I will be presenting this paper, Sorry Polly, Women’s Law Still Touches Me, as part of the Two Way Learning Webinar Series offered by Australian Institute for Psychoanalysis.
The title of my paper centres on an incident where I became ill after inadvertently watching a sacred woman’s dance. I was then healed by the women performing another dance. One result, captured by Polly’s comment, was that I was now immune from women’s Law, it could not touch me.
To the contrary, my experiences in Aboriginal Australia have touched me deeply. For nearly forty years, I have struggled with how these experiences sit with my western upbringing.
Referring to the work of Winnicott, Bion and Ogden, I explore the possibility of a communication between psychotherapy and Indigenous cosmology.