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How to Touch a Hot Stove Selected by REEL

September 26, 2014, 12:00 am
SponsorDepartment of Modern Languages and LiteraturesMore Informationhttp:/‌/‌www.montclair.edu/‌chss/‌modern-languages-literatures/‌Posted InCampus Events
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REEL Recovery Film Festival
New York, NY Edition

Sept. 26–Oct. 2, 2014

QUAD Cinema

34 W 13th Street

New York, NY 10011

Co-created by Lois Oppenheim, Professor of French and Chair of the Dept. of Modern Languages and Literatures, How to Touch a Hot Stove: Thought and Behavioral Differences in a Society of Norms, is one component of The Hot Stove Project which provides a comprehensive set of resources for those with lived experience and the people in their community, offers a means of catalyzing conversation across multiple divides, and aims to integrate a large group of people whose marginalization can no longer be accepted.  As she says on the website, “We have much to learn from people who think differently.  To some extent, we all do.  What happens if you don't walk away?”

Dr. Oppenheim, whose interest in mental health began with her work on psychoanalytic literary criticism (which she teaches in conjunction with other critical approaches in her courses at Montclair State University), trained in the Scholars Program of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.  She then went on to a Visiting Scholar position at the New York State Psychiatric Institute while on sabbatical, where she did research for a book on psychoanalysis and literary and artistic creativity: Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion (Routledge, 2013), which was awarded the 2013 Courage to Dream Prize by the American Psychoanalytic Association. 

Dr. Oppenheim and her co-creator (psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Alice Maher) have screened How to Touch a Hot Stove: Thought and Behavioral Differences in a Society of Norms at multiple venues and led discussions about the medical versus psychosocial etiology of mental health disorders and treatments.  The film, along with supplementary footage entitled Crazy? (edited by recent Montclair State University graduate in film studies Ken Spooner) is available online for screening in classrooms and other settings.

Please visit the website at TheHotStoveProject.org and, if you support the de-marginalizing effort, like it on Facebook and follow it on Twitter.