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We are delighted to announce the winners of our poetry and psychoanalysis competition, in collaboration with Under the Radar Magazine. The following winners were announced on Saturday 30 June 2018 at our conference Poetry and Psychoanalysis: Writing Shame, which was supported by the Forward Arts Foundation:

IOPA 'Special Prize' Winner (for mental health workers)

Cones – Louisa Campbell

Commended (in no particular order)

The first annual Psychoanalysis & Poetry competition was judged by poet and psychoanalyst Beatrice Garland. After a first degree in English Literature, she worked as a National Health Service clinician, teacher and researcher in psychological medicine at both the Tavistock Clinic and the Maudsley Hospital. She has won both the National Poetry Competition and the Strokestown International Poetry Prize, and was short-listed for the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize.

This coming weekend (9th-10th June 2017), the Institute of Psychoanalysis will be hosting a conference on poetry and psychoanalysis, focusing on ‘Creative Borders and Boundaries’. On Friday evening and throughout Saturday there will be poetry readings, lectures and discussions, with poets, academics and analysts exploring ideas around creativity, politics and consciousness across the separate, yet often complementary, worlds of poetry and psychoanalysis.

Co-organiser Susanne Lansman has talked about the motivations behind the event:

Zygmunt Bauman, who died on 9th January this year, was a renowned and widely influential sociologist, whose intellectual influences included Sigmund Freud’s body of psychoanalytic theory. Bauman lived, and suffered, through the catastrophic upheavals of the Second World War and its aftermath. Born to Jewish parents in Poznań, Poland in 1925, his family fled upon the Nazis’ invasion in 1939. The Baumans escaped to the USSR and, several years later, Bauman enlisted in the Soviet-controlled First Polish Army, as part of which he fought in several battles.

The migrant threatens us where it hurts: in the unconscious fear that there is not enough to go round, writes David Morgan

“It is always possible to bind a number of people in love as long as there are others left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness – the outsider may be different in only minor ways, but this will suffice.”

— Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents
 

In this Tedx talk, David Tuckett (a training analyst and Director of the University College London Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty) focuses on using psychoanalysis to understand behaviour in financial markets and the economy.

His book, Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Stability, opened new ways of thinking about economics and finance. He now introduces Conviction Narrative Theory (CNT).