Public Lectures
“The slap of Angels’ cold wings”: memory, forgetfulness and creativity - The Society of Analytical Psychology Annual Lecture, March 2018 here
This lecture explores the links between loss and grief, memory and creativity, aesthetics and ethics, via a personal dream, Shalman Alexie’s poem “Grief calls us to the things of this world”, Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”, Freudian and Jungian writing on creativity, Lorca’s exploration of duende, and ends with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 2015 album “The Skeleton Tree”.
It concludes that to be creative “we have to manage the tension between remembering and forgetting, allowing long term memory to dissolve in the demands of the day, but not banishing it; we have to resist ideologies that tell us the ‘right way’ to mourn, or the right way to create. We have to be ourselves, in touch as much as we can with the larger Self, and with the smaller ordinary interactions with those we love and those who love us, alive or dead.”
Imagination, creativity and the joys of Being ordinary - The Society of Analytical Psychology Annual Lecture, October 2007 here
This lecture addresses the nature of the imagination and its links with creativity, using clinical examples from individual and couple work, and a particular burst of creative production in the work of the English poet Thomas Hardy (Poems 1912-13) and the American sculptor David Smith (at Voltri, Italy). It explores Coleridge’s distinction between ‘Primary’ and ‘Secondary Imagination’ and tries to explore the joys of being ordinary, and their links to imagination and creativity.
It ends with a comment about the process of writing the paper: “One of the things that happened towards the end of the hardest part of the work – when most of the basic putting down on paper had been done, and the process of deleting weeks of work to shorten and structure the paper was just beginning – was that I found myself thinking of my patients, past, current and in a funny way, future – the ones I haven’t met yet – with a poignancy that made me take notice. After some reflection, I realised this was to do with their struggles to find a way of living so that their imagination could be used in the service of a creative life, rather than as part and parcel of a twilight life, or worse, a nightmare. We all struggle with this, of course; it is after all, just an ordinary thing, but I hope that you’ll agree that being ordinary is something quite amazing, nonetheless.”
The Human Psyche in a Changing World: Art - British Association of Psychotherapists, July 2005 here
This was part of a series of public lectures which paired a Jungian analyst with a subject specialist. I was fortunate to be paired with the artist and art critic Mathew Collings. “I was going to give this talk a title like ‘I may not know much about art, but I know what I hate” but after I heard what Mathew Collings was likely to talk about this evening I decided that my title was redundant. As a result I have decided to focus on two different things, in an attempt to stimulate further thoughts and discussion. The first thing I wanted to focus on is some thoughts and questions about the nature of the artistic process from the point of view of a paper by Carl Jung on artistic creation. The second thing I wanted to focus on is the problem that art faces us with today. Namely, how to determine what is art and what is not; how to encourage more of it; and how to understand what it has to say to us.”
The lecture touched on both the 1927 court case in New York that tried to come to an opinion as to whether Brancusi’s L’Oiseau and 19 other metal works were art, or merely pieces of metal (and so subject to import duties absent from art works) and the current Room 13 project at Caol Primary School, Fort William in Scotland, in which pupils were given free access to art resources and help realising their ideas as painting, drawing, digital prints, sculpture, performance art, photography, mixed media collage or film.
Other analytic writing in the area of creativity
2023 Re-visioning creativity in couple psychoanalysis: the importance of Winnicott and Bollas in clinical practice. In Nathans, S. (ed) More about Couples on the Couch: Approaching Psychoanalytic Couple Psychotherapy from an Expanded Perspective. London: Routledge. Chapter 1.
2011 "I thought he might be better now" – a clinician’s reading of individuation in “Breaking the Waves” (von Trier, 1996) In: Hauke, C. & Hockley, L.(eds) Jung and Film II: The Return. London: Routledge.
2009 “’The Bull of Dionysius’ – Power or love in sadomasochistic couple relationships”. In: Clulow, C. (ed.) Sex, Attachment and Couple Psychotherapy. London: Karnac Books.
2007 “The Power of our Attraction to Theory – or Oedipus meets Ganesh” In: Ludlam, M. & Nyberg, V. (eds) Couple Attachments: Theoretical and Clinical Studies. London: Karnac Books.
2003 “’Oh rose thou art sick!’ Anti-individuation forces in the film ‘American Beauty’”. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 48, 5, 683-704.
2000 “‘Loving the Alien?’ a response to John Izod’s ‘Active imagination and the analysis of film.’” Journal of Analytical Psychology, 44, 2, 287-293
Full bibliography, in addition to the above: here