LITERATURE + LECTURES

The Jung Center of Houston presents Everyone's a Poet: How Our Intrinsic Biology and Psychology Summon Us to Poetry. Physician and poet Michael Lieberman explores the fundamental human capacity, and need, for metaphor and poetry. Tuesdays, Sept 20 & 27, 5:45 - 7:15 pm.

Our lives are filled with poetry, and yet we often fail to recognize it. Metaphor is everywhere from the Ford Mustang to the Hyundai Sonata. We will investigate the origins of poetry and how its very ubiquity obscures its presence.

Lecture one will examine evidence from neurobiology and evolutionary biology, which places the origins of poetry deep within the mammalian brain and our evolutionary past. The archeological record and our oldest written texts suggest poetry has been with us for at least fifty thousand years. Poetry is seen as an essential human activity.

Lecture two will examine the evidence that the collective unconscious, as Jung conjectured, is anchored in our primate past. Inborn needs for the mother, the shock of separation, and the hero/wanderer are examples of how archetypal processes stem from biology and are expressed unconsciously in our poetry.

These lectures are designed for a general audience and will use non-technical language.

Michael Lieberman is a research physician with a PhD in biochemistry who has published five collections of poems, the most recent of which is Far-From-Equilibrium Conditions. His first novel will appear next year. He has also completed a two-year cycle of courses in Jungian Studies jointly offered by Saybrook University (San Francisco) and The Jung Center.