Walt Disney as a prompter

The title of this workshop is inspired by Murray Cox’s seminal book Shakespeare as a Prompter, where the author explores the poetic language of the Bard as a tool to understand both the client’s inner conflicts and the processes of transformation occurring in the course of therapy. I am far from suggesting a parallel between a poetic genius and what has turned out to be a multinational of entertainment. However, it is a fact that for nearly a century Disney’s films have gained a particular place in our collective imagination. This happened for many reasons: the symbolic value of characters and plots, often charged with archetypical resonances; the interplay of shared emotions and feeling, focussed through a skilled use of narrative and visual techniques; the mode of expression and fantasy akin to children’s world view. Whether all this depends on refined market strategies or on actual artistic abilities, it is not the point; the important fact is that these works speak to us. They can provide a screen into which we can project parts of our internal world.

The workshop is aimed at exploring characters, stories and images from Disney’s films, considering how they affected us in our youth, and reworking them creatively in the group. This will enable us to frame at a safe distance our ways of being in the world, sharing them with the others and building together new symbols and transformation tools.