Yale Faculty Member Gives Talk on Poet and Psychiatrist

Joan Wexler will deliver the next lecture in the Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities on Thursday, March 7, at 8 p.m.

An assistant clinical professor of psychiatry in social work at Yale School of Medicine, Wexler will give a speech titled “Rage to Order: Wallace Stevens and Hans Loewald.” Stevens was one of the most celebrated American poets of the 20th century, and Hans Loewald was a pioneering Freudian analyst, writer, teacher and clinician.

The Muriel Gardiner Program in Psychoanalysis and the Humanities was set up by the New Land Foundation. Gardiner, a heroine of World War II, was the inspiration for the character “Julia” of Lillian Hellman’s autobiographical book “Pentimento.”

Paul Schwaber and Dr. Nancy Olson are the current coordinators of the program, having succeeded long-time director Dr. Albert J. Solnit in June 2001. Olson is a candidate of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry in the Yale School of Medicine. She received her M.D. at Yale, and prior to that, a master’s degree and M.Phil. in art history also at Yale. Schwaber is a graduate analyst of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis and professor of letters at Wesleyan University. His most recent book is “The Cast of Characters: A Reading of Ulysses,” published by Yale University Press, 1999.

During past years, the series has included such subjects as “The Other Mozart Effect: How Musicians Get Hurt” and “Composing Fathers from Rachmaninoff to Ives,” by Yale professor Kyle Pruett, a child psychiatrist and a professional singer. This year the series has featured a talk by Laura Wexler, who teaches in the women’s and gender studies program and American studies department at Yale; two talks on Vincent Van Gogh; and a discussion of “Flaubert, the Nauseated Anatomist” by Peter Gay, the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale.

On Thursday, April 18, Anne Higonnet, an associate professor of art at Wellesley College and expert on 19th century French art, will discuss the photographs of Sally Mann. The series this term will end on Thursday, April 25, with a talk about psychoanalysis in China by psychoanalyst Qin Wei.

The talks are held in room 108 of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street. A reception prior to the talk on March 7 will be held at 7 p.m. If planning to attend the reception, call Alicia Grendziszewski at 203-785-7205 (or e-mail, alicia.grendziszewski@yale.edu) before Monday, March 4.