Winnicott saw psychotherapy as founded in the capacity to play. What if we tried to create a playful space for freeing the imagination - in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms a becoming-child, finding the youthfulness of every age in the service of a psychosocial imagining of a different future?

Principles

The principles we wish to draw from for this experimental process are inspired by well-known psychoanalytic concepts from Freud, Winnicott and Bion:

The use of free association

Creating a transitional space where play, imagination and creativity can be fostered

Holding a tension between knowing and not knowing

Holding a tension between past, present and future

Ways of working-process and timings

A host to introduce and hold the frame

Working in tables of 4-6 guests

Triggers and timings and props to be available on each table

Paper on each table for guests to write notes

Maximum number of convivial guests: 20

Working together to free associate and use our imagination in relation to the following two triggers:

What if we started from the idea of a universal nonbelonging, rather than inclusion?

What if we acknowledged our own enjoyment of in-group and out-group dynamics?