The alchemy of metaphor

Mahood, Katy

Abstract

In Joan Didion’s biopic ‘The Centre Will Not Hold’ there’s a moment when she speaks of seeing a five year old girl on acid in Haight Ashbury.

‘It was gold,’ she says, sharp-eyed and birdlike.

Didion knew the power of writing to transform base material, to unsettle the fundamentals.

But is finding gold the aspiration? Can stories work in a different way? What transformations might occur if they did?

In psychoanalysis, language functions as a gateway to the unconscious. Words and repetitions take on an alchemical quality. They change the substance of what is described, shifting the material to the metaphorical. It is in this currency of metaphor that creative writing offers valuable answers to the questions about what it means to be human.

Through a unique autoethnographic approach that integrates Internal Family Systems therapy, fiction and reflective writing, this presentation will give insight into how my novel Entanglement (Borough, 2018) addresses the question of subjectivity. At its heart is the idea of the ‘scattered self’ – the experience of subjectivity in a body that society reads as ‘other.’
Through an a-chronologic engagement between therapeutic and artistic outputs I will explore the alchemy of metaphor, which has the power to transform a fragmented creative writing practice into an arts-based inquiry of the scattered self.

Citation

Mahood, K. (2023, November). The alchemy of metaphor. Paper presented at Alchemy: Exploring Metaphorical Transformations and Arts-Based Research, St Anne's College, Oxford

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Alchemy: Exploring Metaphorical Transformations and Arts-Based Research
• Conference Location: St Anne's College, Oxford
• Start Date: Nov 4, 2023
• End Date: Nov 5, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jan 19, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 23, 2024
• Keywords: arts based research, subjectivity, creative writing
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11467925