December Narrative Medicine Rounds with Emily LaBarge

For our closing Rounds of the fall season, we are delighted to be joined by art critic, essayist, and memoirist Emily LaBarge. Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer living in London. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, frieze, and Granta, among other publications. She has given talks, lectures and readings at a variety of institutions, including Tate Modern, The Hayward Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, Barbican Gallery, and Kestner Gessellschaft. LaBarge is a regular contributor to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her first book, Dog Days, was published in the UK in 2025 by Peninsula Press, and in the US and Canada, with Transit and Hamish Hamilton in May 2026.  

In Dog Days, LaBarge traces the 2009 Christmas vacation in which she and her family were held hostage while Mrs. Doubtfire and “Agnus Dei” played on repeat. In the years that follow, a therapist encourages her to lie in exactly the same position, “just like how it happened, for as long as it happened, and for as long as it takes until the pain comes out”—otherwise it will never leave. LaBarge tries to find “the good story”: neat, polite, reassuring. But what happens to the things the good story leaves out?

A high-voltage synthesis of memoir, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory—drawing upon film and writing from Mulholland Drive to It’s a Wonderful Life, Virginia Woolf to Janet Malcolm—Dog Days writes into this question. How do language and institutions constrain and distort our understanding of trauma, violence, and care? How might we write otherwise, telling a story, and its aftermath, on our own terms? The result is not only a prose work but also a practice: an insistence on more radical, more complex forms of engagement, a search for the place where writing becomes a way of surviving.

Emily LaBarge will be in conversation with Dr. Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D. Dr. Tutter is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia University Vagelos School of Medicine, and the Director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program in the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she teaches Freud and Post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory. She is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and a member of the faculty at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Her interdisciplinary psychoanalytic scholarship, which largely concerns creativity, mourning, and the interface of culture and psychoanalysis, has earned the Hartman, Menninger, Liebert, CORST and Ticho Prizes, among others. In addition to many journal articles and chapters, she authored the monograph, Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House, edited The Muse: Psychoanalytic Explorations of Creative Inspiration, and, with Léon Wurmser, coedited Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, Creativity. A long-standing member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Quarterly and American Imago, she maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis in Manhattan and the Catskill Mountains. 

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds held on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year, hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Rounds are supported by live captioning. If you have any other accessibility needs or concerns, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event. We do our best to arrange accommodations received after this deadline but cannot guarantee them.