emotional dances therapeutic dialogues as embodied systems paolo bertrando director, episteme centre...
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Emotional dancesTherapeutic dialogues as embodied
systems
Paolo BertrandoDirector, Episteme Centre
Turin, Italy
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to please the soul
William Butler Yeats, 1927
(Keith Haring)
The mind/body problem (dualism) is a sharp theoretical divide…
…but it’s not a problem for systemic therapy practice.
the dualism
(Alberto Giacometti)
Here is a remarkable fact. When atoms and molecules are organized in a suitably complicated way, the result is something that perceives, knows, believes, desires, fears, feels pain, and so on—in other words, an organism with a psychologyorganism with a psychology. Alex Byrne, 2006
… how do [mind and body] interact so as to produce in a person a mind able to have effects on their body (as when the person wills the body to perform some act), whilst also their body can affect their mind (as in the experience of pain)? Although the problem is simple it has as yet no satisfactory solutionas yet no satisfactory solution. John Taylor, 2007
the problem
(Nam June Paik)
parallel dualism
trascendental idealism
reductionist materialism
Without consciousness, the mind–body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness With consciousness it seems hopeless. Thomas Nagel, 1974
There is also the question of what exactly is what exactly is the mindthe mind? It is certainly composed of conscious components, but it would also seem to contain non-conscious ones [that are] more readily accepted as … components of the body. John Taylor, 2007
experiencedescription of
experience
narratives of the body
(Man Ray)
The textuality of the body implies that any account of bodily experience is mediated; it cannot servecannot serve, as many modernists suggest, as a source of a primitive “reality”.
Tim Armstrong, 1996
The body as an object of investigation conflates any ready distinction between a philosophy of experience and a philosophy of knowledge. … We act, as we write, with with the bodythe body.
Bryan Turner, 1992
the body text
(Alberto Giacometti)
It is (usually) the female body which comes comes to act as a “text”to act as a “text”, uttering its meanings in a material way, well known from instances of hysteria, because other channels do not necessarily exist for it.
Sue Vice, 1996
solid bodies
(Botero)
Between 1880 and 1920, gluttony … would be bound to fatness, fatness to inefficiency, inefficiency to lack of energy and loss of balance, and imbalance to overweight. This knot of relationships would hold as well for housewives as for dancers, and in the home as in the heavens. Hillel Schwartz, 1987
body as object
(Man Ray)
Bodies become thingsthings for moving, possessing, using, enjoying, adjusting, disposing of, bartering with, abusing, ignoring, exploiting, controlling, and so on. This often leads to self-manipulation as well as to the manipulation of others.
Vincent Kenny, 1998
anorectic bodies
(Alberto Giacometti)
Anorexia is necessarily parodicnecessarily parodic, as it at once exemplifies the feminine stereotype of perfect slimness and repudiates it by making a mockery of it. Marilyn Lawrence, 1989
family therapy
(David Hockney)
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
William Butler Yeats, 1927
In family therapy, Yeats’s question is considered rhetoricrhetoric: we cannot know the dancer from the dance. The person is his dance. Minuchin and Fishman, 1981
What am I doing? I am accessing the right brain when I ask somebody how they feel and when I help them to connectconnect with parts of their body. Virginia Satir, 1985
new dualisms
(René Magritte)
disembodied dialogues
mindless bodies
When ideas become radically separated from embodied practices, the sensuous activities of everyday life tend to be subordinated to disembodied abstract disembodied abstract differences. John Lannamann, 1998
Schizophrenia is a disease of the brain disease of the brain in which various psychopathological processes result in highly variable clinical manifestations. However, despite a century of study, what is wrong in the brain (and where) is not known with exactitude.
Robert W. Buchanan et al., 1997
The issue was not whether a lesion was present, but which of all those reported were significant. John Casanova, 1997
Despite the wide array of histopathological lesions nonenone have thus far [1997] proved diagnostic. John Casanova, 1997
The delineation of the neuroanatomy of the symptom complexes of schizophrenia is a major goal major goal of schizophrenia research… Robert W. Buchanan et al., 1997
new solutions
(Marcel Duchamp)
[There is the] temptation to see a profound philosophical problem in a place where there is really none. As the philosopher Ludwig Ludwig Wittgenstein Wittgenstein emphasised, such philosophical mirages are often produced by an apparently inevitable but erroneous picture of the phenomenon under investigation… Alex Byrne, 2006
I do not know what to do except to make abundantly clear what opinions I hold regarding the supernatural on the one hand and the mechanical on the other. …
Very simply, let me say that I despise and despise and fear fear both of these extremes of opinion and that I believe both extremes to be epistemologically naive, epistemologically wrong, and politically dangerous. They are also dangerous to something which we may loosely call mental health.
Gregory Bateson, 1967
beyond dualism
(Man Ray)
The old compromises between “supernatural” religion and “materialist” science are artefacts of a false division false division and by-products of the meeting between unsophisticated theology and equally unsophisticated science. Gregory Bateson, 1976
person and self
(Alexander Calder)
The “person” is not a bounded entity separated off from the world in which he or she exists, but an interaction of interaction of body with worldbody with world, consisting partially of both. David Smails, 1993
embodied interactions
(Henry Moore)
The history of our embodied interactions … generates over time the range of possible actions in which we can viably engage. … The body is the the repository of the repertoire repository of the repertoire of viable anticipations which we can make about ourselves with others. Vincent Kenny, 1998
new neuroscience
(Alberto Giacometti)
… it’s in these acts, as actsacts rather than mere mere movementsmovements, that our experience of the surrounding environment is embodied, that things get for us an immediate meaning. … the acting brainacting brain is also, and first of all, an understanding brainunderstanding brain. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, 2006
To discover that a certain feeling depends on the activity of a number of specific brain systems, interacting with a number of body organs doesn’t doesn’t diminish diminish the status of that feeling. Antonio R. Damasio, 1994
embodied dialogues
(Marcel Duchamp)
There is nothing more in the utterance than the utterance; there is nothing more said than what it is said; there is nothing more shown than what is shown. Nothing moreNothing more. Tom Andersen, 1995
Not all words for just anyone submit equally easy. … Forcing [language] to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated difficult and complicated process. Mikhail Bakhtin, 1935
Verbal communication can never be understood and explained outside of … a concreteconcrete situation. Voloshinov/Bakhtin, 1929
body positioning
(René Magritte)
The person suffering does not experience the fullness of his own fullness of his own outward expressedness outward expressedness in being … He does not see the agonizing tension of his own muscles, does not see the entire, plastically consummated posture of his own body, or the expression of suffering on his own face.
He does not see the clear blue sky the clear blue sky against the background of which his suffering outward image is delineated for me.Mikhail Bakhtin, 1923
emotions
(Alberto Giacometti)
Blushing is the most peculiar and most most human human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that animals could blush.
Charles Darwin, 1872
It is not the simple art of reflecting on our own appearance, but the thinking what thinking what others think of usothers think of us, which excites a blush. In absolute solitude the most sensitive person would be quite indifferent about his appearance.
Charles Darwin, 1872
Although the evidence to support the order of events that James postulated is somewhat equivocal, most modern theorists accept that emotions involve emotions involve both mind and bodyboth mind and body.Keith Oatley, 2004
Emotion can point to goals and concerns. Sometimes they are clear to us. Sometimes, however, we might not know not know we have these goalswe have these goals, so the emotions associated with them emerge only slowly. Keith Oatley, 2004
hugs
(Henry Moore)
Shiva Nataraja