Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and the Arts Program

Chair: Rosa Aurora Chavez, MD, PhD

The Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia metropolitan area is home to a culturally and intellectually vibrant community, including museums and galleries; theater, dance, and music performances; international cinema festivals; culinary arts; writers, artists, academics, and psychoanalysts.

The program aims to facilitate dialogue among artists, psychoanalysts, and the community; enhance understanding of the intrapsychic and interpersonal processes that make creativity and art possible; and explore how art can expand and deepen the understanding of psychoanalysis while enriching professional practice and everyday life.

For years, the Theater Program offered post-show discussions following plays in the Washington, DC, area. Psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and scholars engaged in conversations with performers, directors, writers, production teams, and audiences.

The expanded program encompasses all the arts and includes:

• Post-performance conversation panels covering theater, music, dance, visual and plastic arts, film, poetry, literature, culinary arts, martial arts, and other artistic forms.
• Action seminars addressing psychoanalytic theories related to artistic fields and the creative process.
• Development of program strategies.
• Planning and implementation of events.
• Fundraising.

Through these activities, the program seeks to enrich the understanding and appreciation of art from psychoanalytic perspectives while remaining open to the ways art can broaden psychoanalytic understanding and enrich practices and lives.

Advisory Team

• Marshall Alcorn, PhD — Literature Advisor
• Johanna Arenaza, PsyD — Dance Advisor
• Bernard Arons, MD — Music Advisor
• Robert Fenton, MSW — Theater Advisor
• Joanne Gold, MA, MSW, MAEd — Arts and Aesthetics Advisor
• Silvana Kaufman, MSW — Film Advisor
• David Miller, MD — Visual Arts Advisor