Psychoanalytic, Buddhist, and literary works indicate a vast internal expanse for which each discipline attempts to find language. However abstract the terms for describing variations of this space may seem–the unconscious, emptiness, or Keats’ concept of “negative capability,” our psychic contact with this terrain in all cases has powerful implications for affecting how we thrive and how we suffer. 

This is a course rooted in a commitment to the paradox of exploring through language that which resists language. In bringing together Psychoanalytic, Buddhist, and literary texts, it’s not just that we now have the tools each discipline offers, but the very gaps between them become generative in themselves. 

We are excited to engage each of the elements in this course as a lens and a companion in thinking through each of the other elements. 

This is, at its heart, a writing course, a place to begin or continue an inquiry.The texts are starting points, provocations, company, support, in your own writing/clinical work

The Buddhist readings are a selection of texts, drawn from different traditions, that have been meaningful to each of us or that have specific relevance/resonance to other readings, etc. 

Through writing exercises designed in response to the readings, we will explore the forms Buddhist thought, psychoanalysis, and literature have found to approach what is both unsayable and more real even than what we call “reality.” 

The goal will be to generate creative work that emerges from this exploration, a seed for both creative and clinical work. We will share the pieces in a workshop format, along with discussion that will mine the relationship between form and content in the works we read, and in each participant’s particular voice. 

Each participant will have two opportunities to share writing in workshop sessions. 

Readings and areas of exploration will include:

• Winnicott’s Facilitating Environment and Philip Guston’s process

• Freud’s writing on free association in the Interpretation of Dreams

• Selected writings of Mark Epstein, D.W. Winnicott, Jessica Benjamin, Joyce McDougall, Donnel Stern, Christopher Bollas   

• Readings on meditation practice from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Eihei Dogen, Pema Chödrön, Koshin Paley Ellison, and such texts as the Vimalakirti Sutra, Shantideva and The Way of the Bodhisattva

• Contemplative Tending: the Zen practice of Soji as a Creative Practice

• Readings in the works of writers & artists, including Ruth Asawa, Francis Ponge, Laurie Sheck, Amina Cain, Farnoosh Fathi, Renée Gladman, Francis Ponge, Donika Kelly. Forrest Gander. 

INSTRUCTORS

Erica Ehrenberg’s poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Paris Review Podcast, BOMB Magazine, Slate, The New Republic, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet Series, Poetry Daily, Guernica, The Bennington Review, The Common and elsewhere. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford, and a Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Her psychoanalytic writing has appeared, or is forthcoming in Psychoanalytic Dialogues,Critica and Psychoanalytic Perspectives. She is currently teaching courses on the intersection of psychoanalysis and literature,and she is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.

Genine Lentine is the author of Archaeopteryx, Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model,   Mr. Worthington’s Beautiful Experiments on Splashes,  and co-author with Stanley Kunitz of The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. She received an MS in Theoretical Linguistics from Georgetown University and an MFA in Poetry from NYU. As Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco Zen Center, she curated The Expert’s Mind: Ten Interdisciplinary Talks, and Nothing is Hidden, a series of readings, screenings and artist talks. She has received fellowships from Montalvo Arts Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, University of Arizona Poetry Center, & Hedgebrook. She taught Writing and Contemporary Practice at The San Francisco Art Institute and stewarded an interdisciplinary garden space known as The Meadow. She works 1:1 with writers and artists and teaches ongoing workshops. www.geninelentine.com

HOW TO REGISTER

• Course Fee: $800

• To reserve your space, please send full fee or a deposit of $400 by May 13

• Please pay full fee by May 20

• Send payment via Zelle (preferred) or Venmo.

• Please let us know if paying in installments will be helpful.

• Cancellation Policy:

  • Course fees are non-refundable

  • In the event of cancellation before May 13, your registration fee (minus a $75 cancellation fee) will be credited toward future sessions.

  • In the event of cancellation after May 20, you will receive a credit for 1⁄2 of the course fee ($400) toward future sessions.

Explorations in Buddhist Thought, Psychoanalysis, & Literature

8 Sessions | May 20 - July 15 (no session June 17)

Wednesdays, 9-10:30 PST

8 Sessions

$800

May 20 - July 15

(no session June 17)

Wednesdays, 9-10:30 PST

Instructors

ERICA EHRENBERG has taught creative writing at NYU, Fordham, and Stanford Universities, as well as for the Stanford online continuing education program. Her poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Paris Review Podcast, Poetry Daily, The Bennington Review, the Harvard Review, Guernica, BOMB Magazine, The Common, Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, and elsewhere. Her short-form essay “On the Question of Dreaming” is forthcoming in Critica. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, she has just graduated from Psychoanalytic training at The National Institute for the Psychotherapies where she received The Educator’s Award for Outstanding Scholarly Paper. An Associate Editor at Psychoanalytic Perspectives, she will be opening a private practice this winter. 

GENINE LENTINE is the author of Archaeopteryx, Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model,   Mr. Worthington’s Beautiful Experiments on Splashes,  and, and co-author with Stanley Kunitz of The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. She received an MS in Theoretical Linguistics from Georgetown University and an MFA in Poetry from NYU. As Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco Zen Center (2009-10), she curated The Expert’s Mind: Ten Interdisciplinary Talks, and Nothing is Hidden, a series of readings, screenings and artist talks. She taught Writing and Contemporary Practice at The San Francisco Art Institute and stewarded an interdisciplinary garden space known as The Meadow. She works 1:1 with writers and artists and teaches ongoing workshops.