ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

The Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts is dedicated to respecting and celebrating the poetic nature of psychoanalysis. This psychoanalysis, as defined by the Academy, flourishes best when it exists outside of a medical model with its pre-conceived notions of  pathology, symptom, etiology and supposed “cure.” It is a psychoanalysis whose delicacy and wonder cannot be anticipated with formulaic treatment plans, whose whispers cannot be heard amidst broadcasted conversations with third party insurers and managed care administrators, and whose rhythms and lyrics cannot possibly arise within pre-formulated, prescribed, and preformatted “standards of care and practice.”  Instead, it is a psychoanalysis that comes alive in places where the bureaucracy of the industrialized health care industry (governmental agencies, professional organizations, and third party payers) has not yet invaded.

These are private places, where the murmurings of one’s soul can be received by an ‘other’ with open mind and open heart, and the opportunity exists to discover the hidden meanings of an individual’s lyrical engagement with the world. In such places, an individual’s life story, no matter how painful, is not distilled into categorical straightjackets of diagnosis and pathology. Here, one’s customary ways of experiencing and engaging with the world with one’s body and mind, are appreciated as everyday, yet meaning filled symbolic and communicative  expressions, rather than illness derived “symptoms” to be obliterated with psychopharmacology or “goal directed” talking treatment.

The Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts invites you to witness just one example of the magic that can happen when an individual (even one diagnosed numerous times as psychotically ill) is listened to from a perspective increasingly rare in today’s mental health culture. As part of the discussion we will be focusing our attention on very basic philosophical, theoretical and cultural assumptions---those that underlie the clinical material as it was understood and worked with, as well as those assumptions which increasingly define the mental health cultural surround, threatening to regulate out of  existence the freedom, individuality and creativity of the analytic discourse.

This conference is an invitation to hear about an experience where raw human poetry came alive in the consulting room – spilling out beyond the boundaried confines of a ‘poem’ as it might be printed in a written anthology. It is an opportunity for us to listen to how two individuals found words together for the previously unspeakable, beckoning utterances of the soul. It is a chance for all of us who care about psychoanalysis to speak outside the margins and to witness the magic that can exist therein.  

  “…. (f)rom a psychoanalytic point of view, everyone is poetic; everyone dreams in metaphor and generates symbolic meanings in the process of living.  Even in their prose, creativity is no longer the exclusive preserve of the divinely inspired or the few great poets.”  

  — Jonathon Lear