Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/03/2018
10:00 am - 12:30 pm
Location
120 Belsize Lane, NW3 5BA
Categories
SAP Annual Lecture
The Slap of Angels’ Cold Wings:
Reflections on Loss, Memory and Creativity
Speaker: David Hewison Respondent: Marica Rytovaara
In this lecture I explore briefly the links between imagination and creativity. I focus on the role that loss and memory have in the capacity for a creative life, drawing on the work of writers and musicians as well as Jungian and psychoanalytic theory.
The title comes from Shalman Alexie’s poem ‘Grief calls us to the things of this world’, which captures so well the shock that remembered loss carries with it. I suggest that it is the capacity to be open to the shock of re-ignited grief – even to welcome it – that enables us to remain creative in the face of the urge to shut down and to deny. Without the capacity for remembering, or for being reminded despite ourselves, we are frozen; without memory, we cannot forget and allow symbolisation to unfold in whatever way it needs to. Lorca’s writing on the ‘duende’ – the dark spirit, mixed with death, that takes us to the edge of our creative capacities is one way to understand this; another is found in the eternal angels in Rilke’s ‘Elegies’ that demand that we give witness to the fleeting world – that we ‘become’.
Speaker: David Hewison, PhD, is a Jungian Training Analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology and a Consultant Couple Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Head of Research at Tavistock Relationships, where he runs a Professional Doctorate Programme. He developed an integrative behavioural model of couple therapy for depression for use in Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) Services, and ‘Couple Therapy for Depression – A Clinician’s Guide to Integrative Practice’, written with Clulow and Drake, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. He has taught internationally and has published widely on analytic theory and practice, with an emphasis on creativity and the imagination.
Respondent: Marica Rytovaara is a training analyst of the SAP and the Association of Child Psychotherapists (ACP). She is a full time Consultant in Adolescent Psychotherapy in an adolescent in-patient unit (National Health Service) in London. Marica has written several articles about adolescence and teaches widely in the UK and abroad.
Chair: Jay Barlow
(This is a 2-hour CPD event)
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