Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu 22 Sep 2022
6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Explores how metaphor is not just a poetical way of speaking but a form of perception that shapes how we imagine self and world.
Hosted by Allan Frater and The Psychosynthesis Trust
Online via Zoom
Book now via eventbrite here
Why this workshop?
Metaphor is the ability to understand and experience something unknown in terms of something known, a famous example from Shakespeare being ‘Juliet is the sun.’
To speak of feeling ‘shut down’ or ‘fragmented’; to talk of needing a ‘reset’ or having ‘blown a gasket’; to consider the personality an assemblage of component ‘parts’, exerting ‘pressures’ and ‘resistances’ – are colloquial ‘mind-as-machine’ metaphors rooted in a common-sense assumption of a mechanical self and world. The workshop will show how this results in an often-painful search for machine like predictability, order and control over our lives, relationships and the environment.
Given that human beings are not machines the workshop will introduce ecological metaphors that better convey the wildness and irregularity of experience ‘as if’ a chrysalis or forest, a cloud formation or a beating heart. A re-wilding of metaphor that enables us to better notice and work with the unruly, unexpected and seemingly chaotic imaginings which often point the way to creative process and transformation.
Who is it for?
The workshop is for anyone interested in imagination and metaphor. It is intended for therapists and also non-therapists – with examples and exercises that include and also go beyond a conventional therapeutic context into everyday life and work. No expert understanding is required.
Aims and Learning Outcomes
The seminar will support you to:
- Work with the spontaneously ‘living metaphor’ found in everyday speech, fantasies, feelings, body sensations and gestures.
- Avoid the dangers of ‘dead metaphor’ in clichéd language and concrete or literal minded perspectives.
- Notice how metaphors reveal and also conceal aspects of experience.
- Understand the origins of technological metaphors hidden in much of therapeutic theory and contemporary language.
- Work with ecological metaphors in everyday relationships, creative work, self- development and healing.
What to Expect:
The online format using Zoom will be a mix of mini-presentations, group discussions and short experiential exercises to try out the material and provide a basis for grounding it in everyday life.
Workshop Sources:
The genesis of the workshop is a critical development of Roberto Assagioli’s psychosynthesis, going beyond an understanding of imagination as a merely ‘inner’ or subjective faculty, to provide an experiential and theoretical appreciation of the systemic role imagination and metaphor play in shaping and responding to everyday life.
Particular sources include: the ecopsychologists Theodor Roszak, Jerome Bernstein and Nick Totton; the integration of psychotherapy with complexity theory by Terry Marks-Tarlow and Robert M. Galatzer-Levy; the philosophers Gregory Bateson, Zachary Stein and Bonnitta Roy.
Costs
The Psychosynthesis Trust invite you to select the price point that feels like it represents a fair contribution for attending this event based on your income. There are three options to choose from when purchasing tickets: £25, £30, £35.
Allan also runs a regular online ‘Waking Dreams’ evening course, the next cohort starts May 2022 click here to find out more.