Resting Places: Desecration and Restoration of the Sacred
Image: Sigmund Freud’s Antiques / (c) esel.at/Lorenz Seidler / Sigmund Freud Foundation
FEBRUARY 12 | 6:30 PM
TICKETS AVAILABLE IN DUE COURSE
Join us at the ACFNY for Resting Places: Desecration and Restoration of the Sacred, a thought-provoking panel discussion examining the psychic, cultural, and spiritual significance of sacred places marked by violence, loss, and displacement. This roundtable is the second installment of the series Rooted & Displaced: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Meaning of Place, a collaboration between the Freud Foundation US, the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, and the Erikson Institute of the Austen Riggs Center.
About the Event
Sacred places often bear the weight of collective memory, holding histories of devotion, dispossession, trauma, and repair. Through an interdisciplinary and psychoanalytic lens, this conversation explores how sites of desecration and conflict may also become spaces of mourning, remembrance, ritual reclamation, and healing. The discussion reflects on the restoration of a desecrated Jewish cemetery in Vienna as an act of cultural remembrance; considers Jerusalem as a sacred site within Islamic tradition; and examines the meanings of sacred space in Christian contexts. Panelists approach sacred places not only as geographic locations, but as symbolic containers of grief, resilience, and psychic transformation. Held across Vienna, New York City, and Stockbridge, MA, the Rooted & Displaced series brings together psychoanalysts, historians, cultural theorists, and clinicians to explore how place shapes identity, carries trauma, and mediates experiences of rootedness and rupture in an era marked by displacement, ecological loss, and technological life.
Participants
The Rev. Pamela Cooper-White, Ph.D., LCPC | Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and Religion, Emerita, and Dean and Vice President Emerita, Union Theological Seminary, New York
Pamela Cooper-White is a leading scholar at the intersection of psychology, religion, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of eleven books, including The Psychology of Christian Nationalism: How People Are Drawn In and How to Talk Across the Divide (2022), winner of the INDIES Gold Award for Political and Social Sciences. A former Fulbright–Freud Scholar at the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, she is an honorary member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Freud Foundation US and is a frequent international speaker. Image: Union Theological Seminary
Suleiman Ali Mourad | Myra M. Sampson Chair Professor of Religion and Middle East Studies, Smith College
Born in Lebanon and educated at the American University of Beirut and Yale University, Suleiman Ali Mourad is a historian of Islam and the Middle East. His publications include The Mosaic of Islam (2016) and the Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem (2019). He has appeared in international documentaries such as Jerusalem: City of Faith and Fury (CNN, 2021) and regularly contributes to global media. He is currently completing a book on Lebanese food culture and is spending the spring semester as Scholar in Residence at the American University of Beirut. Image: Courtesy of the participant
Diane O’Donoghue | Director, Program for Public Humanities and Senior Fellow for the Humanities, Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University
An art historian and psychoanalytic scholar, Diane O’Donoghue chairs the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and directs its Ecker Fellows Program. Her book On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious (2019) received the Robert S. Leibert Award. Her current research examines posthumous harm, informed by her work at the Währinger Jewish Cemetery in Vienna and a recent fellowship at Harvard’s Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Image: K.E. DiCero
Jane G. Tillman, PhD, ABPP | Evelyn Stefansson Nef Director, Erikson Institute for Education and Research
Jane G. Tillman is a board-certified clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale Child Study Center and Teaching Associate in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on suicide, intergenerational transmission of trauma, and postvention work with clinicians and institutions following patient loss. Image: Courtesy of the participant.