Meet the Author with Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, PhD

Join Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, PhD, for our next Meet the Author event with Aaron Kook, LMHC, and the online audience.

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TUESDAY, January 13, 2026
7:30 - 9:00 PM on ZOOM
MEET THE AUTHOR with Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, PhD

Dr. Schmidt-Hellerau  will present her new book Life Drive & Death Drive Libido & Lethe: A Clear Road Through Freud's Metapsychology Leading to Helpful Findings and New Concepts (IPBooks, 2024).  The program will be moderated by Aaron Kook, LMHC, and the audience will have a chance to ask questions during the Q&A session at the end.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
  

 

 

In her talk, Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, PhD, will offer a simple guideline that helps to understand the basic ideas of Freud's theory of the mind. She will speak about the drives -- the life and death drives, as well as the sexual and the self-/object-preservative drives -- and she will explain the function of aggression in all of them. Further, she will address how relational experiences structure the mind in memory traces, object representations as well as in the Ego, Id, and Superego. Her discussion of these concepts will make immediate connections to our clinical work.


“Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau navigates what has been for many of us the murky waters of metapsychology, and provides an exceptionally lucid, logically coherent account of the overall structure of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, the relationship of its various elements, and the significance for clinical practice and neurophysiological priniciples. She convinces the reader that Freud’s metapsychology, critically and synthetically approached, contains more creative potential than anything else yet produced in psychoanalysis. Her own extraordinary capacities as a psychoanalytic scholar and passionately creative thinker have given us a Freud for the future.” —Alan Bass, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly

“This is an original, systematic, scholarly, challenging overview of Freud’s metapsychology and a fundamental reformulation of Freudian metapsychology in the light of the evolution of psychoanalytic thinking to the present day.”–Otto F. Kernberg, IPA Past President

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

  Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, PhD, studied literature, philosophy and psychology in Heidelberg and Zürich, where she worked as a university professor for clinical psychology. She is a training and supervising analyst and faculty at the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society and at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Her areas of expertise are metapsychology, in particular drive theory, its clinical application, and applied psychoanalysis of creative processes. She is the author of three psychoanalytic books, three novels, and many articles, published in many languages, and edited a Freud Reader, an Essay book and three collections of Short Stories. She was the Chair of the IPA in Culture Committee (2017-2025) and is now the ING CoChair for North America. She works in private practice in Chestnut Hill.

 

ABOUT THE MODERATOR:
 
  Aaron Kook, LMHC is a a third year joint candidate at BPSI and is in full-time Private Practice in Brookline, MA, working with adults, children, and families. Before becoming a clinician, he was an educator in the public school system, teaching Latin to students of various ages. That was the beginning of his interest in both human development and the evolution of language. He continues to delve into these matters, as a clinician and as an aspiring fantasy writer.
 
 
 
 
 
 
The target audience for this program is the general public and mental health clinicians at all levels of training. 

Continuing Education 
Continuing education is not offered for this program.
 
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This program is made possible by the generous support of BPSI Members and friends. Your gift to BPSI supports education in the fields of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.  

To make a gift to BPSI, contact Carole Nathan (cnathan@bpsi.org or 617-266-0953 x101), go to www.bpsi.org, or send mail to BPSI, 141 Herrick Road, Newton Centre, MA 02459.