Resurgence of Freud

For most of the 20^th century Freud’s thoughts were foundational in understanding mental functioning while also offering the consensus approach to treating mental conditions, from neurosis to other more severe psychopathologies. With the advent of psychotropic medications and advances delving more deeply into the brain’s biology, the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and his followers lost much of their influence within the realm of psychotherapeutics. Ultimately, Freudianism relinquished its central role, and yet it never faded out entirely. During this same time it withstood a number of severe attacks on its legitimacy as a scientific and clinically validated paradigm.

Today, however, there appears to be an increase of interest in Freud and in his numerous followers, and although the classic four- to five-day-a-week psychoanalysis may no longer be widely practicable, talk therapies based on Freudian theories appear to be sought more often in recent years. Meanwhile, within the humanities the application of analytic concepts has taken on a sustained and meaningful role. What is psychoanalysis’s durable appeal all about? How has it withstood attacks upon its scientific bona fides? And if, as many critics claim, our evident fascination with the ways of AI is delivering us to a zombifying anti-humanism, are neo-Freudian ideas, broadly understood, an answer?

This roundtable will tackle this resurgence of interest in Freud and psychoanalytic theories.

All Helix Center events are free and open to the public, including this one!

Roundtables are streamed live our website and the recording remains available after the event events.

This is a past event that happened on September 20th, 2025 at 2:30PM.

Participants

Stephen Dames

Writer

Stephen Rex Dames is a recent graduate of Columbia University. He wrote his senior thesis on the history of British non-medical psychoanalysis, arguing that out of various labor and gender conflicts surrounding “lay analysis” in early twentieth-century Britain, certain defining aspects of the modern psychoanalytic profession were born. This thesis—entitled Lay Labour and Analytic Conflict: The Development... read more! »

Ben Kafka

Associate Professor of Clinical Psychoanalysis, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia

Ben Kafka, Ph.D., L.P., is a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Greenwich Village. He serves on the faculties of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center and the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell. He is also the co-founder of Princeton’s new Seminar on Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Studies. Originally trained as a historian, Kafka taught at NYU for... read more! »

Cassie Kaufmann

Licensed Clinical Psychologist & Psychoanalyst
Founder & Director, Greene Clinic

Dr. Cassie Kaufmann is a licensed clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is the founder and director of Greene Clinic, a sliding scale psychoanalytically oriented training clinic in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. There she supervises, teaches, and introduces psychoanalytic theory and practice to students and early career psychologists, social workers, and counselors. She is also a founding... read more! »

David Russell

Associate Professor, English, UCLA

David Russell is Associate Professor of English at UCLA, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature, as well as film, philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is the author of Marion Milner: On Creativity (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay form in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Princeton University Press, 2018).

W. Craig Tomlinson

Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University

W. Craig Tomlinson, MD, is a psychoanalyst in private practice and Asst. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, where he has taught at the Center for Psychoanalytic Theory and Research for over two decades and directs the Freud curriculum. He also designed and teaches courses on Freud and psychoanalysis to graduate and undergraduate students... read more! »