Around the World in a Day

Psychoanalysis & Art – a journey into the creative process

We believe that the Coronavirus crisis is affecting more than our physical health and social interactions: it is also affecting our cultural life. It increases primitive fears, causes social withdrawal and hinders people’s ability to engage and relate in a transitional, common playground. Human contact, psychical as well as physical, that usually nurtures life, may now trigger fears and persecutory anxieties.
Our bodies no longer move much and have to reduce their expressiveness; minds and relationships suffer from this deprivation. The closure of cinemas, theaters, squares, children’s playgrounds, schools, psychoanalytic centers, etc. may cause and reproduce at the same time both individual and collective cumulative trauma.

In the encounter with the uncanny, both, psychoanalysis and art endeavors to find ways to represent the experience. Psychoanalysis meets the art in a space where both endeavors to find transformative potential. Looking inward and outward, they are trying to find ways of expressing their encounter with the unknown; finding expression and interpretation for what was experienced as unrepresented.
The very nature of art and psychoanalysis is evolutionary because it is constantly questioning the states of being and, in turn, it is questioned by them. In this way, both psychoanalysis and art are inherently engaged with the process of how transformation happens. In the relational field, artistic and analytic creative process finds common ground, bringing emotion into play, and thereby its potential to become thinkable.

IPSO offers a dialogical platform to psychoanalysts and artists to reflect upon the nature of creative processes within the context of contemporary reality. 6 webinars covering 6 different time zones, connecting candidates, psychoanalysts, artists and a wider audience from the 5 continents, in a one-day virtual trip around the world.