The Intersection of Poetry and Jungian Analysis through the Metaphor: In Creation You are Created is a remarkable text that moves as freely through worlds and genres as its author. It is a psychology text that dives into poetry with passion and shares intimate stories of the clinical analyst’s clients. In the vein of Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ classic Women Who Run with the Wolves, here is a feminine and wholistic take on myth and metaphor in life and literature. –KFK
Regina Célia Colonia-Willner is a poet, neuroscientist, licensed clinical psychologist and singer. She holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from The Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US, and received a degree from the Carl Gustav Jung Institut Zurich, where she defended her thesis “In Creation, you are Created. The Intersection of Poetry and Jungian Analysis through the Metaphor,” the basis of this her latest book.
She is the author of four collections of poetry and short stories, including Canção para o Totem (Song for the Totem), which won the Jabuti Prize, Brazil’s Pulitzer. Her poems have appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere in the US. Her fiction appears in the anthology Urban Voices— Contemporary Short Stories from Brazil, published by the University Press of America. She is now working on her new collection of poems, Into the Blooming Night.
KFK: You are someone who moves through many worlds that may seem separate, as a scientist, a clinical psychologist and as a poet. In the introduction of your new book, The Intersection of Poetry and Jungian Analysis through the Metaphor: In Creation You are Created, you write, “Jung was interested in poetry and the arts as opportunities to explore archetypal dimensions. He famously stated that ‘In creation, you are created.’”
You use this as the subheading for the title of your book. Can you elaborate on that idea?
RCW: I am, among other things, a poet, a neuroscientist and also a singer. I sing in a choir as a soprano coloratura. I love to sing. It helps me hear what I am singing. Carl Gustave Jung also loved to paint. There is a museum in Switzerland with his paintings. It helped him to recuperate after he and Freud parted company.
KFK: You have also lived in at least 3 different parts of the world. What qualities of mind allow you to do so with ease?
RCW: I have been writing since I was a very young child and started moving across the world even before I was a one year old. My father worked in the military. I believed it was “the normal way” of life for my family and me. My first birthday was celebrated in Santiago de Chile, although I was born in Brazil, as we were going to Quito, Ecuador, where my father was posted to supervise the new frontier between Chile and Ecuador.
I guess since the very beginning, the world looked like one continuous place, not different countries. I believed I was “trained” to do that since I was a little baby. And also for that reason, I speak five languages.
KFK: Where do you currently live and work?
RCW: Currently, I live and work in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, but I still travel a lot. For example, to graduate from the Carl Gustave Jung Institute I was going back and forth from Kusnacht, Switzerland, and the United States, several times a year.
KFK: Who or what creates your personal ecosystem?
RCW: My ecosystem included Rio de Janeiro beaches – when I had time – before the pandemic, but also the immense trees in Senegal, Africa, where I was representing Brazil in that country as a diplomat. I was serving there with the Brazilian writer Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, the Ambassador, and a very important Brazilian poet.
KFK: What inspired you to write this book?
RCW: I believe a Jungian analysis session resembles a trip discovering new places, suggesting how to put things together in a different order, and paying attention to different temperatures and animals, like the big llamas from the Andes mountains. I am moved by a sort of curiosity about the world – a curiosity similar to the one of a scientist.