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Between Hours/Interdisciplinary Dialogues, Applied Psychoanalysis Programme

Between Hours/Interdisciplinary Dialogues is an Applied Psychoanalysis programme of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society that has been evolving since 2013.

Between analytic hours, this work group attempts to interface psychoanalysts with professionals from across a wide range of disciplines with a view to sharing psychoanalytic ideas and facilitating mutually inspiring dialogue. Alongside our psychoanalytic peers, all the way back to Freud, we greatly appreciate the crucial impact of art and literature on our clinical work and understanding of human nature and purposefully set out to more actively engage it.

Our events focus on sharing our insights into the inner world and its link to the broader society, and facilitating discussion and debate across disciplines, whether through exploring the relationship between psychoanalysis and the arts, or looking at human development and socio-cultural issues from a psychoanalytic perspective. Our goal is to run free or affordable events that are open to the public and encourage audience participation.

The name, Between Hours—poetic term for the application of psychoanalytic thinking between analytic ‘hours’—is taken from Salman Akhtar’s book of the same title, which is aptly a collection of poems written by psychoanalysts. We are grateful for his permission to use the name. We use the term ‘applied psychoanalysis’ in its broadest sense to refer to a psychoanalytic perspective that emanates out of and extends beyond clinical practice.

Our mandate is to:

  1. make a psychoanalytic perspective more accessible to the general public through facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue, discussion, and debate
  2. further engage in dialogue with artists and writers on the mutual task of symbolically representing experience
  3. share a psychoanalytic point of view with specific community groups and with health and allied professionals
  4. respond to current and pressing concerns in the community that pertain to mental health.

Day in Applied Psychoanalysis

Our annual Day in Applied Psychoanalysis has a long tradition in Toronto and focuses on wide-ranging themes from the arts to politics. It currently adopts an approach that involves pairing a speaker in the community with a psychoanalyst to fertilize cross-disciplinary discussion and debate.

Background to this Day

The Annual Day in Applied Psychoanalysis originated as a forum to integrate psychoanalysis and literature. It grew out of informal meetings in the 80’s of a number of people in the Toronto psychoanalytic community and university academics and became the Psychoanalysis and Literature Study Group, later formalized in the TPS as an Extension program in Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Annual Day in Applied Psychoanalysis grew out of the collaborative link forged between this group, the Psychoanalytic Thought program at Trinity College, and the Psychotherapy Program at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Early themes focused on critical readings of Shakespeare, psychoanalytic literary criticism, and over the years the program expanded its applied focus to include spirituality, politics, aesthetics, humour, ethnicity, etc. Between Hours has adapted this format to further engage other disciplines and to foster links with a range of community groups as we go forward.

Freud Café

In May 2014, Between Hours, in partnership with Caversham Booksellers, launched Toronto’s first Freud Café—an outreach community event held in a local café, close to the University of Toronto, that runs every other month through the academic year, September to May. This ongoing programme, geared toward university students and academics, now going into its third academic year, involves free public talks by Toronto psychoanalysts on Freud’s ideas and those of his followers that invite open discussion about their impact on our lives today. It is a drop-in event. Registration is not required.

Between Hours runs other interdisciplinary events throughout the year on diverse areas of social and cultural interest. Check the website for upcoming events.

Upcoming Events

October 26, 2024

Freud Café Canada – The Revolt against Mourning: The Outlawing of Grief and the Road to Social Violence, Vengeance and War

View Brochure

Join us for an informal talk by Arthur Leonoff in conversation with Gordon Yanchyshyn.

Always a ghost and never an ancestor, the collective mind is haunted by societal losses that are effaced and never mourned. It is the negative of mourning—lost ideals emerging as delusions of grandeur, a stolen destiny, with vengeful needs to reclaim the past glory that never was.

Recent Between Hours Events

May 31, 2024

Freud Café Canada – View Brochure

Joshua Levy: Are you Empathic?

January 20, 2024

Freud Café Canada – View Brochure

Endre Koritar and Ian Miller: The Leader’s Hypnotic Influence and the Creation of Alternate Reality

November 18, 2023

Freud Café Canada – View Brochure

Bradley Murray: Life and Death in the Metaverse

October 21, 2023

24th Annual Day in Applied Psychoanalysis – The Sibling Trauma – View Brochure

A day of stimulating dialogue featuring Juliet Mitchell in conversation with Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly.

May 13, 2023

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Meg Harris Williams, Colleen Murphy and Vivienne Pasieka (moderator): Shakespeare’s Prefiguring of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Reverie: The Dream within the Dream

November 5, 2022

23rd Annual Day in Applied Psychoanalysis – The Face of Ethnic Conflict: Revenge or Reconciliation in the Aftermath of War – View Brochure

With international speakers:
Vamik Volkan, MD – Psychoanalyst/Psychiatrist (Virginia)
Endel Talvik – Psychoanalyst/Psychologist (Estonia)
Colleen Murphy – Playwright (Toronto)
Cyril Levitt, PhD – Psychoanalyst (Toronto)

September 8, 2022

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Gordon Yanchyshyn MD (Toronto, TPS), Endre Koritar MD (Vancouver, WBCPS), and William Massicotte PhD (Montreal, QEBCPS): Propaganda and the Lies We Tell Ourselves

March 5, 2022

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Endre Koritar MD (Vancouver, WBCPS), Cecilia Taiana PhD (Ottawa, OPS), Gordon Yanchyshyn MD (Toronto, TPS), and William Massicotte PhD (Montreal, QEBCPS): A Freud Café Dialogue in an Age of Bewilderment

October 29, 2021

The Freud Café Fright Night – View Brochure

Psychoanalysts Karen Dougherty, MA/RP and Thomas O’Brien, MD: “And Things That Go Bump in the Night…” (& why we love them)

September 18, 2021

22nd Annual Day in Applied Psychoanalysis – Strangers in a Virtual Land: The Impact of Disembodied Relatedness on Psychic Development and the Sense of Self – View Brochure

With:
Christine Anzieu-Premmereur – Child & Adult Psychoanalyst (New York)
Alice Quinn – Editor, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic
Vijay Seshadri – Poet (New York), whose poetry collection, 3 Sections, won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
Clara Nemas – Child & Adolescent Psychoanalyst (Buenos Aires)
Beth Coleman – Associate Professor, Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, University of Toronto

April 7, 2021

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Claire Lunney and David Dorenbaum: Why the Couch? Psychoanalysis: From Freud to the Digital Age

October 28, 2017

21st Annual Day in Applied Psychoanalysis – Gender through the Looking Glass: Whose perspective? Gender Fluidity in Culture, Literature, and Psychoanalysis – Contemporary Viewpoints – View Brochure

With:
Paul Lynch, MD
– Psychoanalyst, Boston
Emma Donoghue, PhD – Acclaimed Irish-Canadian Writer/Literary Historian
Sheila Cavanagh, PhD – Associate Professor, Sociology, Toronto
Oren Gozlan, PsyD – Clinical Psychologist/Psychoanalyst
Marco Posadas, MSW – Clinical Social Worker/Psychoanalyst

April 12, 2017

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Elizabeth Tuters and Lindsay Barton: Hold Me: In Mind & in Reality

What is a baby? Donald W. Winnicott says, ʻThere is no such thing as an infant.ʼ What can he mean? Join us as we explore the chaotic state of infancy and its effect on the adult – in mind and in reality.

March 27, 2017

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Marco Posadas: Love, Relationships and Gender in the Times of Social Media

January 30, 2017

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Mavis Himes: In the Beginning was the Name: The Language of the Unconscious

Our origins are intimately linked with our name, a noun not chosen but lovingly given and assigned to us. Names are both a mark of separation and a trait of affiliation. For most of us, a close association develops between our name and the person we are, such that the sound of our name reverberates deep within us.

In psychoanalytic work, we are forever at the mercy of words to engage in our practice and names are signifiers that easily run amuck. This presentation will explore such questions as: Do names have a privileged position in psychoanalysis? What is so ‘proper’ about proper names and why are they so significant? How do names function in analytic work?

November 23, 2016

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Tony Toneatto: Psychoanalysis and Mysticism: Friends or Foes?

We live in a time when interest in/idealization of meditation, yoga, mindfulness and many other forms of spirituality are growing exponentially in our culture. What does psychoanalysis have to say about mysticism, meditation and the pursuit of enlightenment? This talk will briefly survey the history of the psychoanalytic study of mystical states of consciousness beginning with Freud and continuing to the present, with a particular emphasis on distinguishing between the salutary and harmful effects of mystical experiences and their pursuit.

September 12, 2016:

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Rafael López-Corvo: The Traumatic Loneliness of Children

Most parents have great difficulty understanding and making real communication with their children because all adults have repressed and forgotten their own childhood. This often results in the creation of two different worlds that run parallel, though infrequently overlap, prompting parents to resort to one of three modes of reaction: i) ignoring children, ii) trying to change them into adults, or iii) becoming impatient and sometimes violent. From the vertex of the child, all of these reactions amount to feelings of unfair treatment, non-existence, but mostly loneliness. The Arbor Room, Hart House, University of Toronto

Winter/Spring 2016, Various Dates

Saturday Morning Parent Talks

In February 2016, Between Hours, in partnership with Parentbooks, launched The Saturday Morning Parenting Clinic—a new series of five free public talks for parents with a focus on understanding your child and exploring the experience of becoming and being a parent. The first session was February 20, 2016 at Parentbooks on Harbord.

View Brochure

February 20, 2016 – There’s a Monster under my Bed – Understanding Children’s Primitive Fears and all that they Evoke
March 19, 2016 – That Big Bad World – Helping Children Thrive in Anxious Times
April 9, 2016 – How to Say No to Your Kids Without Feeling Too Guilty
May 14, 2016 – The Time of Our Lives
June 11, 2016 – Thinking Together

June 1, 2016:

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Joshua Levy: Why do we Need to Remember our Dreams?

The Arbor Room, Hart House, University of Toronto

May 2, 2016:

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Klaus Wiederman: Coupling: A psychoanalytic point of view

A look at relationships, their developmental origins and trajectory, and what happens when things go awry. The Arbor Room, Hart House, University of Toronto

March 21, 2016:

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Ronald Ruskin: The Psychology of Sport / The Psychoanalysis of Hockey

An exploration of the psychology behind our national sport from a psychoanalytic perspective with a lively discussion on mind/body integration. The Arbor Room, Hart House, University of Toronto

October 3, 2015:

20th Annual Day in Applied Psychoanalysis – Precarious Beauty: The Aesthetic Conflict in Art and Psychoanalysis

An inspiring day of presentations by artists in dialogue with analysts
Jane McAdam Freud, Meg Harris Williams, Joseph Fernando and Louis Brunet

The 2015 annual interdisciplinary event invited two acclaimed British artists with psychoanalytic ancestry from Freud to the post-Kleinians —Jane Mc Adam Freud and Meg Harris Williams—to showcase their work and dialogue with Canadian analysts—Joseph Fernando (Toronto) and Louis Brunet (Montreal)—on the impact of the aesthetic conflict in driving curiosity and the development of a thinking/feeling mind.

Jane McAdam Freud, MA (RCA), FRBS, is an acclaimed British sculptor and multi-disciplinary artist. The recipient of many international awards, her works are represented in national collections worldwide. Great granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and daughter of Lucian Freud, her work focuses on the meeting of Art and Psychoanalysis.

Meg Harris Williams, visual artist and literary critic, writes about the relation between psychoanalysis, aesthetics and literature. She has published widely on interdisciplinary lines, including The Apprehension of Beauty (with Donald Meltzer), The Chamber of Maiden Thought, The Vale of Soulmaking, The Aesthetic Development: The Poetic Spirit of Psychoanalysis, and Bion’s Dream.

Joseph Fernando, MD, Training and Supervising Analyst, Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis, has published papers on guilt, narcissism, the character of the exception. His recent book, The Processes of Defense, won the 2010 Gradiva prize for a book on psychoanalytic theory.

Louis Brunet, PhD, Psychoanalyst, President of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, Professor of Psychology Department, Université du Québec à Montréal, is the author of 7 books, 26 chapters, and 96 papers, and has published widely on individual and mass violence, archaic psychic organizations, projective identification, and the containing function.

September 28, 2015:

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Sarah Freke: Of Human Bondage and Jokes

Somerset Maugham’s autobiographical novel, “Of Human Bondage,” is read through the lens of Freud’s paper, “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious,” examining what is at stake to allow the movement from the masochistic bond to the capacity for fraternity. Upstairs @ Harbord House.

May 21, 2015:

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Joseph Fernando: Whose unconscious is it anyway? – A user’s guide, from Freud to more recent ideas about the unconscious

“We all have an unconscious: we all dream; we all regress; we all fantasize; we all create. How do these activities relate to Freud’s great discovery of a form of mental life different from normal waking consciousness? And to other forms of unconscious, such as the cognitive and post-traumatic unconscious?” Free public event in partnership with Caversham Booksellers @ Cups Café.

March 19, 2015:

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly: Sibling Rivalry in Jane Austen’s Fiction, A psychoanalytic reading
@ Cups Café

January 29, 2015:

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Cyril Levitt: Hostile and Malignant Prejudice: Or Why it May be Easier to Hate Your Neighbour

The fourth in a series of free, stimulating talks on Freud’s ideas by Toronto psychoanalysts, followed by an open discussion about their impact on our lives today. This talk will explore some of the reasons for the persistence of hostile and malignant racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice in our contemporary world in spite of advances in science, the lessons of millennia of violence and bloodshed and the popular opposition to its manifestations. Free public event in partnership with Caversham Booksellers @ Cups Café.

November 13, 2014:

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Don Carveth: On Guilt and Conscience: Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents—A Kleinian Re-View

Don Carveth contrasts the punitive guilt inflicted by the Freudian superego with the reparative guilt of Melanie Klein: “While the former is fueled by aggression, the latter is fueled by a capacity for concern for the other. This, in my view, is the distinction between the superego that wishes to beat and the conscience that wishes to heal. In this light the problem in civilization is not an excess of (punitive) guilt, but a deficit of (reparative) guilt. What civilization needs is less superego and more conscience.” Free public event in partnership with Caversham Booksellers @ Cups Café.

October 2, 2014:

A Between Hours Post Performance Event

Heather Weir in a post-performance psychoanalytic discussion with the directors of Bloody Family – an adaptation of the Oresteia, at the Theatre Centre, Queen Street East, Toronto.

September 23, 2014:

The Freud Café – View Brochure

Prof. Charles Hanly: Philosophical Precursors to Freud, Part II: Oedipus, Aristotle, and Freud: Plato banishes tragic poets from his ideal republic. Out of doubt and remorse for such severity, Plato expressed the hope that someone would offer a defense of tragedy. Aristotle’s Poetics is that defense. Free public event in partnership with Caversham Booksellers @ Cups Café.

May 22, 2014:

The Freud Café – View Brochure

The first in a series of free, stimulating talks on Freud’s ideas by Toronto psychoanalysts, followed by an open discussion about their impact on our lives today.

Prof. Charles Hanly: Freud and Plato’s anticipations of Freud’s psychology of dreams in the Republic. Free public event @ Tik Talk cafe. An event hosted in partnership with Caversham Booksellers and Tik Talk café.

February 1, 2014:

19th Annual Day in Applied Psychoanalysis: The Storied Skin, Stories we tell Ourselves

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Eminent Canadian Director, storyteller, filmmaker, Sarah Polley, spoke directly to her film, ‘Stories We Tell’ through conversation with Vivienne Pasieka, psychoanalyst, and dialogue with the audience, following a full screening of the film. Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly, Ph.D., Toronto Training Analyst and past president of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, gave a psychoanalytic response and spoke to unconscious meanings in the creative process and in narrative structures.

George Ignatieff Theatre, Trinity College, University of Toronto.

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