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LEARNING EXCHANGE RESOURCE: Developing your creative practice to manage trauma, loss and uncertainty

This session brings practitioners and experts to ask how creative practice can support managing loss and uncertainty.




SPECIAL GUEST PROVOCATEUR - Esther Dreifuss-Kattan



“When dealing with major loss and mourning, if there is no integration through artistic expression, no idealisation of the self can take place, and instead one suffers the ‘depletion of the self by the shadow of the loss of the Other’ (Kristeva, 1989. p. 5). Giving a form through visualisation or verbalisation, however can stabilise the self and thus reestablish the narcissistic balance that had been overwhelmed by the archaic affects of trauma, illness or loss, thus initiating both an internal and external dialogue. Aesthetic expressive abilities allow the artist not only to connect to the Other, the viewer, but to reconstruct and recollect in a visual form his or her inner experiences as well.”

(Dreifuss-Kattan-Kattan, 2016. p. 2)


Esther Dreifuss-Kattan
will join us from California to talk about her book, Art and Mourning. Esther will speak about how artists have used their creativity to face and work through traumatic and painful experiences of loss. As a psychoanalyst, art therapist, and artist Estare has analysed the work of major modernist and contemporary artists and thinkers through a psychoanalytic lens.

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The structure of the morning is a bit different today due to availability of presenters…

10.00 - Acknowledgement of country & welcome, intro for the day’s run through

10.10 - Sharing practice - ceremony with Sinsa Mansell and revisitings with Simon Spain

10.50 Break off rooms

11.00 Provocation from guest - Esther Dreifuss-Kattan -

12.00 break

12.15 Break into chat rooms for discussions about provocations

12.45 wrap and ArTELIER business - next session etc…

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Dr. Esther Dreifuss-Kattan is a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and art therapist in private practice in Beverly Hills, California. Dr. Esther Dreifuss-Kattan was President of the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles from 2016-2018. She works with adults of all ages, adolescents and children. Given Dr. Dreifuss-Kattan’s own artistic background, she specializes in helping clients who are involved in various creative pursuits and/or who work in the entertainment industry and the art world: film, television, music, visual arts, fashion, talent agents, academics, and those in public relations.

Dr. Dreifuss-Kattan’s second specialty is working with adult and pediatric cancer patients/survivors and their families as well as those with chronic pain.  In addition to her private practice, she also works extensively with Los Angeles-based organizations devoted to treating those with illness.  She is part of the team at Chai Lifeline West Coast, a non-profit organization that helps families who have a child with cancer. She is clinical consultant to the Pediatric Pain and Comfort Care Program at UCLA and Whole Child LA and a Group Facilitator/Clinical Specialist at the Hematology/Oncology Department at the David Geffen School of Medicine where she leads the “The Healing Arts Group” for the Simms/Mann UCLA Center for Integrative Oncology.

Dr. Dreifuss-Kattan also works with mature adults as they embark on retirement, set new personal and professional goals, and find continuedcreative inspiration. Dreifuss-Kattan also leads an Art Healing and Empowerment Workshop for women who are immigrants from Mexico through the Mar Vista Family Center in Los Angeles.

Dr. Dreifuss-Kattan is currently a senior faculty member at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. She has taught at UCLA Extension in the Health Sciences and Visual Arts departments, at Tel-Aviv University in Israel in the Clinical Psychology Graduate School, and at the Extension Program of Zurich University in Switzerland.  Her published books and articles center on clinical practice and theory in psychoanalysis  on Art Therapyand Psychooncology. She lectures nationally and internationally.

She received her PhD in Psychoanalysis from the Southern California Institute of Psychoanalysis, now the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, and earned another PhD in Art Therapy and Psychooncology from the Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

She is registered with the California Medical Board as a Research Psychoanalyst. RP-58, and credentialed as an ATCB art therapist with the American Art Therapy Credentials Board.

She is a member of the American Psychoanalytic and the International Psychoanalytic Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Art Therapy Association. 

Dr. Esther Dreifuss-Kattan speaks fluent English and German, as well as conversational French and Hebrew. 

EXTRAS:

You might want to listen to this CAT podcast before the session..

In this episode of What are you looking at? we talk to Reserved for Healing artist Michelle Maynard and Head of Indigenous Engagement and Strategy at MAAS, Marcus Hughes about cultural and artistic practice and the non-linear path of healing.

Reserved for Healing was an exhibition at Contemporary Art Tasmania exploring intergenerational knowledge and cultural exchange in Lutruwita/Tasmania, featuring Mae Ganambarr, Jack Langford, Kaninna Langford, Ruth Langford, Josie Mason, Warren Mason and Michelle Maynard.

The Reserved for Healing program focused on expanding the ambition of cultural production for Tasmanian Aboriginal artists and was developed through CAT and walantanalinany palingina (WaPa) working with support from the Australia Council’s Chosen initiative. WaPa and CAT partner on building capacity for delivering the First Nations festival, WaPa 22Ten22.

https://soundcloud.com/whatareyoulookingat-3/s06e01-reserved-for-healing?in=whatareyoulookingat-3/sets/what-are-you-looking-at-4

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