Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu 30 Mar 2023
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
A short course exploring new developments in fiction-therapy.
Thursday 30th March + Thursday 20th April
Times: 6.30pm-8.30pm
Booking details via Psychosynthesis Trust eventbrite
Why this short course?
By what mysterious process does a book come to life in the hands of a reader? Why is life often easier with a good book on the go? And what can be done to enhance this therapeutic cross-over into everyday living? This two-part course addresses these questions by exploring reading as an act of imagination.
Wild Reading is a way to name, validate and enhance the imaginative wonder of fictive experience. To be wild is to be free-willed and reading wildly allows readers to imaginatively break free in two related areas:
-absorption within a text as an imagining beyond limiting situations and restricted identities.
-how fiction continues beyond-the-page as a revitalised reading of the ‘text’ of everyday life.
The result will be an experiential and theoretical appreciation of reading fiction, not as an isolated fantasy activity but as the cultivation of an imaginal perception that takes us to the heart of human creativity, healing and transformation.
Who is it for?
The course is for anyone interested in the enhancement of reading fiction, whether personally and/or via fiction-therapy with others. It is therefore intended for therapists and also non-therapists. No expert understanding is required.
Aims & Learning Outcomes:
The course will support you to:
-understand how reading fiction is an act of imagination.
-enhance reading skills for imaginative absorption in a story (and get over a ‘reading slump’).
-distinguish ‘wild reading’ from ‘tame reading’ (a critical, rationalistic focus).
-explore imagination as an everyday act of perception (not just ‘pictures inside the mind’).
-apply an imagination-centred fiction-therapy method.
-discuss reading experience (as opposed to talking about books and authors).
-appreciate and enhance the relationship between imagination and psychological health.
What to Expect:
The first part of the course will provide the theoretical context and practical skills needed to get you started Wild Reading. The second part is scheduled to allow time for reading so that we can then come together to discuss further questions and experiences of Wild Reading. The online format on Zoom will be a mixture of slideshow presentation, group discussion and short exercises. The slideshow will be e-mailed to participants after each part of the course.
Course Approach:
Traditional fiction-therapy (or bibliotherapy) favours prescribing texts to match presenting issues and discussing the thinking/feeling after-effects of reading. This course differs from these approaches by focussing directly upon the process of reading itself. The wild spontaneity and freedom of fictive experience is found, not in the pages of a book or a reader’s mind separate from the text, but in the coming-together of a text with a responsive reader. The course therefore adopts a position from directly inside the living relationship between text and reader, offering a new approach to reading fiction as an act of imagination.
Course Sources:
The course applies active-imagination and art-therapy methods to the reading of fiction. In particular, the critical developments of these approaches as presented in ‘Waking Dreams’ by Allan Frater, the course trainer. Additional sources include: Keith Oatley, Sven Birkerts, Matthew Rubery, Wolfgang Iser and Walter J. Slatoff.
Trainer:
Allan Frater is a psychotherapist, supervisor and author of ‘Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life.’ Since 2011 he has taught at the Psychosynthesis Trust on the Counselling Diploma courses as well as CPD events related to his research interest in the role of imagination within normal everyday life, creative work and healing/transformation. Partly as an excuse to read more novels, he is currently writing a second book on how reading fiction enhances imaginative life, upon which this course is based.