Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

120 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
Free Associative Gifts
Edited by Marcus Price
Call for Poems
I am honoured to have been invited to be poetry editor for Contexts.
This has come about through the GASI forum discussions.
Unsurprisingly a number of us have an interest in writing and sharing
our poetry. I hope that you will feel able to send your poems so that I
can choose a few for publication in future issues. In my experience,
psychotherapists are commonly unreceptive to their patient’s poems.
These, I think, are sometimes the therapists who may not have had
their own poetry properly heard.
Every year of my secondary school we had a poetry
competition, I always came first. So thankfully my confidence was
bolstered early on. I guess some of those who were not the winners
might just have been left alone with the vulnerable feelings. That’s
why I am sceptical about the value of poetry competitions and expert
judges. A common mistake of artist’s, who run projects for patient
groups, is that they invariably find one person who gets elevated into
the special one, into whom their own creativity gets projected. I hope
you will feel brave enough to bring forward your ordinary poems and
cast aside the endemic fear of judgement.
I feel that there is a pressing need for poetry in our world and
that we as therapists and group analysts should try to set an example,
perhaps, to let slip our sometimes jargonised defences into something
more personal and meaningful. Thankfully we have found a space for
poetry and song in some of the shadow workshops, spaces which have
been enormously rewarding. It was psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden
who likened poetry reading to corpse examination, unless that is, the
poem is read aloud as a live event. Expect, therefore, in future Context
issues, to examine only a few corpses, not corpuses. It might be at a
future event that some of these will come alive.
Psychotherapy and poetry go hand in hand, so it’s not
surprising that there are some prolific poets amongst our members.
We start with some powerful poems by Elizabeta Marcos, some
sizzling and at times hysterically funny sonnets and limericks by
Derek Love and we finish with contrasting group poems by Einar
Gudmundsson and Marcus Price. I’m sure these free associative gifts
will speak to you in different ways.