“Bullets don’t just travel through skin and bone. They travel through time.”

These words were tattooed onto the shoulder of a young woman whose father was shot during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland.

This workshop series is an opportunity to work with the wrenching, but also binding truth that trauma plays out over time, including between generations. Experiences that happen to a family, to a society, and to organisations intimately link these units with larger contexts of history and culture.

Etymologically, trauma is a wound to an organism, a puncturing of the physical, but also the psychological, “skin” or boundary that protects the inside from the outside.  When Freud took up the study of trauma, he described the “protective shield” parents provide for children.  What makes a psychological wound traumatic is that the events leading to it are extremely powerful, existentially threatening to the core self, and happen suddenly, in a way that breaches the person’s now internalized protective shield against massive overstimulation.  The capacity for thought and even for feeling is overwhelmed.  Instead, trauma leads to a reflexive effort to cut oneself off from the unbearable.  A broader definition of trauma would also recognize the debilitating effects of cumulative traumatic stress over time, leading to sustained, self-protective warping of a person’s development, to chronic self-destructive efforts at dulling the pain, and to actions that might very well traumatize others.

Drawing on his new book, ‘Traveling through Time’ Jerry Fromm and his colleague Richard Morgan-Jones will facilitate a series of six 90-minute workshop sessions comprising experience-based learning, reflection on experience and seminar presentation.

Participants will:

• explore the Nature of trauma,
• engage in (Im)possible dialogues, which may be between parts of the self, between groups or between generations, and the way in which trauma shapes large group identity, and
• contemplate Creative innovations and new beginnings, through the establishment of potential space and some of the dynamics that occur within it.

The experiential elements of the workshops will utilise the ‘Trilogy Matrix Event’, a method developed by Richard Morgan-Jones that offers a potential integration of perspectives from across individual, group and contextual dynamics.

This series will examine the idea of the unconscious from its beginnings in the work of Fredrik Schelling – a German philosopher of the Romantic period – through Psychoanalysis and Socioanalysis – to current views of the unconscious in neuro-psychoanalysis and eco-semiotics. The concept of the unconscious has endured through different iterations and has influenced not only clinicians and therapists, but also philosophers, scientists, artists, social scientists and authors. It has seeped into contemporary and popular language and influences the ways in which we see ourselves and each other.

In the series we will approach the many and varied conceptions of the unconscious through short lectures, recommended readings and discussions. The reading is recommended but not essential for attendance.

The sessions are led by Professor Susan Long who has studied ideas in unconscious dynamics for over 40 years.