Writing on the Moon

This innovative book offers a collection of creative writings by psychotherapists - poems, short stories, and creative non-fiction. Thethemes tap into our most passionate and spontaneous selves, raiding the inarticulate, as we hear the creative voices of psychotherapists as never before. Two questions are implicitly addressed: Why is creativity important to psychoanalysis? And how can a therapist's analytic mind be receptive to the artistic voice?Writing on the Moon: Stories and Poetry from the Creative Unconscious by Psychoanalysts and Others is a collection of the best works published over the past fifteen years in the Creative Literary Section of Psychoanalytic Perspectives, along with imaginative introductions by literary editor Bonnie Zindel.Some writings are raw and honest, some are dark and access our primal being. Others, filled with beauty, illuminate the internal life, the playful mind, and unconscious doodlings that might otherwise remain unformulated. The work is not scholarly or polite. Creativity has long fascinated psychoanalysis, from Freud's studies of Michelangelo and Leonardo, to Marion Milner's interest in artists and analysts. Plato called creativity "divine madness."The book's contributors include Robert Stolorow, Thomas Ogden, and D.W Winnicott, and submissions came from as far as South Africa, Australia, England, France, Israel, and the United States - offering a glimpse into the private world of psychotherapists, who hold so much in their work with patients. In the romance between poetry, stories, and psychoanalysis, the book exalts the rich soil of our originality and imagination -- and raises the question: Why is creativity important in psychoanalysis?

Bonnie Zindel, LCSW, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York, and a faculty, supervisor, and training analyst at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. A founding editor and Creative Literary Editor of 'Psychoanalytic Perspectives', she is the author of numerous articles on creativity. Bonnie is a former member of the Actors Studio Playwrights Unit and has conducted writing groups for psychoanalysts for over twenty years, as well as writing workshops at international conferences in Rome, Madrid and San Francisco.