BPA | The Poetic Mind Seminar - Between the Lines – Approaching Poetry as Mind

The Poetic Mind Seminar

Monday 8th September 8.30am - 10pm

Between the Lines - Approaching Poetry as Mind

Professor Jonathan Green

Hybrid, In-person & Online
89 Prince of Wales Road, NW5 3NT & Online via Zoom

Approaching poetry's mind invites readers into a fertile space where poetry and psychological thinking meet - not as disciplines but as ways of thinking, feeling, and being. Talk and performed poetry will illustrate an approach to poetry, not merely as language but as a form of mind: an embodied container for the unspoken and a symbolic space in which absence memory loss and desire are given shape. Drawing on clinical insight literary sensitivity and philosophical depth, between the lines will offer a richly textured meditation on poetic communication. For therapist poets and all those attuned to the inner life of language, this is a presentation about how poems can think.

Jonathan Green has been a Painter for 60 years and a Child Psychiatrist for 40, as well as a long-time poetry reader. He is a clinician and Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Manchester, where his work has focused on early child attachment, social development, and autistic development. He also had early Art training in Paris and Winchester School of Art, and kept painting subsequently, exhibiting increasingly over the last 20 years. This presentation of poetry in ‘Between the Lines’ grows out of work I have done on the intersection of Art and Therapeutic relating, expressed in a paper on ‘Form and Mental State; an Interpersonal Approach to Painting’ -https://doi.org/10.1192/apt.bp.108.005751. In this event I want to explore and share a similar approach to the reading of Poetry.

The Poetic Mind Seminar

A series centered on the intersection of poetry and psychoanalysis can explore how both disciplines utilise language to navigate the complexities of human experience.

Future topics

Metaphor and Meaning: Examining how metaphors function in both poetry and therapeutic dialogue to reveal unconscious content.

The Poetics of Therapy: Investigating the role of narrative and in psychoanalytic practice.

Language and Healing: Exploring how the expressive qualities of language in poetry can inform therapeutic techniques aimed at emotional processing and integration.

By delving into these areas, we could illuminate the rich, symbiotic relationship between poetic expression and psychoanalytic exploration, offering deeper insights into the human condition through the lens of language.

Image: The cupola above the stage in the Wigmore Hall, incorporating the painting 'The Soul of Music' by Gerald Moira.  Reproduced thanks to Historic England.
The opinions and views expressed are entirely those of the speaker in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the policies or opinions of the BPA.
Refunds available up to 10 days before the event start date.