Emmy will discuss her new book, Filial Lines: Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and Comics Form (Cambridge UP, 2026), which explores how graphic memoirists Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel negotiate their familial and creative inheritances on the page. The book offers a lively cast of five formal tropes — boxes, spirals, tic-tac-toe, mirrors, and webs — through which to model fundamental elements of the comics grammar and its material processes. Together, these figures show how and why graphic narrative is particularly suited to express and manage layered, relational identities. Bridging between formal close readings and psychoanalytic theory, this talk considers what the comics form, in the hands of two of its most celebrated practitioners, may have to say to the project and practice of psychoanalysis now. 

This event is open exclusively to Lab members. Learn more about our Lab here.

Boston College is among seven premier Catholic universities in major cities worldwide selected to host an exhibition on the theme of “Exercises in Empathy.” The exhibitions are part of a global contemporary art series launched by the Catholic Universities Art Triennial (“ART CUT”), commissioned by the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See.

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Jack Hanson is a writer, editor, and scholar of religion. His work has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Financial Times, Commonweal, The Nation, The Drift, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University and is now a lecturer at Columbia University.

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We envision a grace-filled gathering where filmmakers, mentors, producers, and supporters encounter the deep well of Catholic artistic tradition together, strengthen one another in their vocations, and forge relationships that will sustain the renewal of film culture. Here we reclaim filmmaking as a vocation and a gift—a way of building community and offering the fruits of our art to a world in need of mercy and truth.

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We are delighted to partner with the Faculty of Psychology at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile, as co-hosts of the 2027 Psychology and the Other conference. Rooted in the Jesuit tradition of its namesake, Saint Alberto Hurtado, who himself earned a doctorate in psychology and pedagogy, the Faculty of Psychology at Universidad Alberto Hurtado cultivates an ethically grounded, psychosocial approach that speaks directly to themes of responsibility toward the Other. Its programs and acclaimed doctoral research lines emphasize human rights, political violence and psychosocial reparation, relational learning, subjective dynamics in social institutions, and community transformation, all within Chile’s living context of memory, resistance, and epistemic justice.

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This online learning group orients around the new book, Psychoanalysis and Catholicism: From Freud to Francis. In this learning group, participants will read and discuss the major historical events, key theoretical and theological concepts, and corresponding contemporary issues with the author, psychologist Dr. Adam Schneider. Alongside the book, participants will read important primary sources to deepen their learning and enhance the group dialogue. Figures in psychoanalysis such as Maryse Choisy, Marc Oraison, and Jacques Lacan are put into dialogue with Pope Pius XII, Bishop Fulton Sheen, and Father Karl Rahner. Topics from repression to sublimation, aggiornamento to synodality, congruent Catholic and psychoanalytic formations will be explored. 

Together, participants will learn how guilt and grace are worked through in spiritual and psychoanalytic directions. While clinicians and clergy have often been at odds in the past, both anthropologies align in their pursuit of truth. This learning group will follow the exhortation of St. Francis of Assisi to “hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves, so that He who gives Himself totally to you may receive you totally.”

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Participants will be eligible to receive CEs

This talk will present a psychoanalytic perspective on the link between childhood experiences and adult relationships. Dr. Atlas will examine how one’s dissociated child self-states manifest in their later love life. People bring to their later relationships all the injuries they have survived, the unmet needs they have buried, the scars they have collected, and the solutions they have found. People’s internal children often hold the wheel and drive their most important relationships. Atlas will discuss affect regulation, toxic nourishment, shame, aggression, loss, and therapeutic action.

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Participants will be eligible to receive CEs

This learning group begins with critical psychology and liberation praxis, then examines how power operates in psychotherapy itself, within its theories, institutions, and relationships. From there the learning group turns to Critical-Liberation Psychotherapy (CLP), a framework for recognizing and countering dehumanization in clinical work. CLP holds that psychotherapy can offer relational and institutional conditions that cultivate flourishing and novel forms of subjectivity. It draws upon critical and liberation traditions for concrete guidance on how to create those conditions and foster critical consciousness. Psychotherapy need not play a necessary role in social change movements, yet clinicians who want their practice to support liberation may find CLP useful as a method that envisions therapy as a site for enacting more just ways of relating to self, other, and world. Case vignettes illustrate how therapeutic encounters can carry the potential to rekindle social imagination and open liberatory possibilities.

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Participants will be eligible to receive CEs

This workshop begins with three portraits: a scrupulous congregant whose absolution never seems to resolve their suffering, a patient in psychotherapy whose evident insight does not seem to change their symptoms, and an incarcerated individual who is about to be released from prison and return to a community that has no place for them. Each person has been judged or diagnosed correctly, and yet, change has not occurred. 

This workshop critically examines the juridical framework that has come to dominate conceptions of sin, symptom, and crime and their corresponding interventions. Through an understanding of psychoanalytic concepts such as superego, ego ideal, and ideal ego, participants will learn why this framework fails to produce change and reinforces isolation from the community. 

Finally, through a reading of selected literature from Wendell Berry and Flannery O’Conner, participants will understand how community is possible when the demand for a final authoritative verdict is surrendered in favor of sustained, laborious accompaniment. These movements will occur through mini lectures and small group break out discussions. Readings will be provided ahead of the workshop.

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Participants will be eligible to receive CEs

This workshop addresses potential impasses when either participant in treatment experiences debilitating shame. An apt phrase suggests people can “die of shame.” Sandra believes that shame is often a factor when treatments die. This workshop will explore the role of shame in premature treatment terminations. Individuals often die from trying to avoid shame. Some die because they refuse to use the walker that might help them safely navigate the streets. Some kill themselves because their secrets have been exposed on the Internet, or to the members of a fraternity. Or they commit suicide rather than face the shame of bankruptcy, or failure in school, or work, or love. In this workshop, participants will explore the contours of shame and its variants. What gives it its unique power? How can clinicians help suffering survivors? How may shame alter the pain of grief? How can one differentiate shame from fear of shame, as well as guilt and anxiety? What practical gains might ensue from making these distinctions?

Registration details to come

Participants will be eligible to receive CEs

Named in honor of St. Dymphna, the patron saint of mental health professionals, The Lily of Éire Art and Culture Festival is a three-day event held at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture in Manhattan. We invite artists, filmmakers, writers, performers, scholars, and mental health professionals to submit proposals that engage with the intersections of art, culture, psychology, and the human condition. We welcome contributions that explore how artistic expression can illuminate the complexities of human experience, foster meaningful dialogue across disciplines, and open new possibilities for understanding psychological life.

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Bringing together artists, scholars, psychotherapists, and practitioners from around the world, the 2027 Art & Character Conference at the University of Navarra's Madrid campus seeks to examine the undertheorized relationship between art, character education, and the flourishing of individuals and communities. Convening on the University’s Madrid campus but including programming that will take participants to artistic and cultural venues throughout the city, the Conference is intent on bridging the divide between the theoretical and the experiential, demonstrating that character is as much about how we live as what we think.

Learn more and submit a proposal