This 12-week webinar course offers participants an immersion in a choice collection of the most influential writings in the history of our discipline. The course will draw on psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden’s insightful and moving Creative Readings (2012), a collection of papers that retrospectively stand out in the evolving analytic understanding of the mind. These include Freud, Isaacs, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bion, Loewald, and Searles. These papers, some of these authors’ most significant written work, serve as a valuable cross-section of the development of the most central original psychoanalytic ideas, such as Oedipal development, unconscious phantasy, and internal objects, but also psychoanalysis’ transition from “what” to “how.”

Of these papers, Ogden writes: “I am far more interested in what these authors knew, but did not know they knew — in how these texts are rich in ways their authors did not consciously intend or understand” (p. 3). In the same way, we are invited to think of what we know and to touch the anxiety of not knowing. Webinar participants will be invited to enter into the readings as if for the first time, creatively. We will engage with each text personally, emphasizing an emotional and imaginal response, and a little less an intellectual grasp. The ultimate hope is that the conversations will stimulate further thinking and imagining to take into each one’s practices and grow our curiosity for more learning and experiencing.

Dates:  1-27, 2-10, 2-24, 3-10, 3-24, 4-14, 5-5, 5-12, 5-26, 6-9, 6-23, 7-14

Fees: $480