​

This workshop involves several exercises in time-limited (five minutes), addressive, free associative writing to a moment in your life (or with a fictional character or situation you have written or could write about).  The idea we want to test is whether creative and therapeutic writing are deeply, delicately and unconsciously woven from the same magical threads of words.  How does writing move us and what do we do differently with emotions aroused when the purpose is fiction or therapy? 

 

There will be a brief recap of Freud’s and Jung’s ideas on the therapeutic and analytic technique of free association and transference—with an extract from Karen Horney’s pioneering book on Self Analysis (1941) where reputedly she analyses herself as a fictional case. There will be handouts and some reading from extracts with discussion highlighting the impact of free association and its sibling idea of stream of consciousness on Joyce and Woolf and contemporary fiction and media. The workshop will end with reflections on the exercises and the necessary entanglement between writing that seeks reality (therapeutic and analytic) and writing that makes fiction (creative and performative).