Psychosocial Studies and Journal of Psychosocial Studies Online Reading Reading Group: On not being able to read

Myna Trustram

Please join us for our monthly online reading groups where we will be coming together and discussing topical psychosocial articles. This month we are incredibly lucky to have Myna Trustram present her essay “On not being able to read” published by the Journal of Psychosocial Studies.

The essay can be accessed and download free of charge by clicking here

Abstract:

This experimental essay sets out an imaginative and cognitive space in which I might explore my bizarre and troubling experience of not being able to read. I open a book that I suspect will reveal things I want to know and I am unable to go beyond a few paragraphs. It is not due to a lack of time or dyslexia; it is about the emotional world that I enter when I read.

The essay is not a flowing narrative because my mind does not think in that way about the problem; rather, it is a collection of notes for an unthought work. This is, actually, how I read – never quite going all the way. I write the essay not to solve the problem but to see if I can make something of it, which means encountering it and so feeling it all the more.

All registered attendees should automatically be sent a Zoom link. The link will be re-sent the day of the event.

Author biography:

Myna Trustram worked in England for many years as a historian, museum curator and academic. In 2021 she stopped paid work and now focuses on being a writer. Myna writes short experimental essays in which she calls upon literary and academic forms to consider themes such as mourning, childhood, separation and emptiness. Myna has publications in Victorian social history, museum studies and now this more adventurous form that calls upon psychoanalysis and the psychosocial.

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