This special event organized by the TPS Extension Committee consists of two parts: a paper and a workshop. The paper asks, “What does poetry offer psychoanalysis?” (50 minutes plus discussion). The workshop builds on the themes discussed in the paper, responding to the question posed by W. R. Bion, “What kind of poets and artists can we [psychoanalysts] be?” During the workshop, participants will learn about the medieval practice of versiprose through an exercise that transforms a patient’s linear prose into poetic form. This method creates various pathways for exploring the affective states presented by the patient (1:45 hours).

The workshop will consist of two sections. In the first section (A), we will focus on the patient’s prose, which includes three short paragraphs provided by the presenter. In the second section (B), we will work on prose (transcript) submitted by one or more of the participants. The transcript should be limited to two or three short paragraphs selected from an exchange between the patient and analyst during a session.

This workshop engages participants in exploring the problem of the patient’s fixed, successive and continuous narrative by evoking, through verse, the simultaneity of the primary process using versiprose to break away from the bounded and confined signification of the patient’s secondary process, seeking to bring forth what Jean-François Lyotard called the “affective phrase”—the libidinal “voice” that lies at the heart of the psychoanalytic session.

Agenda

9:30-10:30 am – Paper
10:30-11:20 am – Discussion
11:20-11:30 am – Workshop explanation
11:30-12:00 pm – Lunch break
12:00-2:00 pm – Workshop

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this course, participants will be able:

1. To create an opportunity to play and experience your creativity with the associative-dissociative chain of the patient’s signifiers.
2. To experience the analytic session as a draft-poem that offers us a complex inner architecture that changes over time and can be looked at from many angles.
3. To consider the psychoanalytic process as a specific kind of poem-thought, to bring attentiveness to “sound sense”, the non-linearity of time.

Cecilia Taiana, PhD

Cecilia Taiana, PhD, is a psychoanalyst in Ottawa, Canada. In 2024, she conducted a workshop for psychoanalysts and candidates at the Psychoanalytische Institut Berlin (PaIB), introducing the medieval practice of versiprose—substituting prose with verse—and exploring its application in psychoanalytic sessions by transforming session prose into poetic form. Her most recent articles, part of a trilogy, are “What does poetry offer psychoanalysis? Robert Frost’s Sound Sense,” CJP, Spring 2022, and “T S. Eliot’s Concept of Tradition,” CJP, Fall 2022. The third article is, “Wallace Stevens, Connoisseur of Chaos, and his notion of Motion,” was also published in the CJP, Spring 2025 and “’Day’s Residues’: One Vertex among Multiple Vertices,” August 2022, in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. For two of her previous articles, she received the Dr. Douglas Levin Prize (2014) and the Dr. Miguel Prados Prize (2017), awarded by the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. Currently, Cecilia is writing an article on artificial intelligence and psychoanalysis.