Alonso Center Welcomes New Director and Invites Community to First Lecture of the Year

Clinical Psychology faculty member Amy Taylor, Ph.D., is the new director of the Alonso Center for Psychodynamic Studies.  

Dr. Taylor looks forward to engaging with the Center’s community and creating opportunities for learning and dialogue about psychodynamic psychotherapy. 

She shared: “Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a living, evolving, creative practice responsive to its time and place. I am delighted to be part of this initiative that invites us to learn together and from one another as we continue to grow as psychodynamic thinkers and practitioners, and which serves as a place from which we may communicate psychodynamic ways of seeing to the wider world.”

The Alonso Center for Psychodynamic Studies was established through the generous support of Anne Alonso, Ph.D., and her husband Ramon. The Center’s goal is to encourage a greater understanding of the value of psychodynamic psychotherapy.

The Alonso Center brings together psychologists and psychiatrists, educators, writers and artists, organizational development experts, and the public to strengthen our understanding of the value of psychodynamic psychotherapy and the centrality of the psychotherapist/patient relationship in the provision of effective mental health care. These efforts are directed at educating the public and professional communities about the importance of adaptive, resilient human relationships as a source of healing and growth. The Center encourages and supports the application of psychodynamic and relational principles in everyday life, including education, business, journalism, and the arts. Past directors included late Sam Osherson, Ph.D., Faculty Emerita Margaret Cramer, Ph.D., and, most recently, past program director and long-term faculty member Marilyn Freimuth, Ph.D. 

The Center is pleased to announce the first public event of the year. Please join the Alonso Center Board of Directors, Dr. Taylor, and faculty member Heather MacDonald, Psy.D., on February 25 at 11:30 a.m. PST | 2:30 p.m. EST to hear a lecture by David Goodman, Ph.D., titled “Our Techno-Political Horizon: Configuring the Self in a “Non-Place.”

Event Details

“Our Techno-Political Horizon: Configuring the Self in a “Non-Place.”

The lecture is dedicated to the late Phillip Cushman, Ph.D., a renowned scholar and psychotherapist, an expert in psychodynamic relational theory and hermeneutic philosophy. 

Saturday, February 25, 11:30 a.m. PST | 2:30 p.m. EST

The lecture is open to the members of the Alonso Center, the Fielding community, and the broader public interested in psychodynamic psychotherapy. 

About the Speakers

Speaker 

David Goodman, Ph.D., is the Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and External Relations, Director of the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics, and an Associate Professor of the Practice in Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. He is also an Associate Professor of the Practice in the Philosophy department in Boston College’s Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Goodman currently serves as the Series Editor for the Psychology and the Other Book Series with Routledge. He has authored and edited over a dozen books including The Demanded Self: Levinasian Ethics and Identity in Psychology (with Duquesne University Press, 2012), Psychology and the Other (with Mark Freeman and Oxford University Press, 2015), The Ethical Turn: Otherness and Subjectivity in Contemporary Psychoanalysis (with Eric Severson and Routledge, 2016), In the Wake of Trauma: Psychology and Philosophy for the Suffering Other (with Eric Severson and Brian Becker and Duquesne University Press, 2016), The Road to the Living God:  Ana María Rizzuto and the Psychoanalysis of Religion (with Martha Reineke and Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Critical and Theoretical Perspectives in Psychology: Dialogues at the Edge of American Psychological Discourse (with Heather Macdonald and Brian Becker and Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Memories and Monsters (with Eric Severson and Routledge, 2017), and Race, Rage, and Resistance: Philosophy, Psychology, and the Perils of Individualism (with Eric Severson, Heather Macdonald, and Routledge, 2020). Co-authored with Matthew Clemente, Dr. Goodman currently has a book under contract with Oxford University Press titled Technology and Its Discontents (forthcoming). Dr. Goodman is also a licensed clinical psychologist and has a private practice in Boston, MA.

Event Co-host

Amy Taylor, Ph.D., has been a Fielding faculty member since 2020. She received her Ph.D. in existential-phenomenological psychology from Duquesne University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship and psychoanalytic training at the Austen Riggs Center in western Massachusetts. She has additional training in applying psychoanalytic ideas to groups, families, and couples. Her clinical and research interests are broad, but she is especially interested in links between psychoanalysis and embodied experience, gender and sexuality, and technology. Recent foci include how pregnancy and parenthood shift clinician identity and how the analyst/ therapist’s office serves as a holding extension of the therapist’s body.

Event Co-host

Heather MacDonald, Psy.D.

Heather MacDonald, Psy.D., is a core faculty member at Fielding Graduate University. Dr. Macdonald came to academia after years of practice as a clinical psychologist whose work involved community outreach, and individual therapeutic services to children and families in the foster care system and in the juvenile justice system. As a community-based clinical psychologist and a person who has lived in Asia and Africa, she has always sought to understand mental health issues within the context of their respective social, economic and political environments and believes that groups and communities are the preferred sites of intervention. Dr. Macdonald’s work in the U.S. and abroad has led to scholarly research on the interface between culture, justice, relational ethics, clinical practice and post-colonial thought. Her research draws upon a cross-fertilization of ideas and disciplines including phenomenology and psychopolitical theories of embodiment. Her most recent books and articles include the following: African American Young Men and the Diagnosis of Conduct Disorder: The Neo-Colonization of Suffering (2015); Does Psychology “matter”? An analysis of relevance in South African psychology (2017); Race, Rage, and Resistance: Philosophy, Psychology and the Perils of Individualism (2019); and a forthcoming edited volume titled: Neoliberalism, Ethics, and the Social Responsibility of Psychology: Dialogues at the Edge to be published by Routledge.

To learn more about the Alonso Center for Psychodynamic Studies and join as a member, please click here. 

Questions? Email alonso@fielding.edu.