EXPLORING WHERE POETRY AND THERAPY INTERSECT: TWO WORKSHOPS DELIVERED BY DIANA HEDGES AND REAMONN O'DONNCHADHA, POETRYREACH, MAYNOOTH, COUNTY KILDARE, IRELAND, 23 MARCH 2013

摘要

PoetryReach offers training in Ireland to accredited therapists wishing to explore clinical use of poetry, and non-therapists wishing to use poetry devel-opmentally with clients. We do not train therapists as such. We run a peer group, workshops and September international convention.The purpose of Poetry Reach's spring event is to set poetry therapy (PT) within a broader context and to address our concern to stay abreast of contemporary trends in the arts in healthcare field. The intended audience is our trainees, followers and those interested in or curious about PT.The morning workshop was delivered by Diana Hedges who stressed concepts and ideas rather than theory. She spoke of the flood of new thinking that filled the moral vacuum caused by Darwin in 1913: Marx's challenge to capitalism; Freud's theory that we weren't in charge of our own destiny because human behaviour was motivated by unconscious insights and subject to psychic anxiety and dimly understood behaviour patterns; in the arts, rhyme being challenged, Ibsen, Joyce and Elliot's disturbing commentary on individual motivation and behaviour, Hitchcock's cinema made on these themes and Stravinsky shocking the Parisian art-world with his controversial ballet The Rites of Spring. Psychological theory aimed to explain stages of development, offering Behaviourism, the idea that everything is learned by stimulus and can be unlearned by reprograrnming. But Freud posited a new awareness of connections and influences, a psyche unavailable to conscious thought, governed by the Oedipus complex, not seen as evil but as explainable. Jung challenged Freud's leader orthodoxy and stressed the significance of dreams. As opposed to Freud's description of our dark side, unhappiness, dysfunction and neurosis, Carl Rogers stressed the positive.