Donata Puntil writes:

In this presentation I would like to focus on the link between language, identity, culture and materiality within the psychotherapeutic encounter. I will invite you to think beyond a fixed notion of language as linked to one state or one nation. Instead, we could think about language/s as something fluid and dynamic, as something always in motion, heterogeneous and complex. Something that is always becoming, never fixed, never at rest. Something that always allows space for new words to emerge to represent new realities. Drawing upon some key concepts from applied linguistics, from nomadic inquiry and from posthuman philosophy I would question the taken for granted assumption of psychotherapy as “the talking cure”. I will also try to draw some attention to what happens when multiple languages are used in therapy and how these languages might be embodied and lived through and within the therapeutic space. I will also present some vignettes for discussion.

I am a Senior Lecturer in Language and Intercultural Education at King’s College and a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist trained at the Tavistock & Portman NHS Trust and at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London. I recently have been appointed as Lecturer in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London and I also teach at the Tavistock.

I am currently struggling completing a Doctorate in Education at the Open University as part of the AHRC Project Language Acts & Worldmaking https://languageacts.org ; my research is part of the Diasporic Identities research strand of the project in which I explore language teachers’ professional identities within a nomadic, posthuman and new materialist onto-epistemological perspective.

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This event will be held on Zoom and recorded. The meeting details will be found in the emails you receive following registration.

*If you are in Edinburgh you are welcome to join us socially after the seminar to keep the conversation going. We'll be going to Doctors on Forrest Road.*

First Thursday seminar - Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry