Daniel J Sapen | Adelphi University, Derner Institute (original) (raw)

I'm a clinical psychologist, philosopher, and musician, with a background in combat sports, with a few years of college baseball to spice things up

I write from an urgent, sentimental skepticism, born of living one foot in the post-modern and another firmly in the romantic. Scholarship has always been, for me, on the knife-edge of passion and disinterested Logos. Plus I think even my favorite thinkers were delightfully wrong, so I have to go in and tinker in the process of coming up with ideas.

I'm particularly interested in music and the principles of improvisation, exemplified by jazz and seen as they extend to pervade and illuminate other human makings and doings. I love being a clinician, for the purely human helping endeavor, and because, in the process, I get to enjoy and help people usefully re-engage in their life-stories.

My book, Freud's Lost Chord, while inspired by the existence of no more than three or four works in all of psychoanalytic theoretical canon which utilize the insights and phenomena of jazz, or non-classical-track music, is a sui generis attempt to do just that - explore in-depth, using examples of music from Miles Davis and John Coltrane, what it means that Freud was deeply uncomfortable with and stymied by music, as the only one of all the arts - no, all the human activities which Freud believed could be interpreted, intellectually conquered by way of psychoanalysis. In so doing, I somehow manage to revision and revise the history of psychodynamic thinking, and take a needed step in the direction of rapprochement between Freud/Klein axis and that of Jung and Archetypal Psychology. The Hatfield-McCoy feud between the partisan elements of the Freudian and Jungian camps (most vitriol, it must be said, continuing to exist on the Freudian bench), is now in at least its 108th year, and continues to be about little more than the question of whether the libido is primarily sexual or is many-faceted. The religious axis is central, though endless theoretical quibbles remain, as well as ad hominem assaults on Jung's character and sanity.

I can’t help but find myself searching for points of affinity and reconciliation… Nothing new in heaven or earth, and smart, questioning people keep discovering the same thing, different stripes on the tiger, from different angles, with different emphasis.
Supervisors: John Peck, Kirkland Vaughns, Robert Mendelsohn, Dave Liebman

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