James Joyce Foundation, Australia - News and Notices

The 6th World Congress for Psychotherapy (WCP2011)
will be held in Sydney, Australia from 24-28 August, 2011

The Congress will feature internationally renowned psychotherapists, representing different fields of psychotherapy, counselling, and related disciplines. A number of oral and poster presentations, invited symposia and workshops are currently being planned for the Congress.

Memory as a Biological Imperative in Story Telling
presented by Clara Mason

Story telling holds the fabric of spiritual life for many ancient cultures. These oral tradition where the enduring quality of sacred narratives is dependant on memory as a living process of re-imagining to revivify these stories by the new voices of each generation forms the bases of retaining a primal connection to the world. It is the antitheses of religious abstraction.

This paper will endeavour to bridge this ancient wisdom with the work of neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman who states that Memory ‘underlies the mind and indeed all of biology’. His concept of a ‘remembered present ‘ shows how novelty necessitates continual recategorization using reentrant circuitry in the human brain.

Edelman’s comprehensive biological theory of the mind provides a fascinating link to the most significant storyteller of our time, James Joyce.

Joyce was blatant in his confrontation of René Descartes's dichotomy between mind and body. "If they had no body they would have no mind," said Joyce who was especially interested in Giambattista Vico's (1668-1744) notion that "memory is the same as imagination" and Vico’s assertion that Poetry is the primary form of the mind, prior to intellect and free from reflection and reasoning. The scope for ‘tripping the light fantastic’ a form of dreaming, in human interaction, may have its own validity in facilitating memory as a dynamic to restructure the past. There may be a lack of fluidity in working towards coherent rational integration that reflects our regard for intellect above the creative imagination and this may indeed stifle a more radical restructuring with memory as poet.