Freud Café Canada
Between Hours/Interdisciplinary Dialogues, Toronto Psychoanalytic Society in collaboration with Community Bridges, Canadian Psychoanalytic Society presents:
FREE public talks on psychoanalytic ideas by Canadian psychoanalysts with an open discussion about their impact on our lives today.
Contagion of the Mind: Truth, Trust and Sanity in the Digital Age:
A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Mental Illness Weaponized through Technology, as viewed through Ron Ruskin’s 2026 Novel, The Walls of Jericho
BETWEEN HOURS
Hybrid Event
With Ron Ruskin and Alireza Taheri
Saturday, November 7, 2026: 10:30 to 12:00am (ET)
Live at Caversham Booksellers: 262 B Geary Ave, Toronto, ON M6H 2C5 – In-person registration here
** Also via Zoom. Preregistration is required.
Please RSVP by email to info@torontopsychoanalysis.com. Registration closes one week prior to the event.
What if social and mental disorders are increasing? What if our connection to one another is degraded by ‘virtuality’—expanding mindlessness, speciousness, divisiveness, misinformation? What if our health care system, government, and support networks are unable to contend with this fractured social world?
In Ron Ruskin’s novel, The Walls of Jericho, a psychiatrist in a downtown Manhattan hospital sees a startling increase in the number of aggressive and violent patients affiliated with anarchic groups set on destroying civil order and society brought to the E.R. suffering from paranoid disorders.
Join us for a stimulating talk with Ron Ruskin, MD, psychoanalyst, author of The Walls of Jericho, in conversation with Alireza Taheri, PhD, psychoanalyst, on the interface between the individual mind, society and the digital world.
Ron Ruskin, MD, FRCP is a Toronto writer, associate professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, psychiatrist at Mt Sinai Hospital, and training analyst at the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis. One of the founding editors of Ars Medica, he has published widely on psychoanalysis and fiction and co-edited texts on psychotherapy supervision, the humanities and medicine. His latest novel, The Walls of Jericho, is a conspiracy thriller, diagnosing the digital age as a contagious terminal illness.
Alireza Taheri, PhD is a Toronto psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor who teaches at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute and Society, Persepolis Psychoanalytic (Iran), and the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He writes on philosophy, psychoanalysis, film and literature. His published monograph, Hegelian-Lacanian Variations on Late Modernity: Spectre of Madness, develops a novel dialectical theory based on Hegel, Lacan and Žižek. His current research focuses on the importance of negation in psychoanalysis.
Moderator: Vivienne Pasieka, PhD, psychoanalyst
Previous Presentations from The Freud Café
February 21, 2026 – Proust and Psychoanalysis: A Psychoanalytic Understanding of Memory and Space in Marcel Proust’s Novel
September 20, 2025 – Bethune’s Concern: the Fascist in Us
March 1, 2025 – Psychoanalysis as Soul-Making
October 26, 2024 – The Revolt against Mourning: The Outlawing of Grief and the Road to Social Violence, Vengeance and War
May 31, 2024 – Are you Empathic?
January 20, 2024 – The Leader’s Hypnotic Influence and the Creation of Alternate Reality
November 18, 2023 – Life and Death in the Metaverse
May 13, 2023 – Shakespeare’s Prefiguring of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Reverie: The Dream within the Dream
September 8, 2022 – Propaganda and the Lies We Tell Ourselves
March 5, 2022 – A Freud Café Dialogue in an Age of Bewilderment
October 29, 2021 – The Freud Café Fright Night – “And Things That Go Bump in the Night…” (& why we love them)
April 7, 2021 – Why the Couch? Psychoanalysis: From Freud to the Digital Age
April 12, 2017 – Hold Me: In Mind & in Reality
March 27, 2017 – Love, Relationships and Gender in the Times of Social Media
January 30, 2017 – In the Beginning was the Name: The Language of the Unconscious
November 23, 2016 – Psychoanalysis and Mysticism: Friends or Foes?
September 12, 2016 – The Traumatic Loneliness of Children
June 1, 2016 – Why do we Need to Remember our Dreams?
May 2, 2016 – Coupling: A psychoanalytic point of view
March 21, 2016 – The Psychology of Sport / The Psychoanalysis of Hockey
September 28, 2015 – Of Human Bondage and Jokes
May 21, 2015 – Whose unconscious is it anyway? – A user’s guide, from Freud to more recent ideas about the unconscious
March 19, 2015 – Sibling Rivalry in Jane Austen’s Fiction, a psychoanalytic reading
January 29, 2015 – Hostile and Malignant Prejudice: Or Why it May be Easier to Hate Your Neighbour
November 13, 2014 – On Guilt and Conscience: Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents — A Kleinian Re-View
September 23, 2014 – Oedipus, Aristotle and Freud
May 22, 2014 – Freud and Plato: Plato’s Anticipations of Freud’s Psychology of Dreams in the Republic
For more information about and for registration in the tps&i Extension Programs, Scientific Meetings, Training Programs, Study and Supervision groups and Special Presentations, please visit our website: torontopsychoanalysis.com or email info@torontopsychoanalysis.com
