Writing Traces of the Unconscious with Annie Rogers, Ph.D. and Nathan Lupo, MFT
This workshop is an invitation to explore writing as an experience of traces of the unconscious. “The written word is the limit or shoreline against which the Real breaks into the Symbolic,” Lacan tells us in Liturattere. The aim is to introduce writing that works in the curvature of the unconscious, marking the analyst or psychotherapist by allowing discovery of surprising linkages.
The writing exercises will introduce participants into a frisson of words and silences through poetics, word clouds, singular and repeating phrases, (re)marks of the clinic, dreams, memories and sheer nonsense. This is writing to find what’s possible to say, and what’s impossible- the unsayable that we can only circle indirectly.
In the first writing workshop, we will introduce exemplars of the unconscious in language: the puzzling rubric of dreams, poetics as a form of condensation, and the art of poetry that elides any summary of meaning. We will focus on the constructive use of memory and its limits through various poetic devices, pushing toward the unknown. This is a space to consider and reconsider, to write, to read aloud, to play with language and hear its resonances.
The second writing workshop will focus on the problematics of case histories as a genre. We will invent new forms of writing case study notes that do not erase the speaking patient, nor create an imaginary version of what is happening in the mind of the patient by the analyst or psychotherapist. To work with the art of the note, please bring the dream(s) of one patient and a few sentences of their speech concerning that dream. The aim is to find a form that respects the absolute Otherness of any encounter with another human being’s unconscious, the mystery of language and its non-transparency, whether spoken or written.
We will ask all participants to sign a confidentiality agreement prior to this second meeting.
Please Note: this workshop is offered in two parts on consecutive Saturdays, February 21st and 28th from 10:00-11:30 a.m. via Zoom.