The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin

Arwen Curry, Discussant Janie Riley, MFT

Friday Mar 7, 6:30 PM – 9:00 PM

2nd Fridays

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is a feature documentary exploring the remarkable life and legacy of the late feminist author Ursula K. Le Guin, best known for her groundbreaking science fiction and fantasy works such as A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed. Produced with Le Guin’s participation over the course of a decade, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is a journey through the writer’s career and her worlds, both real and fantastic. Le Guin’s father was a psychoanalyst and anthropologist and her mother was a writer. Le Guin expanded their legacy to create fictional worlds that offered a startling and expansive way to envision multiple social realities, upending dominant paradigms such as capitalism and patriarchy. Le Guin explored themes of the imagination, dependency, difference, gender, class, and the development of self in the unconscious world. Arwen Curry, the director of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin will lead us on an exploration of Le Guin’s multitude of ideas, creative visions, and her role as an inspirational voice for writers and thinkers that have followed her. She will be joined by Janie Riley who link these ideas to psychoanalytic inquiries.

CE Credits offered: 2

Course Objectives

After completing this course participants will be able to:

1. List elements in Le Guin’s thinking that explore ideas related to the development of the imagination and one’s ability to envision multiple social realities, identities and ontologies; and compare and contrast her thinking to psychoanalytic ideas and therapeutics.
2. Describe Le Guin’s process of shifting her unconscious, socially-driven gender biases and related psychological dependencies; and how the literary criticism of her fictional works, those of hers which nonetheless exposed and questioned patriarchal, classist and rigid gender-binary structures, influenced her personally and professionally.
3. Represent examples of how Le Guin uses her characters and fictional worlds to draw the reader to consider and grapple with paradoxical social and personal realities without offering easy answers; and compare these creative processes with psychoanalytic ideas and concepts.

db.pincsf.org/events – 415-288-4050 — 530 Bush St, Suite 703, SF CA USA — pincsf@gmail.com

The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. PINC maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Visit db.pincsf.org/policies for policies and disclaimers.