Berkeley Psychoanalytic Society
Exploring the Unconscious: Arts, Science and the Humanities
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Roads to the Unconscious: Some Parallels and Divergences between Psychoanalysis and the Writing of Poetry
Saturday, October 31, 2020 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
In an essay in Poetry magazine in 1951, the critic Lawrence Hart wrote: “We came to consider poetry as the adventure of the writer into the hidden springs of his own action and emotion—his work in poetry being parallel in some ways to that done through psychoanalysis and sometimes aided by it.” We’ll explore some of those parallels. We’ll discuss how the two disciplines use free association and other means to overcome censorship and conventional expression; how they draw on the dream state; how they depend in different ways on setting; how they both reveal and help to manage painful experience; and how they require the presence of a partner or object, whether external or within.
SPEAKERS
John Hart is the author of 15 books, mostly in the environmental field, but he comes to us today as a poet and as an exponent of an alternative Bay Area poetry tradition, the so-called Activist group mentored by his father Lawrence Hart. Hart and his students were nationally noted in the decade preceding the Beat Generation and had a very different approach, taking with utmost seriousness the Modernist demand that poetry show high originality and technical finesse in almost every line. John has worked to document this history and to continue his father’s teaching methods on a research basis, as well as pursuing Activist strategies in his own work. His credits include a James D. Phelan Award, a book in the Pitt Poetry Series (The Climbers, 1978), a belated successor, Storm Camp (Sugartown Publishing, 2017), and periodical publication including Literary Imagination, Midwest Quarterly, Orbis, Southern Poetry Review, and Talisman: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics. He edits the venerable (since 1977) all-poetry magazine Blue Unicorn.
Helen Schoenhals Hart, Dr.med.
Dr. Helen Schoenhals Hart, born in Detroit, received her Masters Degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan in 1968 and went to Germany on a DAAD fellowship. Encountering psychoanalytic ideas there, she changed both specialty and language to train as an analyst at the Sigmund-Freud-Institut in Frankfurt, simultaneously earning a medical degree. She served for many years as a training analyst of the German Psychoanalytic Association (DPV), was a member of the Executive Council of the German Psychoanalytic Association, and was president of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Association (FPV) from 1986 to 1990. For over two decades she worked intensively with the London Kleinians (Herbert Rosenfeld, Ron Britton, and others) and was instrumental in promoting Kleinian ideas in Germany. Since moving to California in 2008 she has maintained a psychoanalytic practice in San Rafael. She is a training and supervising analyst at SFCP. Helen has contributed to the German journals Psyche and Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Theorie und Praxis, to the American journals Psychoanalytic Inquiry and The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and to The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. For 25 years she was a consulting editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, guest-editing a 1994 issue devoted to “Contemporary Kleinian Psychoanalysis” (Vol. 14, no. 3). Her articles on triangular space and symbolization have attracted wide notice.