Events

The 64th Katharine Asher Engel Lecture
Golden and Gifted: Perfectionism as Hegemony

Patty DiBartolo
Caroline L. Wall ’27 Professor of Psychology

Thursday, April 6, 2023 at 5 p.m. — Neilson Library, Klingenstein Browsing Room​, Smith College

In this lecture, Patty DiBartolo shares an emerging paradigmatic shift in her intellectual journey as a perfectionism scholar. This shift is propelled by interdisciplinary engagement, clinical and scientific literatures, collaborations with students, relationships with fellow faculty, and today’s extraordinary historical events.

Patty traces the explosion of research on perfectionism in the last 30 years. The field grew from only a handful of clinical case studies when she was a beginning undergraduate researcher to the tens of thousands of scientific books and articles published today, at a time of what some have called an epidemic of perfectionism. Why is it that the field now knows so much about perfectionism, yet the distress it spawns is more endless than ever? Might there be something we are missing?

Through data and anecdote, Patty traces how psychology’s earliest clinical conceptualizations of perfectionism centered upon privilege, generating a legacy of knowledge relatively silent on the role of race and power. Mapping the ways in which scholars from an array of disciplinary perspectives outside of psychology—including history, political philosophy, and feminist and critical race theories—provided key insights, Patty articulates how the methods, assumptions, and sociocultural and historical influences on the perfectionism field influenced and limited research and practice. To hone and address these limitations, she shares ethnographic and narrative stories in law, literature, and higher education that provide rich description of the ways in which women and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) individuals express, experience, and understand perfectionism. Within many elite and selective spaces, perfectionism serves to reinforce and recapitulate current systems of hegemony, especially when inequitable notions of standards and mistakes negatively impact those historically marginalized. As a result, the current atomistic view of perfectionism and the treatment interventions that view informs tragically underestimate how identity as well as broad historical and contextual factors give rise to this trait.

As a next step, Patty offers a currently imperfect draft of an expanded definition of the perfectionism construct. The research and practical suggestions that flow from this revision provide new directions to disrupt perfectionism and prevent it from exacting a toll from so many, especially those historically kept at the margins.

Patty is the Caroline L. Wall ‘27 Professor of Psychology. She received her A.B. from Smith College in 1989 and returned to join the faculty after earning her doctorate in clinical psychology from the State University of New York at Albany. Patty previously served as the inaugural faculty director of the sciences (2013–2017) and the associate dean of faculty/dean for academic development (2017–2020) at Smith.

Her long standing research interests focus on investigating the definition and phenomenology of perfectionism and its relationship to mental health, work first begun while she was an undergraduate. In the last 10 years, Patty’s scholarly interests expanded to include research on effective and equitable programs and pedagogy in higher ed. She has given more than 100 scholarly and poster presentations and published 45 articles and chapters, regularly including undergraduate collaborators. A 4th edition of her edited volume, Social anxiety: Clinical, social, and developmental aspects (Elsevier, 3rd ed., 2014, with Stefan Hofmann) is currently in the works and her therapist manual, Cognitive-behavioral therapy for social phobia in adolescents: Stand up, speak out (2007, with Anne Marie Albano), is part of the Oxford University Press’ Programs that Work series. Patty is often called to present her research to a variety of audiences, including teachers, parents, and mental health professionals, and her work has been featured in a range of mainstream media venues, including Time, Health, Redbook, and Psychology Today. In 2008, Patty was awarded the Smith College Kathleen Compton ’54 and John J.F. Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching and in 2015, she was elected a fellow of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.

The 63rd Katharine Asher Engel Lecture
Are We Essentially Information? Why Humanity’s Future Hinges on Our Answering This Question

Susan Levin
Roe/Straut Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy

Monday, November 7, 2022 at 5 p.m. — Seelye 201, Smith College

In this lecture, Susan Levin will critique transhumanism, whose advocates urge us to pursue “radical” enhancement of humans’ cognitive ability and moral attitudes, through manipulation of genes and the brain. Surpassing us categorically, the possessors of these abilities would qualify as “posthuman.” According to Susan, transhumanism is deeply misguided, both scientifically and philosophically. Transhumanists insist that cutting-edge science will deliver humanity’s self-transcendence. In actuality, their view of our genes and brain rests on a conceptualization of the real and knowable per se as “information,” crystallized in potent metaphors, such as “program” and “code.” Far from manifesting a timeless truth as transhumanists presume, this picture stems from a particular confluence of developments during World War II and its aftermath. Mounting findings in genetics and neuroscience undercut this informational frame and, with it, prospects for the discrete manipulation of capacities that transhumanists single out for elevation.

Ultimately, Susan’s objections to transhumanism are philosophical. Even if the informational picture were correct and posthumans could be “built,” we should not proceed. For, in so doing, we would eliminate what makes existence as a human being distinctive and worthwhile. Moreover, science cannot be “salvific,” as transhumanists presume, for it cannot tell us what humanity’s guiding values and ends should be. Ancient virtue ethics, adapted to liberal democracy, offers a holistic perspective on living well that is radically superior to transhumanism, which, condemning humanity as hopelessly defective, locates humanity’s worth in subserving the emergence of its own “godlike” successors.

Susan B. Levin is the Roe/Straut Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy. In addition, she is a member of the steering committee for the Five College Program in Culture, Health and Science. Susan received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and her B.A. from Pomona College. She has been a member of the faculty at Smith since 1993.

The areas of Susan’s research are bioethics and ancient Greek philosophy. Her most recent book is Posthuman Bliss? The Failed Promise of Transhumanism (Oxford, 2021). The American Philosophical Association featured the book in its Recently Published Book Spotlight. Susan also discusses the book in a post for OUPblog, an article for the Institute of Art and Ideas, and a blog post in the series “The Page 99 Test.” An interview with her appears in the Summer 2021 issue of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly.

Susan previously published two books in Greek philosophy, Plato’s Rivalry with Medicine: A Struggle and Its Dissolution (Oxford, 2014) and The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (Oxford, 2001). In addition, she has published numerous articles in both bioethics and Greek philosophy.