| Lutecium a non-school of Lacanian/Freudian Psychoanalysis San Francisco, California |
| Poetry and Psychoanalysis Study Group with Cynthia Sailers, Psy.D., MFA |
Group Description:
Eric Essman, M.A. / Cynthia Sailers, Psy.D., MFA
Lacan remarked (Seminar 20) that love is the movement among discourses. We might define poetry as a textually-embodied
movement wherein the subject-poet reveals her- or himself both indirectly and transparently through language that exhibits, in
Lacan’s terms, its signifiance (“signifierness”) and jouis-sens: its materiality, its iconic presence, and its capacity to generate a
shifting abundance of meaning-enjoyment. As readers we yield to the summons of poetry, seduced by its sensuousness, its
uncanniness, or virtuosity; by its promise of wholeness and plenitude; by the call to repair its ruptures; or by the desire to
supplement it with our associations. (Our desire is the poem’s desire--which, in the words of poet Heather McHugh, is “to liberate
the larger sense”.) The aim of this study group for clinicians, writers and scholars is to enhance our understanding of languistic
form, to free our energy of creative possibility, to sharpen the sensitivity of our psychoanalytic listening and the increase the vitality
of our interventions by closely engaging and discussing a series of classic and contemporary poems, with interest in how they
generate meaning; how they picture, sound and narrate; and how their sonorities, diction and prosody (phrase, sentence, verse,
rhyme and metric structure) saturate the musical-visual-semantic field. We’ll consider the “dreamwork” of poetry – metaphor-
condensation, metonymy-displacement and other figures of speech. We may also consider how subjectivity is revealed both
through the “voice” or persona of the poet and through the intersubjectivity of our collective discourse about poetry.
The Study Group fee includes admittance to the "Poetics and Psychoanalysis" lecture/event of the Winter 2011 Immersion.
Eric Essman, M.A. / Cynthia Sailers, Psy.D., MFA
Lacan remarked (Seminar 20) that love is the movement among discourses. We might define poetry as a textually-embodied
movement wherein the subject-poet reveals her- or himself both indirectly and transparently through language that exhibits, in
Lacan’s terms, its signifiance (“signifierness”) and jouis-sens: its materiality, its iconic presence, and its capacity to generate a
shifting abundance of meaning-enjoyment. As readers we yield to the summons of poetry, seduced by its sensuousness, its
uncanniness, or virtuosity; by its promise of wholeness and plenitude; by the call to repair its ruptures; or by the desire to
supplement it with our associations. (Our desire is the poem’s desire--which, in the words of poet Heather McHugh, is “to liberate
the larger sense”.) The aim of this study group for clinicians, writers and scholars is to enhance our understanding of languistic
form, to free our energy of creative possibility, to sharpen the sensitivity of our psychoanalytic listening and the increase the vitality
of our interventions by closely engaging and discussing a series of classic and contemporary poems, with interest in how they
generate meaning; how they picture, sound and narrate; and how their sonorities, diction and prosody (phrase, sentence, verse,
rhyme and metric structure) saturate the musical-visual-semantic field. We’ll consider the “dreamwork” of poetry – metaphor-
condensation, metonymy-displacement and other figures of speech. We may also consider how subjectivity is revealed both
through the “voice” or persona of the poet and through the intersubjectivity of our collective discourse about poetry.
The Study Group fee includes admittance to the "Poetics and Psychoanalysis" lecture/event of the Winter 2011 Immersion.
| This Group meets 6pm - 8pm on Fridays: 1/14, 1/28, 2/11, 2/25, & 3/11 Flood Building, 870 Market Street San Francisco |
Study Group Fee: $400