3201 Wilshire Blvd. Ste. #310
Santa Monica, CA 90403
ph: 310 291-3149
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"Psychoanalysis....is a dialogic exploration of a patient's experiential world, conducted with the awareness of the unavertable contribution of the analyst's experiential world to the ongoing exploration. Such empathic-introspective inquiry seeks understanding of what the patient's world feels like, of what emotional and relational experiences it includes, often relentlessly, and what is assiduously excludes and precludes. It seeks comprehension of the network of convictions, the rules or principles that prereflectively organize the patient's world and keep the patient's experiencing confined to its frozen horizons and limiting perspectives. By illuminating such principles in a dialogic process and by grasping their life-historical origins, psychoanalysis aims to expand the patient's experiential horizons, thereby opening up the possibility of an enriched, more complex, and more flexible emotional life." - Robert Stolorow, George Atwood & Donna Orange, Worlds of Experience (2002)
"Know thyself" - Delphic oracle
This is study and reading group that meets to discuss and explore how philosophy, (the tradition of love of wisdom) can serve as a guide to how to live our lives and enhance the integration of the self, the goal of psychotherapy. This mission for philosophic thinking - to learn to live the good life, (what Aristotle called Eudaimonia) inspired the ancient thinkers and today lives on in those who, to quote Karl Jaspers, realize that "to be, means to decide about being..." Philosophers we read and discuss, depending on the interests of group members, are from both the Western tradition; classical Antiquity (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), the Enlightenment (Descartes, Hume, Kant), romanticism (Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhaurer), existentialism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Sartre), phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas), hermeneutics ( Dilthey, Gadamer), pragmatism (James, Rorty), critical theory (Marx, Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas), postmodernism (Derrida, Foucault) - and Eastern thought (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism).
Copyright 2010 Kenneth Rasmussen, PsyD, PhD, Licensed Clinical Psychologist. All rights reserved.
3201 Wilshire Blvd. Ste. #310
Santa Monica, CA 90403
ph: 310 291-3149
info