Dr. Alison Feit lecturing in a green blouse in front of a full lecture hall

Teaching Beyond the Practice

Institutional Lectures

William Alanson White Institute

Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard: Revelation of Depth

Gain, loss and transformation in the final scene of Chekhov’s last play, presented by George Mandelbaum, PhD, with images by Alison Feit, PhD.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) is considered by many the greatest playwright since Shakespeare. This presentation focuses on the climax of The Cherry Orchard, written while Chekhov was near death: a bittersweet scene in which pleasure and pain, loss and gain meet at the play’s emotional and symbolic center.

Using images created by Dr. Feit alongside the text of the final scene, we look from several perspectives at Lopakhin’s jubilant speech on winning the orchard and Ranevskaya’s collapse at losing it. Does every gain also carry a loss? We consider the realization of personal and generational fantasies, transformation and transcendence, and how the values of psychoanalysis can shape the way we value works of art. And we ask how Chekhov wrote plays that spoke to the upheavals of the late 19th century while also symbolizing his own inner life.

Presented by George Mandelbaum, PhD, with images by Alison Feit, PhD, Creative Director.

Saint Louis Psychoanalytic Institute

Your Twenty-Something: A User’s Guide to a Generation Nobody Explained to Us

A two-part series for parents, clinicians, educators and anyone trying to understand modern adulthood: identity, desire and the conversations nobody realizes they’re having.

Part I: Becoming Someone. Why does a generation with more freedom, information and opportunity often feel so uncertain about who they are? We explore identity in the age of social media, the pressure to curate a coherent self, and anxiety, perfectionism, imposter syndrome and burnout as developmental struggles rather than simply symptoms. Many young adults know exactly who they are supposed to be but have lost touch with what they actually want. What happens when the question What do I want? is slowly replaced by What should I want?

Part II: The Hidden Emotional Negotiations of Modern Adulthood. Who gets to need? Who gets to disappoint? Who gets to change? Using contemporary relational psychoanalysis, we examine the unconscious negotiations shaping families, friendships, dating, achievement and separation: how people become stuck in roles they never consciously chose, and what allows new possibilities to emerge.

The City University of New York

Depth in a Shallow Age: Psychodynamic Thinking for Modern Life

Modern life rewards the surface. Psychodynamic thinking helps us hear what lies beneath burnout, distraction and the quiet loss of desire.

Modern life moves fast and rewards the surface: the quick fix, the next scroll, the polished self. But the struggles people bring into our offices, from burnout and distraction to the quiet loss of desire, are rooted in something deeper. Psychodynamic thinking helps us see how unconscious patterns, old longings, and familiar defenses show up in the most contemporary problems, and how to hear what lies beneath them.