BPA | The Poetic Mind Seminar
Book ticketsOrganised by:
British Psychoanalytic Association
Description
The Poetic Mind Seminar
‘This is not for Tears: Thinking’ ‐Poetry and Psychoanalysis in Orbit
Dr Judith Edwards, Psychoanalyst
This is the second in a series of dialogues on the capacity for poetry and psychoanalysis to articulate the internal world.
Online, via Zoom only
Abstract
This paper has been five years in the making, since I have run a series of seminars about poetry and psychoanalysis at the Tavistock Clinic, for non-clinical students. The title comes from a poem by John Berryman, (1914-72) Dream Song 29 (1964 p.77), and it sums up how in this seminar we have tried both to feel what we feel in an authentic way when reading a poem, and think about the links it may have with the central core of the students’ study, which is psychoanalysis.
Are the two disciplines in any way complementary? Can unconscious phantasy be tapped into via the medium of poetry? In this paper I hope to show that while there are profound differences between poetry and psychoanalysis there are also similarities, as the work with students has highlighted; I will also include three brief clinical vignettes.
Bio
Judith Edwards PhD was a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist teaching and supervising on various courses at the Tavistock Clinic, where she was also course tutor for the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies (M16) for non-clinical students until July 2011. Apart from her clinical experience over the years, one of her principal interests is in the links between psychoanalysis, culture and the arts, and making psychoanalytic ideas accessible to a wider audience. She is a senior teaching fellow of the UK Higher Academy of Education.
As well as publishing papers in academic journals internationally, she has contributed to many books including most recently The Emotional Experience of Adoption (Hindle and Shulman, Routledge, 2008) and Acquainted with the Night: Psychoanalysis and the Poetic Imagination (Canham and Satyamurti, Karnac, 2003). She also conceived and edited Being Alive (Routledge, 2001) on the work of Anne Alvarez. She was joint editor of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy from 1996 to 2000, and has edited numerous books on psychoanalytic subjects, including Anne Alvarez’ latest book The Thinking Heart (2012).
In 2010 she was awarded the Jan Lee memorial prize for the best paper linking psychoanalysis and the arts during that year: ‘Teaching &
Learning about Psychoanalysis: Film as a teaching tool with reference to a particular film, Morvern Callar’-British Journal of Psychotherapy, 26.1:pp. 80-99. In 2012 she published a memoir: Pieces of Molly-An ordinary life,(Troubador), under her family name of Gurney, which was then republished by Karnac under her name Judith Edwards.
