Semester Opening 2024/2025

The IPU Berlin starts into the wintersemester 2024/2025 with public lectures by Prof. Michael B. Buchholz "The CCC-Complex – Civility between Courage and Conformity" and Dr. Aleksandar Dimitrijevic "Hearing Silencing as the focus of psychoanalytic treatment".

The lectures will be held in English language.

Prof. Dr. Michael B. Buchholz and Dr. Aleksandar Dimitrijevic edited two important books for psychoanalysis. The first titled “From the Abyss of loneliness to the Bliss of Solitude” opens cultural, clinical and social perspectives on loneliness, with a spectrum from loneliness in music to neuroscientific (and many other) aspects. Prominent psychoanalysts and cultural scientists contributed. The Association of US-Librarians listed the book as the fourth out of ten must-read psychology books in 2023.

The second book “Encountering silencing” opens a series on “Hearing silencing”. It includes the description of cultural practices to silence people, especially witnesses – and how silencing shows up in clinical practice. Hearing Silencing can be viewed as the core of clinical psychoanalysis. The book is on place two of the publisher’s ranking of the top ten.

Buchholz (Senior Professor at the IPU Berlin) and Dimitrijević (formerly at the IPU) present a work that is both necessary and deeply engaging. Their recurring theme is to draw the distinction between loneliness, which can lead to despair, and solitude, which is essential for creativity, flow, and rejuvenation. Chapter 6, an enlightening discourse on the role of solitude and loneliness in creativity, perhaps best expresses this dichotomy. Chapter 7 points out that solitude is voluntary, sought after, and often positive, whereas loneliness is involuntary and aversive. Yet even the term loneliness is further dissected from various perspectives (e.g., chapters 15, 16). Topics covered include child, adolescent, and adult development; music, art therapy, stress, health, and mortality; and even recent research on isolation during the pandemic. Part 4 presents loneliness from the psychoanalytic perspective, delivering frank and powerful clinical accounts of trauma, loneliness, and isolation that provide valuable insight. Though common themes run throughout and there is much agreement across all chapters and authors, each chapter nevertheless offers a unique contribution to the volume.