Plenary Presentation:
• Jeffrey Rubin:
Where Hope Lies: Breaking the Cycle of Violence From Within
(60 min)

We live in a moment of proliferating hostility — political polarization that no longer seeks to understand, only to defeat; the speed with which disagreement becomes contempt; the ways people withdraw, harden, or strike out when they feel unseen or threatened. We know a great deal about what is going wrong. We know considerably less about where hope actually lies.

This keynote argues that hope is not found in the elimination of suffering — that is not within our control — but in something both more modest and more demanding: the human capacity to transform suffering rather than transmit it. In clinical work over several decades, the presenter has repeatedly encountered a troubling pattern: what presents as hatred — toward others or toward oneself — often conceals experiences of humiliation, invisibility, fear, or despair that have found no place to be known or shared. When those experiences remain unrecognized, they harden into grievance, contempt, and the wish to diminish others. This is one of the central mechanisms by which cycles of violence are sustained — in societies, in families, and in individual lives.

The talk explores this capacity for transformation through three figures whose lives and work illuminate different pathways through suffering: James Baldwin, George Atwood, and Anton Chekhov. Each began in circumstances marked by profound hardship and had every reason to become embittered, hardened, or withdrawn. Each, in a different way, did something else.

Baldwin transformed humiliation and racial exclusion into moral witness and a fierce, unsentimental form of love — demonstrating that the refusal to dehumanize one’s oppressor is not moral generosity but psychological necessity, and the only foundation on which a fractured world can begin to heal.

Atwood transformed devastating early loss, epistemological invalidation, and the absence of any emotional home for his grief into a lifelong commitment to accompanying others into the darkest regions of human experience — what the presenter calls being Virgil to another’s Dante. The talk draws on a psychobiography of Atwood to explore both the gift and the hidden cost of his extraordinary benevolence, and the way in which a relationship of mutual understanding across decades helped complete what suffering had left unfinished.

Chekhov transformed an authoritarian and fearful childhood — which he described as that of a “little convict” — into a practice of clear seeing without contempt, and a life of benevolence expressed not in sentiment but in concrete deeds. His lifelong effort to squeeze “the slave out of himself drop by drop” offers a model of hope that is quiet, daily, and no less demanding for its lack of drama.

Drawing on psychobiography, clinical experience, and the presenter’s own history, this keynote argues that the capacity to transform rather than transmit suffering is not a gift. It is a practice — and it is learnable.

Keywords: Anton Chekhov, dehumanization, George Atwood, hope, humiliation, James Baldwin, moral witness, psychobiography, spiritual resilience, transformation of suffering, violence

Short Bio of the Presenter: 

Jeffrey B. Rubin, PhD, practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy in New York City and North Salem, NY. He teaches at The Object Relations Institute of NY, The American Institute of Psychoanalysis, and the C. G. Jung Institute of NY. A psychohistorian and psychobiographer, he has authored eight books, including A Psychoanalysis for Our Time, The Art of Flourishing, and Psychotherapy Case Studies: Escaping the Prison You Didn’t Know You Were In, and is currently completing two new works in psychobiography. He has lectured internationally on the integration of psychoanalysis, Buddhism, and meditation. Dr. Rubin champions a pluralistic psychoanalysis that draws on the best of all analytic traditions alongside history, art, literature, and anything that illuminates the human condition. Chip Brown described his approach in a 2009 New York Times article as “Enlightenment Therapy.” More information is available at drjeffreyrubin.com.