How do we open to experience when we find ourselves closing down, feeling excluded, bored or resistant? What is the value of play and how do we actually do it?

Play is commonly seen as the source of personal creativity but this workshop will offer the opportunity to explore its other disruptive dimensions such as curiosity, revolt and resilience, and the testing of love.

Working from felt experience rather than theory, it is informed by the work of authors in the British Independent tradition of psychoanalysis, such as DW Winnicott,  Wilfred Bion, Christopher Bollas and other thinkers concerned with paradox of the psyche in social and the social in the psyche.

The workshop will entail working with associative techniques and creative artwork (by Eva Rothschild). It will enable participants to examine in more depth, some of themes of the Big Anxiety Forum, related to trauma, distress and our capacity to ‘have experience’.

Hosted by Noreen Giffney, psychotherapist, academic and author of  ‘The Culture Breast’ and Lynn Froggett, Professor (and player) in Psychosocial  Research, the workshop builds on their chapter ‘Knowing from the Inside’ in the book, The Big Anxiety: Taking Care of Mental Health in Time of Crisis, Bloomsbury, 2022.

Image: Bunny Shadow Dance. Photo Arnold Fang