Facilitated by: Erica Ehrenberg, Licensed Psychoanalyst, MFA
What do the great writers have to teach us about psychoanalysis, and in what ways do some of the most powerful psychoanalytic texts function as poetry? This writing workshop is predicated on the idea that creative writers have crucial contributions to make to how we conceptualize psychological experience, and that some of the great psychoanalytic texts lift off the page beyond theory and into poetry. Through writing exercises designed in response to texts like Kafka’s “The Country Doctor,” Celan’s poetry from and beyond trauma, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill,” D. W. Winnicott’s “Fear of Breakdown,” Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and Barbara Guest’s essay on the creative unconscious, “Invisible Architecture,” we will meet at the place where psychoanalytic thinking and poetry not only overlap, but feed on and become each other. The goal will be to generate creative work that emerges from this exploration — a seed for both creative and clinical work. We will share it in a workshop format, with discussion that mines the relationship between form and content in the works we read and in each participant’s particular voice.