Poet and prose writer Erica Ehrenberg started writing poetry at a young age. As she pursued a life built around this work, she felt it to be a process of self-definition — deeply influenced by, but also in contrast to her parents’ careers as psychoanalysts. When she decided to pursue psychoanalytic training herself, she discovered that being an artist and being a psychoanalyst fed each other and that the deeply creative, expressive, and relational links between the two were fundamental to her understanding of what it means to enact internal change in any context.
For this presentation she will be reading poems from her manuscript in progress, which explores intimacy, motherhood, and the body. She will also present excerpts from her paper, On Not Knowing and the Relational Location of the Self, where she asks what it means to work as a psychoanalyst in the “generative unknown,” and compares the work of poets and painters like Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Guston to Freud’s concept of the life instinct and to Winnicott’s “potential space.”
Erica Ehrenberg’s poetry and prose have appeared in numerous journals including The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, BOMB Magazine, Slate, The New Republic, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet Series, Poetry Daily, Guernica, The Bennington Review, The Mississippi Review, The Harvard Review, The Common as well as The Paris Review Podcast. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford, and a Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has taught creative writing at Stanford Continuing Studies, New York University, Storm King Art Center, and Fordham University. A recent graduate of The National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) psychoanalytic training program, Erica lives in New York City, where she is establishing a private practice, and teaches courses on the intersection of psychoanalysis, art, and literature.