The first piece in this two-part series is here.
What will philosophy say to us? It will say: “We must think the event.” We must think the exception. We must know what we have to say about that which is not ordinary. We must think change in life.
—Alain Badiou, Polemics (2006, p. 8)
Just as Badiou rejected what he calls subjective phenomenology, following his work, I criticized what I call “trauma psychiatry.” While Badiou holds that philosophy must be reckless, psychiatry as both Nietzsche and Jaspers brilliantly pointed out must be prudent and balanced, in the spirit of the Greeks’ sophrosyne. The psychiatrist needs to be methodologically up-to-date, a good communicator, attentive and empathic, and a role model, Nietzsche recommended. This is not enough, he must acquire the skills of “every other profession” (Nietzsche, cited by Jaspers, 1997). Clearly, something stands apart from the requirements (conditions) and skills and that is the core of psychiatry. For Jaspers (1997, p. 808), a psychiatrist who turned to philosophy, that was a combination of “scientific attitudes of the sceptic with a powerful personality and a profound existential faith.” Another physician-philosopher, William James (1890), referred to a similar duality of tough-minded empiricism and tender-minded rationalism.
Integrating the balance that psychiatrists need in practice with the boldness that Badiou calls for in philosophy, I called for an evental psychiatry in my doctoral dissertation (Di Nicola, 2012). The first fruits of this project are on a broader canvas, a course on psychiatry and the humanities which we pioneered at the University of Montreal (see my previous APA blog), and in more detailed form, presentations in various fora and two chapters: “Two trauma communities” which discerns a critical tension between clinical and cultural views of trauma (Di Nicola, in press, b) and “Pedagogy of the Event,” analyzing medical and psychiatric education in light of Badiou’s theory of the event (Di Nicola, in press, a). A more complete statement of my evolving project is available online: “Slow Thought: A Manifesto for a Psychiatry of the Event” (Di Nicola, 2014).
An Evental Psychiatry of the Threshold
Evental psychiatry describes a psychiatry that would be singular, radically contingent, inherently unstable and unpredictable. A psychiatry that is irreducible to categories and essences, open to what Badiou calls in French novation. Evental psychiatry works at the site where singularity can exist, novelty comes into being, and change may occur (developed in my doctoral dissertation with Badiou, Di Nicola, 2012).
I anticipated the event in psychiatry by describing the predicament (Di Nicola, 1997) as an alternative to categorical diagnosis. The predicament is unstable, unpredictable, pregnant, and morally charged. The predicament is not the event, but it is akin to Badiou’s notion of the evental site. The predicament occurs in a moment of rupture—it could open possibilities and thus become an event which the faithful subject maintains. While a predicament is not trauma or traumatizing per se, mishandling a predicament could trigger trauma.
An evental psychiatry would deal with threshold people in liminal situations—crossing over, arriving and departing, émigrés, immigrants, refugees of all sorts, people “betwixt and between,” in transitional states (Di Nicola, 1997), what philosopher Thomas Nail describes in his seminal work on the migrant and the border (2015, 2016). Not trauma psychiatry, that has categorized stress and trauma with the notion of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but a psychiatry concerned with “orphan cases” that addresses the liminality arising from predicaments and the threshold people it creates. People caught between subjectivation (the theme of Foucault’s work) and desubjectivation (the thread through Agamben’s work that connects him to Foucault). Albert Camus’ étranger was such a person as was Robert Musil’s “man without qualities.” Samuel Beckett’s characters are such people: “We can’t go on, we must go on.” Walter Benjamin was himself such a person and I sense a kind of wistful self-recognition in his portrait of “porosity” in Naples (Benjamin and Lacis, 2007). What is porosity in a city is reflected in the liminality of its denizens. And it is possible to imagine this more positively than Agamben’s (2005) “state of exception.” Like Simone Weil, who was rapturous about being displaced and counseled that one should uproot the tree of one’s life to make a cross of it, there is no “here” for such people, torn between affiliation and uprooting. The Canadian sensibility—dispersed among the Native Peoples, “the founding races,” and the rest of us—was framed by Northrop Frye (1995, p. 220) not as who we are but, “Where is here?”
The categorical system of psychiatry demands definitions for “caseness” with criteria for inclusion and exclusion—“brackets” in our jargon—which create boundaries, regardless of construct validity or even face validity, and the creation of “orphan cases” that do not easily fall within the boundaries. This creates the pseudo-problems of “comorbidity” and “complexity.” The complexity recognized by such a system is not the complexity of lived human experience or even the attempt to understand it but rather the complexity of shoehorning experience into categories. What falls in between or among defined categories is explained away by comorbidity (“fleas and lice”, as they say in internal medicine), leading to “complexity” and ultimately to “orphan cases.” The most common diagnosis within each diagnostic group is “NOS,” Not Otherwise Specified. That creates a lot of orphan cases for a system whose major goal is a coherent and reliable diagnostic system.
Hence the study of orphan cases is always a challenge for diagnostic systems, categorical thinking and typologies of all kinds. Orphan cases in medicine and psychiatry are what the state of exception is to political theory, and for analogous reasons, just as the exception becomes the norm, orphan cases force the creation of new categories or new ways of thinking. Orphan cases create a rupture in established systems of thought.
Categorical psychiatry becomes obsessed with measurement and with questions of reliability: inter-rater and intra-rater reliability (across raters and across time) and predictability. An evental psychiatry is more concerned with truth procedures and with questions of validity—not if it is measurable and repeatable but whether it is valid and true.
Rupture versus Continuity
Most definitions of mental health revolve around emotional stability and social functionality but these are at odds with the event. To be stable and functional by ordinary measures means to avoid ruptures, events, and the radical reorganization they engender. The entire subtext of DSM psychiatry is that health is continuity, translated as functionality and adaptation. “Life events” or stressors are ruptures that create, minimally, transitory “adjustment disorders” or more serious “mental disorders.” In evental psychiatry, rupture is the prerequisite for the possibility of event. So-called “life events”—the incidents and interruptions of normal life we call stressors—are necessary precursors to events.
One of the implications is that diagnosis as we currently understand and use this notion would not be a fundamental part of an evental psychiatry. None of the challenges to academic psychiatry concurs with its nosography. In fact, that is the first practical impact of every new theory. Pavlovian psychiatry had a radically different approach to psychiatric diagnosis, as did behaviorism based on learning theory and systemic family therapy. Except in the synthesis called psychodynamic psychiatry, psychoanalysis and academic psychiatry also have different and, since DSM-III, incompatible diagnostic schemas. A nosography based on neuroscience would also reconfigure what academic psychiatry considers the core phenomenology of psychopathology.
Discourse Therapy
Evental psychiatry’s therapy would be a kind of “Ideology Therapy” as a form of discourse analysis. Any form of “talk therapy” deals directly with ideology. This is evident not only in the sense that it deploys ideology as part of its method or technique and not only because the non-intended effects work through expectations and other unintended or unannounced influences but because it directly addresses beliefs, perceptions, motivations, ways of perceiving and understanding experience.
In classical psychoanalysis, for example, interpretations shape the patient’s understanding (insight) of their experience by analyzing defense mechanisms (already an interpretation of human experience). In cognitive therapy, cognitive schemas are posited (already a theory of mind) about how the individual perceives the world and his own experience and schemas are confronted, shaped and changes to schemas are recommended. As a clinician, I often question this in practice, which is to say, theory aside, clinicians easily misunderstand their patients. As the old joke goes, even paranoids have real enemies. It is intriguing that Lacan saw “philosophical systematization as akin to paranoia” (Badiou, 2011, p. 64). The psychoanalytic notion that everything is analyzable, that all is grist for the mill and that there are no accidents, slips or lapsi, in short, that there is no contingency in the psychoanalytic world-view is hermetic and slightly paranoid. In practice, psychoanalytic interpretations have more than a little of the paranoid as a stance. Perhaps any form of systematization runs the risk of being a hermetic system that is suspicious of alterity and change. This has been a key charge against psychoanalysis from the beginning, expressed with cynical humor by Karl Kraus, (“Psychoanalysis is that disease which considers itself its own cure”) and with sustained and pertinent critiques from philosophers of science and scientists. The most notable of the sustained critiques was by philosopher Karl Popper who established different truth procedures, falsifiability and verifiability, as standards for science and this has been echoed by philosopher-scientists like Mario Bunge and scientists like Peter Medawar. My answer to this is uncomplicated: psychoanalysis is not a scientific procedure. It is, in Badiou’s schema, a different truth procedure; specifically, that of love. Psychoanalysis is neither science nor philosophy but something new. Just as it cannot suture philosophy, psychoanalysis cannot be sutured to science or psychiatry.
Foucault (1972) described discourses as systems of thought that systematically form the subjects and the worlds of which they speak. Unlike Wittgenstein’s ladder, you cannot throw away the discourse or apparatus after you have used it. There is no illusion here that we can bracket it out or rid ourselves somehow of ideology. To do philosophy or therapy à la Foucault or Agamben would mean precisely to keep all the ladders and other apparatuses around us in plain view so we know how we got to where we are. In other words, we should eschew illusions. It is like theatre without the fourth wall. There is no recourse to hidden discourses, no “magic bullet” and no philosopher’s stone.
Evental Analysis
Such a therapy would tend towards a flattening of the hierarchy of knowledge and power, as Foucault construed it. The face-to-face encounter that Levinas described can never be altogether symmetrical but we identify the asymmetry as much as possible and negotiate the differences. Psychoanalysis is being conceived more and more as a “bipersonal field” and so much work is going on in this field that Werner Bohleber (2010) refers to an intersubjective turn.
An analysis of subjectivation, desubjectivation and resubjectivation following the models of Foucault and Agamben would be valuable. And of course, an analysis of subjectizable bodies following Badiou’s (2011) schema. The kind of philosophical archaeology that Foucault and Agamben have conducted must be conducted for each person’s predicament. Discourse therapy would examine the nested hegemonies that lie side by side, one obscuring the other, one justifying the other sometimes. Often, they are buried, like landmines, and our task is to locate them, map them, and either avoid them or disarm them.
Evental analysis or discourse therapy would apply what I dubbed Badiou’s shears to clarify the task of therapy, unsuturing psychiatry from its conditions. Then, one would do an evental analysis of the person’s world: the evental site, the type of subjectizable body, what processes are in place. An evaluation of the person’s porosity, her capacity for novation would be valuable, along with the extent to which trauma interferes with that porosity.
Let me elaborate with one detailed example. The way psychoanalysis explains its own functioning can be enhanced using evental analysis. Insight, the goal of psychoanalysis, requires fidelity. A rupture occurs in the analysand’s understanding of herself, then a reorganization follows that insight. James Joyce, who was influenced by Freud through the first Italian psychoanalyst, Edoardo Weiss, called this an epiphany. Joyce’s epiphany is Freud’s insight and may be understood as something that occurs in the evental site, which I call a predicament. The epiphany or insight is a response to the predicament. We could go so far as to say that the predicament, the evental site, is a necessary condition for insight. Only a cut, a tear in the world can create the acute sense of a rupture that requires a response. Once the analysand has her epiphany, thoughts, actions and feelings are at first interpreted, and later experienced, differently. For this translation from interpretation to insight to new experience to occur, a deep fidelity must accompany the procedure.
As with Badiou’s theory of the event, real change cannot occur without fidelity. Fidelity is what binds the insight into a world. The psychoanalytic event is insight. But any analyst can relate anecdotes of pseudo-insights, passing insights (“truths-of-the-moment”), insights that merely mimic the analyst’s worldview (transference), without being understood, integrated and lived with fidelity. Genuine healing can only come with this more complete insight—embodied, enacted insight that emerges from the analytic relationship. Healing in this sense is not operational or instrumental change, nor is it merely symptomatic relief. This reflection addresses one of the most difficult questions in any kind of therapy: how to maintain the gains, however defined. We need Badiou’s theory of the event because psychiatry needs a theory of change: how novation comes into the world and how to live with that change.
Conclusion: A New Opening
After radically redefining clinical psychiatry by introducing the phenomenological method, Karl Jaspers promptly left clinical practice, leaving others to work out the implications for psychiatry. Turning to philosophy, Jaspers brought to philosophical puzzles the insights of psychiatry. For example, Hannah Arendt’s (2006) famous formulation of Eichmann as “the banality of evil,” was taken from Jaspers’ correspondence with her.
In a similar gesture, after writing his Tractatus, perhaps the most famous and provocative work of philosophy of the last century, Wittgenstein (1922) concluded that he had resolved the problems of philosophy and abruptly abandoned academic philosophy even before it was published. Proving once again the wisdom of Jaspers’ admonition about philosophical hubris, Wittgenstein was to revisit the Tractatus in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) and other reflections on psychology, offering philosophy as therapy.
Badiou challenged me to confront the puzzles of contemporary psychiatry by either abandoning it or boldly announcing a new vision based on the event. Accepting Badiou’s challenge, I chose to avoid Jaspers’ and Wittgenstein’s extreme gestures. As a late-career psychiatrist and an early-career philosopher, re-visioning psychiatry through the event is a philosophical prescription for both radical change in psychiatry and firm fidelity to track it through.
What could be more critically relevant to a 21st century science of the mind and of human relations than a return to metaphysics?
Vincenzo Di Nicola
Vincenzo Di Nicola is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Montreal where he co-directs a postgraduate course on psychiatry and the humanities. He was recently elected Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, the highest honor granted to health sciences scholars in Canada. In his doctoral dissertation, "Trauma and Event: A Philosophical Archaeology", supervised by Alain Badiou at the European Graduate School, Di Nicola critically examined trauma and the negations of anti-psychiatry to declare the end of the phenomenological tradition in psychiatry and call for a psychiatry of the Event. His writing spans psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy as well as literary essays and fiction, includingA Stranger in the Family(W.W. Norton, 1997),Letters to a Young Therapist(Atropos Press, 2011),The Unsecured Present(Atropos Press, 2012), andSocial Psychiatry(Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Important ideas here professor Nicola! I’m am glad you are disseminating them. I imagine that an “evental psychiatry” would look very different from the current biomedical model and be something closer to Lacan’s vision for psychoanalysis as a singular process between analyst and analysand. This does require a philosophical overhaul — precisely the one you are calling for here.
I’m curious about one point though — Lacan very specifically did not equate psychoanalysis with love; he was interested in the desire of the analysand, which is not the same as love. So his theory was, in some sense, and attempt to clarify what desire is (temporally but also in the form or various “negative” objects, or objects of lack). What do you think these ideas mean in the terms Badiou sets up, esp. fidelity to an event?
Janina Levin
Dear Janina,
I appreciate your thoughtful reading and would like to respond in detail on every point, but …
This is not a thesis about psychoanalysis which is very engaging and requires as much renewal as psychiatry. I am addressing a new vision of psychiatry here.
And the heart of my critique of psychiatry following Badiou is that just as philosophy cannot be sutured to one of its conditions, psychiatry as a discipline cannot be sutured, reduced to, explained by, or dominated by one of its sub-disciplines. Every effort to do so in the past has been either superseded or simply left aside by the next generation. So, to give one example, community psychiatry was going to revolutionize psychiatry (especially in the 1960s to the 1980s it did get the attention of many in the field) but it did not deliver major advances, just somewhat better delivery of care than staying inside the asylum. It was a radical shift in Italy because Italian psychiatry at the time had two speeds: the shameful public asylums throughout the country and elitist psychoanalytic therapy that was inaccessible to the vast majority of Italians, or indeed of most countries. The Marxists who came of age after May 1968 in the capitals of Western Europe left psychoanalysis in droves (except in France), because it is too elitist, too expensive and too focused on the individual as the locus of mental suffering. For example, these young Marxists showed up at family therapy centres in Italy because family therapy was a response to the crisis of shutting down the asylums for communities and families. Italy and Brazil are two countries I know intimately as a psychiatrist where family therapy flourished. In spite of that, it is at best a partial response to the problems of families and communities. I still hold by it but we have to acknowledge its limits. I know, I tried to do child psychiatry, run a service, run a school and even think about literature and politics from the systemic perspective, with notable successes and important limits.
Other sub-disciplines of psychiatry have something to offer but none of them can answer the core issues of the tasks of psychiatry; they are just ways of “changing the subject” (to invoke the title of one of my favourite books by Henriques) and asking new questions.
My argument is simple: we have tried community psychiatry, we took social and transcultural psychiatry very far; we have tried to found psychiatry on psychoanalysis with such luminaries as Silvano Arieti and Otto Kernberg; family therapy had at least two geniuses – Salvador Minuchin and Mara Selvini Palazzoli – but in spite of great success, Minuchin’s structural family therapy is a dead end and mostly integrated into the common sense of family work, while Selvini Palazzoli’s systemic family therapy is still influential in Italy and the Latin world, from Portugal and Spain to France and all of Latin and South America. However, all of this is distinctly separate from mainstream academic psychiatry although many of us still practice and teach it at universities. I am not sure this will outlive my generation of psychiatrists; maybe it will be possible in other fields.
Psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychiatry were given a series of body blows in the US, but the double whammy of DSM-III in 1980 and the rise of the biopsychosocial (BPS) model effectively heralded its death knell.
I could go through all the movements but they all share the same qualities: they declare a revolution from past practice, articulate a new theory or programme, and juggle for dominance in a competitive market for health care and to some extent for academic respectability. None of them address the real issues of psychiatry and none of them can.
Psychiatry can and must use all the sub-disciplines at its disposal, from psychoanalysis to epidemiology to cognitive neuroscience. What psychiatry must not do is to suture itself to any of these as the definition of the field. Doing that is scientism and methodolatry, which reflect a technocratic temperament. A sure sign that practitioners are technocrats is when they change the name of their endeavour and they identify with a method. So Freud abandoned neuropathology as his identity to create the psychoanalytic movement; John Watson redefined psychology as behaviourism; Aaron Beck redefined psychiatry and therapy as cognitive therapy based on his method; and so on.
We don’t need any more technocrats or ideologues in psychiatry. We need people who are committed to psychiatry’s central mission. It must be clinical and not cede to sub-disciplines and it must address three core questions: establishing a coherent psychology of persons, a clear and coherent theory of psychiatry, and a theory of change.
The interest in Lacan and even Freud today is largely driven by people who are not clinicians, which is interesting. People in other fields often have much to teach us and I am nothing if not radically transdisciplinary but at the same time I would appreciate a little humility from professors of philosophy and history and anthropology that maybe, just maybe, people who spend decades training in and practising psychiatry and who can read Foucault and Lacan and Basaglia and all the others just as well as they can know something about people who suffer with mental problems. Although I feel personally respected by these colleagues, I think people basically say, you are an exception but the other psychiatrists are all wrong.
My analyst who was one of the most radical voices in psychiatry did not talk like that. Ronnie Laing never accepted the term “anti-psychiatry” coined by his colleague David Cooper. Laing declared himself an “orthodox psychiatrist,” and was adamantly and doggedly clinically-oriented, even as he fought to change the administrative and practical delivery of care for psychiatric patients.
I can do no better. I want to reclaim psychiatry as a clinical branch of medicine, with an enlarged and more broadly informed understanding of medicine, enriched by all these perspectives from neuroscience and genetics to history and literature and anthropology and theatre, that will better respond to the real nature of human psychological and relational suffering.
My thoughts about the nature of desire, which I presented at the Zizek Conference a few years ago, introducing my notion of “distributed desire” based on the distributed self, are tangentially relevant but not the heart of my concerns in addressing the crisis in contemporary psychiatry.
Thank you for triggering these necessary distinctions and clarifications, Janina!
Warm regards,
Vincenzo
I have really learned a lot from your post Vincenzo. Since I am one those people that read psychoanalysis mainly for its insights into “human nature” and not as a clinician, I understand that my perspective is flawed from that point of view. I do wonder though that if psychiatry is not sutured to any specific procedural knowledge, would it then be a species of philosophy, which is the claim Badiou makes for philosophy — that it cannot be sutured to any foundational truth processes. I don’t think though that this is what you are getting at. I think you probably mean something like — psychiatry has to redefine its own truth process.
I’m probably still a better reader of Lacan than Badiou and have to catch up there; but I see that you have your own specific application of his ideas, which is at it should be.
All my best,
Janina Levin
Thank you for the excellent observation and question, Janina.
In fact, I am modelling my approach on Badiou. Louis Althusser had called for general and regional theories. In Althusser’s schema, philosophy is a general theory and psychoanalysis is a regional one. Althusser had a famous debate with Lacan on this where the former was polite and professional and sensitive to Lacan’s sensibilities, but he was basically saying that philosophy, as the queen of sciences, is the general theory. Both Lacan and Freud are in Badiou’s schema “anti-philosophers,” meaning they privilege psychoanalysis over philosophy. (As an aside, philosophy in Badiou’s view, is ontology or metaphysics, which is why I conclude my article by hailing a return to metaphysics.)
In Badiou’s view, philosophy is the general theory and its conditions are truth procedures for generating truths. Philosophy stands above them as the arbiter. In my view, psychiatry must parallel philosophy as a discipline and recognize sub-disciplines for its tasks. Psychiatry should not be sutured to its sub-disciplines and in this way, is the privileged arbiter for what truths are recognized for the discipline. The disciplines and sub-disciplines change according to the tasks. For example, medicine is the general discipline and psychiatry is the sub-discipline. For infectious diseases, pathophysiology, biochemistry, pharmacology would be sub-disciplines. Medical anthropology would be a sub-discipline of both general anthropology and from the medical point of view, of psychiatry.
Bottom line in common parlance: the tail should not be wagging the dog! In my field, clinical psychiatry is the dog, not epidemiology, psychopharmacology, cultural psychiatry, psychoanalysis, systemic theory, global mental health, neuroscience, public health or anything else for that matter. That’s one big dog, with lots of different tails!
Warmly,
Vincenzo
Unsure if anyone has gone through such procedure successfully, and am I rude to ask, in big numbers. And whether pharmaceuticals will keep playing a role with its gross reduction of life expectancy.
Ariel,
I am not sure I understand your comment. What I am proposing is to revision psychiatry. It’s impossible to tell which new ideas will “take” in big numbers or not. Pharmaceutical companies follow opportunities, not visions.
Also, I am not sure if you are correct in saying the medications in psychiatry are associated with gross reduction of life expectancy. When SSRI use fell in England and elsewhere due to the concern that paroxetine (Paxil) increased suicidal ideation, studies have demonstrated that the youth suicide rate increased, probably because physicians withheld their use in depressed young people.
Regards,
Vincenzo Di Nicola
University of Montreal
As well, I’m a consumer. Can I non-comply and enter projected predicament – with the view to end use of pharmaceutical?
Ariel,
What do you mean by non-complying? Do you mean refusing pharmaceutical treatment in psychiatry? In Quebec, where I practice, and in Canada generally, it is extremely difficult to make people take medications that they do not wish to take. In fact, informed consent is just the start and collaborative care with the patient as a partner is our goal.
My use of the term “predicament” describes life situations that are fraught with anguish, that are unclear, with no straightforward
understanding and no obvious – and certainly no forced – solutions, that have a moral charge and demand a response because life has changed for the person involved in key ways.
You are not asking, but in case you are curious, a predicament or rupture in one’s lifeworld could mean a shutting down into more problems, even trauma, or an opening up towards other solutions, other ways of being that I call, along with the philosopher Alain Badiou, an “Event.” An Event changes everything!
Regards,
Vincenzo Di Nicola
University of Montreal
Dear Vincenzo,
After close to a year of non compliance to state polypharmacy the transformation of my life has improved for the better. Tapering off was slow.
My initial psychosis in 1996, which I keep faithful to more as historical extreme state or rupture, to keep to the language used here had to be dealt with.
Medication was for me fraught with associated iatrogenic injury. Most notably, Cardio Metabolic Syndrome.
To ameliorate predicament (I hope I’m using that term correctly), I had disengaged from state public health and my near-decade long housing instability has been finally resolved for good.
I am not familiar with objective phenomenology as Badiou coins it. What I’ve done is via use of physics as heuristic and interpretive frame, name my extremities, my rupture.
As Badiou quipped words to the effect – unfold the space that does justice to your body.
I am increasing familiar with topology and geometry, perhaps following in a contemporary Platonism.
I use semiology to name and vigiliate precipitative states. Sometimes, just awareness and naming is enough to collapse state back to a general stability. Thus minimising vigilance.
Beyond that? A poet’s synaesthesia. It’s a life.
I’ve had interesting experiences in non medicated self-care . A strong associative perceptual state to pre-medicated times, knowing full well I am 48 years old, occurs episodically.
There have been other cross modalities. Maybe in a discourse this “knowing full well” could be named a meta-perceptual state.
My poetry career is doing well. After 40 or so critical single work publications I’ve had my second chapbook critically released nationally in Australia and get odd work performing and panelling literary events and national writers’ festivals.
Am also applying to a Masters in Culture, Health and Medicine at Australian National University for their next intake.
Regards,
Ariel Riveros
Poet