Writing Words That Touch: Tuning Our Psychoanalytic Voice | January 2025
I don’t know what I think until I write it down. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means, What I want and what I fear.
– Joan DidionTouch me, astonish me, tear me to pieces; make me first shudder, cry, tremble, make me angry; you will give me my eyes afterwards, if you can.
– DiderotI cannot have as much confidence in my ability to tell the reader what has happened as I have in my ability to do something to the reader that I have had done to me. I have had an emotional experience; I feel confident in my ability to recreate that emotional experience, but not to represent it.
– Bion
Photo Art credits: Artist: Janet Oakes | “Into the Woods” Acrylic on canvas
The above writers speak in their exceptional way about their writing process and their style of writing words that transmit their experience to others.
This on-going writing workshop is designed to create a safe, exploratory environment to discover and tune our analytic voices through words that transmit the music of our experience, “not pretty metaphors but …the profoundest thinking we have.” (Frost 1930, p.719)
The inspiration for this seminar series comes from the many creative and diverse writers who offer us their unique style and emotional depth: those who write in ways that push us against our mental limits, that challenge us to enter unknown territory in ourselves, that touch and ignite our deepest places of fear, terror, beauty, play, humour, intellectual acuity, or curiosity about ourselves and our world, those, whose writing profoundly moves us with courage and presence.
Our objective in these seminars is to provide a playground of experiences in which to listen for and respond to our individual voices as they arise and become the written word. How can we thrill our readers? Move them to their own unexpressed and unexplored places? Or simply kindle their curiosity and interest?
These questions and others that come to mind will be a part of the developing conversation in our group as we challenge ourselves and each other to speak with words that touch our lived somatic experience and attempt to reach others in theirs.
Registration closes January 3rd @ 5pm PST.
Learning Objectives:The objective of the seminars is to increase confidence in one’s own writing potential.
Activities:
- Readings: excerpts of emotionally engaging literature that have been inspirational (poetry, reflections, creative stories, journal articles, clinical vignettes, case reports)
- Open discussion
- Break out groups and dyads
- In-seminar writing exercises to prompt the creative process
- Conversations with invited analysts who are experienced and effective writers, regarding their craft and process on:
- personal development and experience in writing projects
- advice on publishing
- confidentiality regarding issues to consider when publishing confidential material
- creative process
- Writing projects: review of participants writing if desired
- creative free form
- memoires
- poetry
- Psychoanalytic articles for publication
- reports
- graduation papers
- essays
