Scientific Meeting: Of Fear and Strangers

1. Buy your ticket at nypsi.org. PLEASE NOTE: Ticket Registration is NOT the same as ZOOM registration.
2. One day prior: Complete ZOOM registration for webinar which you will receive by email from Sharon Weller. This step involves entering your name and email address. If you do not complete this, you will NOT receive link to webinar. PLS NOTE: ZOOM registration is separate from NYPSI website registration.
3. Click on email from Lois Oppenheim (host) which contains ZOOM link and password to “enter” the webinar.
4. Evaluation survey and CME/CE documentation will be emailed the day after the event.

The 1051st Scientific Program Meeting:

“Of Fear and Strangers”

The second in a series of three meetings devoted to the notion of conflict, both small-scale and large-scale, intra-institutional and inter-national.

Tuesday, November 9, 2021

8:00 pm – 10:00 pm (EST)

Presenter: George Makari, M.D.

Discussant: Sander Gilman, Ph.D.

How to ignore the international resurgence of xenophobia? What are its forgotten histories and what do they mean for us today? These are among the questions to be explored by George Makari who will draw upon clues to the origins of the fear and hatred of strangers uncovered while researching the topic for his most recent book. While such fear and hatred may be ancient, the notion of a dangerous bias called “xenophobia” arose not so long ago. Coined by late nineteenth-century doctors and political commentators and popularized by an eccentric stenographer, xenophobia emerged alongside Western nationalism, colonialism, mass migration, and genocide. In this presentation, Dr. Makari will chronicle the concept’s rise from its popularization and perverse misuse to its chilling applications in the lead up to World War II and up through the “new xenophobia” that has emerged in the 21st century. Investigating its evolution through the writings of numerous renowned figures, Sigmund Freud among them, he will synthesize history, philosophy, and psychology to offer insight into varied, interdisciplinary ideas such as the stereotype, projection, the authoritarian personality, the Other, and institutional bias.

2 Contact Hours. 2 CME/CE credits offered.

Historian and psychiatrist George Makari, M.D. is the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy, and the Arts, and Professor of Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College, where for over two decades he has led efforts to integrate humanistic scholarship into mind/brain medicine and science. Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia (W.W Norton, 2021), his third book, was preceded by two widely acclaimed histories, Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (W.W Norton, 2015) and Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (HarperCollins, 2008). Dr. Makari’s books have been or are being translated into ten languages and their findings have been the subject of eight symposia. His opinion pieces and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Massachusetts Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Globe, and Time, in addition to his many articles in psychiatric journals. The recipient of numerous honors, Dr. Makari was presented in 2017 with the Benjamin Rush Award from the American Psychiatric Association. A graduate of Brown University, Cornell University Medical College, and the Columbia University’s Psychoanalytic Center, he is presently a Guest Investigator at Rockefeller University and a faculty member of Columbia’s Psychoanalytic institute.

Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over one hundred books. His “I Know Who Caused COVID-19”: Pandemics and Xenophobia (with Zhou Xun) appeared with Reaktion Press (London) in 2021; his most recent edited volume is The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body (with Youn Kim) published in 2019 with Oxford University Press. Dr. Gilman is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane and Jewish Self-Hatred. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. He has also held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and been a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he created the ‘Humanities Laboratory.’ Dr. Gilman has served as Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA; a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University; Visiting Research Professor at The University of Hong Kong; and the Alliance Professor of History at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. He has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in North America, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, China, and New Zealand. Dr. Gilman was president of the Modern Language Association in 1995 and he has been awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at the University of Toronto (2007), elected honorary professor at the Free University in Berlin (2000), been an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Educational Objectives: Upon completion of this activity, participants should be able to:

1. Describe the genealogy of the term and concept of xenophobia
2.  Explain how different models of mind -including the psychoanalytic – have sought to understand these phenomena.