Psychoanalytic Poetry Festival 2015: The Creative Unconscious

The Poetry Society and the Freud Museum present an all-day event examining the creative unconscious, with leading speakers from the worlds of poetry, academia and psychoanalysis.

SESSION 2

Maurice Riordan - George, Call the Sheriff: Yeats and the Unruly

Yeats understood his poetry was equestrian. It was the exercise of skill and control over the vitality of the unconscious in the struggle to govern the dreamlife of the body and its desires. This talk explores the force of the unconscious in Yeats’s life, including some of its more amusing manifestations, as well as emphasizing the quasi-violent tension between order and lawlessness in the great poems.

Beatrice Garland in conversation with Ron Britton

Dr Ronald Britton talks with Beatrice Garland about the parallel lives that being both a poet and a psychoanalyst involves. She talks about the influence her two analyses, and her subsequent work as an analyst, has had upon her capacity to write; and reads a selection of poems that derive from unconscious mental process. How, coming from a distinguished scientific background, and in the face of some opposition from the parental generation, does one become both a psychoanalyst and a poet?