2021 Gradiva Award Winner
I was honored to be a recipient of the 2021 Gradiva® Award for Best Digital Media from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. These international awards are given to projects that best promote the field of psychoanalysis. It’s an award that is little known outside the realm of psychoanalysis, but in our profession it is a high honor.
The honor is shared with my colleagues Sr. Jungian analysts Linda Carter (Carpinteria), Caterina Vezolli (Milan) and Billy Brennan (Providence) in the Art and Psyche Working Group. Additionally we share the award with co-winners ARAS (the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism) for their technical collaboration in allowing us to use their web platform.
Our project ‘Art in a Time of Global Crisis: Interconnection and Companionship’ was a digital space where people could share images, connect and reflect together around a daily image at the onset of the pandemic in early 2020. This type of shared space provides a container where people can congregate around the power of images and human expression as tools to manage anxiety, stress and loneliness. Remember some of the emotions from March 2020, how confusing, frightening and adrift things may have felt? Connecting around strong archetypal imagery can provide some bounding and shared energy.
Linda, Caterina and Billy and I collaborate regularly together in the Art and Psyche Working Group where we launch projects, plan conferences like this as well as conduct scholarly work on art, healing and community.
”Gradiva, or "She who steps along", is a mythic figure created by Wilhelm Jensen as a central character in his novella Gradiva (1902).[1] The character was inspired by an existing Roman relief. She later became a prominent subject in Surrealist art after Sigmund Freud published an essay on Jensen's work.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradiva)
You can read more about Freud, Jung and the surrealists appreciation for the sculpture of Gradiva here: https://lnkd.in/gEBRD6A5
Our project ‘Art in a Time of Global Crisis: Interconnection and Companionship’ can be viewed here: https://lnkd.in/gCumhZkg
Link to NAAP and awards: https://lnkd.in/gnRbQ6SR