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CP3: The Center for Philosophy, Psychology and Psychiatry

Michael J. Miller, Ph.D., Director

What is CP3?

The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences has a long tradition of engagement with philosophy.  We have been the academic home of Ernest Becker, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, had a major impact on our culture in the 20th Century, as well as Thomas Szasz, whose iconoclastic work "The Myth of Mental Illness" was pivotal to the anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry movements. In addition to Becker and Szasz, many of our faculty over the years, including Robert Daly, Eugene Kaplan, Ronald Pies, Chaitan Haldipur, and Michael Miller have worked at the intersection of philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology.

In that tradition, the Center for Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychiatry (or CP3) was founded in January, 2023.  We are an international group of faculty and staff from this department, employees of the medical center, and thinkers and practicioners all over the world who value philosophical contemplation of our work.

We meet several times per year for presentations by regular members and invited speakers. These include some of the foremost thinkers of our day in philosophy of pscyhiatry, psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, existential and humanistic psychology, and critical psychiatry. See below for the list of 2023 and 2024 events.

If you would like to join CP3, please email Michael Miller, Ph.D., at [email protected]

 

CP3 Presentations: 2024

Speaker Affiliation Title
Joseph Anderson

UMU, Duquesne U

Sartre and The Clinic of Psychoanalysis

 

Sheldon Solomon

 

Skidmore College

 

Terror Management Theory

 

Linden Smith

 

Syracuse University

 

Kierkegaard, Anxiety, and the Limits of Psychology

 

Katherine Tabb

 

Bard College

 

The Medicine of Imprecision

 

Carl Elliot

 

University of Minnesota

Why They Blow the Whistle

 

Mark Komrad and Ronald Pies

 

Johns Hopkins, UMU, Tufts 

Psychiatric Euthanasia

 

 

CP3 Presentations: 2023

Speaker

Affiliation

Title

Ronald Pies, MD

Upstate Medical University

The Work and Legacy of Thomas Szasz

Michael Miller, Ph.D.

Upstate Medical University

Nietszche’s Prefiguration of Freud in Beyond Good and Evil

Awais Aftab, MD

Case Western Reserve University

Psychiatry in the 21st Century: Critical and Philosophical Perspectives

Nassir Ghaemi, MD

Tufts University

On Karl Jaspers

Chaitanya Haldipur, MD

Upstate Medical University

Psychiatry in Literature: Machado de Assis

Daniel Berthold, Ph.D.

Bard College

Talking Cures: A Lacanian Reading of Hegel and Kierkegaard on Language and Madness

Ronald Pies, MD

Upstate Medical University

Compassion in Psychotherapy and the Healing Process: A Bio-Psycho-Spiritual Perspective

Richard Boothby, Ph.D.

Loyola University

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred with Freud and Lacan

Kirk Schneider, Ph.D.

Columbia University and Saybrook University

The Experiential Democracy Dialogue, A Half-Day Workshop

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