Virtual only. Please register at the link.
Adele Tutter, Co-Director of Psychoanalytic Studies
The Psychoanalytic Studies Program (PSP) of the ICLS presents:
Poetry and the Unconscious
A conversation between Nuar Alsadir and Eli Mandel
Moderated by Adele Tutter, Director, PSP
This event will be virtual. Registration is required.
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” wrote Emily Dickinson.
Beyond the bounds of narrative and normative logic, poetry reaches the brain in privileged ways. How does it communicate, and what is it trying to say? Nuar Alsadir and Eli Mandel—each, both poet and psychoanalyst—look to psychoanalysis for ways of understanding the effects of poetry on psychic reality. Drawing on works by Bion, Winnicott, Arlow and others, they discuss how poems make contact with the psyches—and bodies—of readers. They will also consider the animosity that poetry stirs up, and explore the ways in which it may stem from the special threat it poses to the order of objective reality. Time will be reserved for the audience to join the conversation.
Nuar Alsadir, PhD, LP, a poet and psychoanalyst, is the author of the poetry books Fourth Person Singular, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize, and More Shadow Than Bird; her first book of nonfiction, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, will be published by Graywolf Press and Fitzcarraldo Editions in August. She is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Eli P. Mandel is a PhD candidate in English and interdisciplinary humanities at Princeton University, and a candidate in the licensure-qualifying program at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. The recipient of Frederick M. Clapp Fellowship in Poetry from Yale, his poems, essays and translations have appeared in The Harvard Review, The New Inquiry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
The Columbia University Psychoanalytic Studies Program (PSP) encourages the exploration of the rich interface between psychoanalytic thought, the fine arts, and the humanities and social sciences. It offers a Certificate in Psychoanalytic Studies to students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Contact Adele Tutter (atutter@mac.com) for more information.
