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Recently, i attended a conference on the theme of gender and creative arts therapies.  Having been interested in how gender affects the profession and practice of art therapy for some time, i knew what i was getting myself into. On my way there, the early morning sun stroked my face as a cool breeze moved around me. Suddenly, a stream of 5 ballerinas fluttered across my path in quick succession. I could tell they were professional ballerinas because they were all roughly the same age and shape, with similarly tightly packed crowns of braided hair. They seemed to hover just over the concrete carpet where they floated, ducks in a row. For a moment, my body froze as though stuck in a dream. I was dumbfounded at first but then i remembered that the conference was taking placed just a few steps away from the Place des Arts  in Montreal and i had to accept that i had in fact just witnessed 5 ballerinas on their way to work.  I thought to myself “What beauty. What grace. A man could never do that. A man could be beautiful and graceful to be sure, but not that way.” A crossing of paths of this sort happens only once in a lifetime and from that moment on, i realized that my day was going to be special.

I made my way over to the hotel about 50 yards from where the ballerinas were going to rehearse. I moved into the building and up to the conference floor. At the registration desk i announced myself as Thomas and the volunteer registration clerk knew who i was by first name alone. “I’ve seen your nametag” she said. I concluded that she remembered having seen it because i was one of only a few men attending the conference. I wondered if the rarity of my gender helped her memory at all. I wondered if she would have been able to find my name in the large stack so quickly if i had been a Sara or a Jennifer. On the floor of the main conference room there is seating for maybe 200 people but only a handful are present when i arrive. Within moments, a few colleagues, old and new, join me at the table. The room is full and i can scan the crowd to confirm that i am one of 3 or 4 men present out of a hundred and fifty. This ratio of men to women is nearly identical to the ratio of men to women found in the profession of art therapy at large so i am not put off by it. Yet.

The conference keynote speaker opened with a wonderful introductory anecdote about her own gender identity. Soon after, she noted that the term “feminism” can be problematic form many and that some have even suggested calling the movement for the equality of all people and social justice “humanism” but then she points out that humanism does not offer a critique of the male dominated structures we know as patriarchy. Though i’m not sure i have enough theoretical understanding of either term, my initial impression is that if you want to have a movement for the emancipation of all humankind and freedom from tyranny in all its forms then you had  better call it something other than feminism. If your movement is inclusive of every man, woman and child in all their diverse forms then you should probably take your own name out of it and call it something other than feminism. However, if your movement is one for the advancement of women’s rights known as “equality” then it makes perfect sense to call it feminism. If the ideological center of your movement rests on women’s issues, then the term feminism seems entirely appropriate. The term etymologically implies “women’s movement” and i feel a little confused when i hear that feminism is claiming to be the movement responsible for the only pertinent discourse on gender issues. After all, gender includes male gender and a movement which is owned and operated almost exclusively by women cannot possibly claim to take the full depth of male gender into account. It cannot even claim to have a balanced understanding of gender because i holds only one perspective. In feminism, issues of violence against women and patriarchy are understood through the lens of womens’ experience, not men’s. Where does this leave us? For a man to be a believer in gender equality, and social justice, he has to call himself a feminist. It doesn’t make sense. Blacks literally broke out of cages, from shackles and continue to pick away at the master slave relationship on a daily basis. They don’t call their movement for racial and ethnic equality “blackism”. I am not sure women ever had it as bad as blacks in the west did but they did have more power as a group. In my humble opinion, having a uterus is a power so great most women have not even realized it’s true potential yet. Then again i understand that feminist women don’t much like it when men define women’s bodies. Yet women define male behaviour and i suppose men don’t much like that either. My point is that when you have power, you can bargain and that is why women in the U.S have made more gains as a group than blacks have.

We don’t have a movement called “black-ism” because it would be alienating to Chinese and Caucasian people. It is common knowledge that if you want to share a table with someone, you have to either bring something to the table or offer your guest something. Blacks did have a movement called “black power” in the 60s, of which the black panthers were one spearhead and you could see just how alienating those movements were. They were blacks-only clubs aimed at asserting black power by any means. Like feminism, the black power movement served the much needed function of voicing the non-dominant narrative, making sure it got pasted into every newsreel and article, creating as much disquiet and cognitive dissonance as possible, leading to the necessary process of reflection. Nobody likes to have a mirror turned on them when they are being ugly.

The tsunami that is feminism rocked our world like a fist with 3 consecutive waves but now, has the tide gone out?  Is the discussion still stuck in anger and adversity? Is the movement one of polarities in opposition? Has the fight not been sufficiently won? I suppose not. No, the fight has not been won here in Canada and much less so in so many other places where women continue to suffer gross injustice under the thumb of patriarchal establishment. Still, I find it difficult to hear doctoral and post doctoral women talk about women’s disadvantages without also taking time to acknowledge the tremendous privilege they have. The privilege of living in a democratic society which is financially sound and relatively morally just. I am reminded just now of an old social studies professor in high school who painted the picture of a woman, a black person and a someone with disabilities all complaining of discrimination to the dean of Harvard university. The professor was implying that it is not possible for those three individuals to talk about discrimination without also mentioning privilege.

The term feminism implies “women’s movement” or “feminine way” but why should a movement for social justice and equality among all individuals have the word woman in it at all? If i started a movement called “Me-ism” and told you that anyone is free to join it, would you feel welcome? I don’t think you would because you would likely feel no ownership for that movement and you might then conclude that your democratic power to participate in it is being held back. However, if i call my movement “the movement for the freedom, equality, happiness, love and emancipation of all people everywhere” then i am pretty sure my membership will grow. Shouldn’t a movement for the good of humankind, an egalitarian and just movement be gender neutral in name? Throughout feminist discourse, we are rightly reminded that language is power. How many times have i personally been slapped on the wrist for assuming that the doctor in a conversation was a “he” when it could have been a “she”? It is a fair point to remind me not to assume that a doctor is a he because that thought influences my behaviour and my behaviour reinforces the way things are. That’s what patriarchy is in essence: a bunch of people thinking wrong thoughts and acting wrong acts as a consequence. Feminism rightly reminds us that oppressive patriarchal values are instilled into the fabric of our very own language to such an extent that we don’t even realize it. How often have we heard of the perils of using words like “policeman” and “fireman?” Well feminism : “take your own medicine”. You can’t put the word feminine, female or woman on everything good. You can’t patent the process for the emancipation of humanity from the shackles of its own creation. You can’t trademark the name for whatever that movement is.  

In my first workshop, things were more evenly balanced. The term patriarchy was absent but i noticed that feminism was on the menu again. Let me remind you that i continue to call myself a feminist for the time being, but it is only for lack of a better term which is more inclusive and more democratic. In my second workshop, feminism and patriarchy are both on the menu, served alongside the main discussion about the process of embodiment in psychotherapy. At this point, i am wondering why the conference was called “Gender and Creative Arts Therapies” when it would have been more appropriate to call it feminism and creative arts therapies. I still might have gone, had it been called that. Up till now, we have not been talking about gender at all, we have been talking about feminism and feminist visions about what gender is. There is a huge blindspot running through the entire thread of this conference and somehow i think i might be the only one to see it. At least, i am the only one to mention it. We have been talking about the danger of dominant discourse all the while peddling our own version of it. If the goal of feminism was ever inclusiveness then i would say that this group of over 150 mostly white women is not that. Do the women here really feel that they understand the male gender better than men themselves? Am i allowed to feel a little insulted about that? Do women not get offended by male doctors and lawyers telling them what they should do with their bodies? Is a white heterosexual male allowed to feel that his voice is not being heard? At some late point in the two day conference, i brought up this last question with the keynote speaker who suggested that the discrimination that a white male might feel as a minority in say a black neighbourhood is not equivalent to the discrimination a black man might face in a white neighbourhood because as a white man, i can choose to return to my privileged side of town any time i wish. I see the point. It makes sense. The socio-political value of the discrimination may not be the same. Yet can we really quantify the suffering of one person over and above the suffering of another? When it comes to the hurt, alienation and the very personal feelings associated with discrimination do we not all bleed red? Just to be clear, i am not suggesting i was discriminated against in any way. On the contrary, i was welcomed in some sense as an honorary if not peculiar member. I am especially thankful for the personal and political welcome which some women courageously crossed the floor to offer me. Those individuals left the safety of the dominant group behind for a moment, in favour of a different kind of discussion and i honour them for that.

lover's chess. A game played with hearts and minds.

Let’s go back to the speakers point about discrimination against a white male being less significant than that encountered by a black male. The charge holds that a a member of the dominant group can simply leave the area of discrimination and return to his position of privilege. In general, i think that is true but let me share with you one of the only places i can think of where it might not be true: In the fields of frontline nurturing. These are women dominated fields. The work of art therapists and childhood educators are areas where few men are found. A man who finds his calling in those fields is a rare bird indeed. He is needed because, well…just because. I don’t feel i should have to explain why a man is needed in a mental health care profession like art therapy or early childhood education. Luckily, women have fought hard enough to prove that we are better off with more women in law, politics and medicine and i just think we have made enough headway, thanks to feminism, to not have to revisit certain issues pertaining to why gender balance is a good thing. So if a man encounters sexism or discrimination in the fields of empathy as an art therapist or an art educator, where can he go? Just pick up and leave back to his privileged position as a stock broker, a lawyer or perhaps as somebody’s boss in a large corporation? What if he does not want to do those things just as some women may not want to be housewives? Personally, i would rather be a housewife than a stock broker or politician any day but that is just like me. My point here is that a white male minority like myself cannot just pick up and leave if the field he was born to be in turns out have a grudge against his gender. Does feminism have a grudge? Do the women of art therapy and other women’s professions hold a grudge? Do some women feel that it is only fair that men should experience a certain amount of discrimination as payback for all those years when they held all the power? Only those women can answer. For my part, i can know that some seem to. To give you a concrete example of how i came to feel some feminist women may be holding a grudge, i can tell you that after having been refused entry into the masters program twice i was finally admitted only to be told by a fellow student that i only got in because i am a man! I complained about this but to tell you the truth, i did not even understand at the time how a white man might go about reporting this kind of sexism. Notice that i say “sexism” and not “reverse-sexism” here. Some people use the term reverse sexism and discrimination when a woman or a minority does it. I just call it sexism and discrimination.

Maybe the older women of today’s feminism haven’t evaluated the movement’s progress in a while but i am living proof that the movement has made some pretty big strides. Of course, maybe my little blog post is not the overwhelming validation which some feminists were hoping for. Maybe feminism has made so much headway towards its intended targets that it has forgotten to pause and assess how far it has come. Maybe feminism is unaware that it has in fact gained so much strength and momentum that it can itself become the monster it seeks to annihilate if only in some rare and remote instances. Perhaps this is a price some feminists are willing to pay. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and i am wondering if “we” feminists can hold our positions so staunchly that we resort to inflexibly chanting the mantra: “down with patriarchy!” while forgetting to look at how our newfound power is shaping our internal structures.  Are we feminists ready to accept a man when he crosses the pond leaving behind a more traditional role in favour of uncharted territory? Is feminism ready to receive those men not as threats but as brothers?

 Just recently, someone posted on an important art therapy facebook page: “when men enter a new field they take it over” (my words). While this has been largely true, it is not true in the world of art therapy. What does this say about the man of today? What does it say to the men of tomorrow who may be wondering if they should risk leaving traditional male roles behind to become art therapists? While i must accept that patriarchy has been a force of oppression and continues to be so to varying degrees, i cannot accept that any person would prejudge me because i happen to have a penis. It pains me to think that my son could grow up in a world where a woman might demean his gender as he tries to enter a woman dominated field like nursing or childhood eduction. When i think that any woman might be biased against him because of what is perceived to the failings of men who went before, men he never knew, i actually get pretty angry. I believe that men have been slow to join a movement called feminism in part because they don’t think they belong there. It is feminism’s job to ensure them that they do. The irony about  a concept called feminism is that you need men’s participation in order for it to really work.

At some point in the conference, I got a flashback to some 1960′s video footage i had seen of important men sitting at a panel discussion on social issues. All of a sudden, one of the women yells out from the audience “where are the women? Why are there no women on this panel?” I wanted to ask why men seemed conspicuously absent from this conference. I wanted to know why there were only three or four of us in attendance and only one out of roughly 25 speakers. These talks were supposed to be about the intersection between gender and creative arts therapies – a fascinating topic – upon which i wrote my master’s dissertation. The more i think of it, the more I am struck by the cruel irony of a movement of people arguing for inclusion and democracy while being just about the most homogenous group of ethnic and gendered people i have ever seen. I found my way into the conference as a mostly white, heterosexual male, it is true. But i seemed to be the only person of my kind of gender who figured out how to get there. I had to find my way there on my own and i had to cut down some pretty tall grass on the way i dare say. But don’t feel sorry for me because i do have to admit that i have enjoyed many of the privileges of a white male throughout most of my life. I don’t take those privileges for granted though as a patriarch might, so if you are angry and want to vent at people with penises, then kindly direct your energies elsewhere.  

I have gone on for a bit about my impressions of the general theme of the conference, focussing exclusively on those aspects of a gendered voice which i felt were lacking. Let me take a break from this for a moment to tell you about how wonderfully i thought the conference was put together and how much i appreciated the high calibre of presentation which ran throughout all of the talks that i attended. Let me tell you about how much i feel in my element within a group of people who live and breathe like true art therapists do. After a conference of this importance, i feel compelled to draw you the shape of my passion for a bright human kind, in which art’s therapy is in all of us. It is precisely because art therapy and gender are so important to any consideration of a brighter future that i must spare nothing in my critique. So please allow me some further step, that i might inch out beyond what we already know.

In the fourth presentation, on the first day, feminism is being served again and creative arts therapies is the plate we are eating on. In this workshop i decided to ask the question: “If feminism means to be a movement for the analysis of the wider master-slave relationship which affects us all, then shouldn’t we call it something other than feminism?” I ask “Shouldn’t we find a term which is more inclusive and honours the work that men and women of ethnically diverse backgrounds have done throughout all time for the emancipation of humankind?”  A lot of men wrote, sang, fought and died for a better tomorrow for all humankind so why is it that we are calling the movement for the redistribution of wealth and the advancement of democracy “feminism?”  Feminism can be part of humanism but humanism will always be the umbrella we can all stand under.

When i humbly asked the 30 women in that particular talk if we could consider renaming the movement, roughly 5-6 counter views emerged within seconds and i realized that from my ebb, a flow can be expected. Here are the two oppositions to my proposal as i remember them.

 1) Feminism is not exclusive and men are welcome.

2) The word feminism has historical roots in the original women’s liberation movements and the word should reflect or honour the role of women in that history.

Let me address the second point first. There was no time for a drawn out discussion but my thoughts were the following regarding this comment : history has never really been a good justification for doing anything. Trust me, patriarchy is the master of saying: “that’s just the the way we do  it because that’s the way we have always done it” and i can tell you that only gets you in hot water. Times change and language has to change. Feminism taught us that. If feminism wants to become an all encompassing movement for everything from men’s liberation to immigration law reform then it has to call itself something else. If it wants to be a movement for women’s issues and for the emancipation of women, as it was originally, then it should continue under the present banner.

I believe the first point has been addressed by what i have presented so far. We can only ask, if the invitation really has been extended to men. We can only ask if an environment really has been created towards welcoming men as men. If so, then we must ask why they have not come. It is dangeroursly easy to conclude that men don’t come because they are patriarchal, they are only interested in power, or the pay isn’t good enough to attract them. This kind of rationalization is circular because when you presume that men are those ways then you can explain all of their behaviours through those parameters. The thing i most commonly hear when i ask feminists this question is that men don’t come because they are afraid. To this i respond that men have, since the beginning of movement always  crossed the floor to ask women to dance and it is now time for women to do this. Ask them to join you. Invite them, don’t threaten them. It’s not enough to simply open the door. Go to them and tell them you want them there. I feel many of my brothers are just waiting for the invitation like timid girls at a high school dance. Feminism should have taught you that until the one with the power makes a move, things don’t change. Well this time, it’s actually you. You have the power and you control the discussion. All you need is someone to dance with. The invitation has not been received. As i write this, the student union of Simon Frasier University is planning to spend $30,000 on a men`s center for the exclusive use of men wishing to discuss men`s issues. This would be the second such “men`s center” established in a Canadian university in the last 2 years. Maybe this is marriage therapy and we need to offer counseling to each partner separately?

Let me say again that i consider myself a feminist but only until the movement for the democratization of humanity gets a better name. The patent for the process of change and betterment of our species is not something which can be claimed by any movement called feminism, though feminism can claim to be part of that movement. We were all involved in that together,  or at least we should be. Let me continue further in my critique of the conference. Indulge me because i listened for nearly two full days with little interjection. Indulge me because i did digest and so now must reflect to you so you can reflect to me. I listened courageously to stories of ingrained patterns of behaviour with horrible consequences for all genders. I observed again how the horrors of patriarchy cast shadows across generations of women, men, children. I listened and honoured those stories as best i could and now i must speak because listening is not enough.

So far, in this conference, the dominant narrative has been that patriarchy – the principal movement associated with male gender – is unjust and oppressive while feminism – the principal movement associated with the gender of women – is liberating and good. We can all pretty much agree that next to patriarchy, feminism looks pretty good indeed. Patriarchy gave us the pope, organized religion, murder, rape, war and all forms of social injustice while feminism gave us peace, non-violence, democracy, equality and social justice. Hmm, wait just a minute there….The danger is that we associate feminism with women and patriarchy with men when in fact, feminism and patriarchy are ways of thinking and behaving. No gender can have a monopoly on thought, behaviour or any other kind of human process yet because feminism and patriarchy are paired in perception with women and men we tend to conclude that the feminism is about women and patriarchy is about men. This is dangerously binary and simplistic. I think it is safer to say that patriarchy happened and when it happened men got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Men were pushing it forward, holding it together. Patriarchy was just the way it was. With hindsight, we can look to the past and see how oppressive it was. At the time, it seemed like the only way to live. Consciousness had to be raised for men and women to see these things differently. Feminism, i tell you this because i love you: keep your hands out of the jar. It’s bad news in there. You will only get fat eating empty calories that shorten your life.

Throughout the conference, we heard numerous references to the “earth-mother”. The male equivalent of the earth mother has been the millennia old patriarchal notion of the “god-father”. The first rules the earth, the second, the heavens. Feminism rightly questions how it is that all of the people’s’ gods happen to be male with a couple of exceptions. When it can, feminism stabs at the heart of patriarchal institutions like traditional religious beliefs and this is as it should be. Honestly, i can’t see how one could reconcile being a feminist with faith in a male god or a republican government for that matter. So how can we so easily refer to the earth as a mother? You don’t get to kill god for being a man and then step in and claim the earth is a woman. In fairness, the earth mother archetype has been with us since the beginning and it is probably as old as the father-god archetype depending on what culture you are looking at. It seems natural to equate the concept of earth with the concept of mother because both are planted with seed and both yield the fruit of creation. Both nourish what grows. When it comes to the god father, maybe that association is natural in our minds as well. The father was the bigger member of the family with more physical strength. He is mysteriously implicated in our origin but we have no recollection or proof of it. His strength seemed all powerful, especially when he was angry and he was largely absent or unseen in our lives while he was off hunting, working, fighting or dead. Much of the time, father’s presence had to be sensed and internalized rather than actually witnessed. Sounds a lot like god to me. So the god-father archetype seems to have been a fairly simple projection of our own mixed feelings about our relationships with our own fathers. When it comes to earth mothers and god fathers, I only wonder if we need those images any longer. After all, are we sure earth isn’t a man? Is god a woman? Does it help us to associate our gender with the processes of the universe which we still don’t understand? It may have helped us understand a world from ages past but considering how feminism has enlightened the discourse on gender, do we still need male gods and female earth? Is it god who makes us in his image or do we make things look like we do? It rings sorely on my ears to hear the term “mother earth” even though i know it is anchored in a deep and rich cultural history spanning diverse civilizations. So I ask: “why can’t earth be a man”? If women want the heavens, let them have it because everything i want is right here in art therapy.

It was mentioned earlier in this post that feminism may have actually been more successful in certain parts of the world than feminists actually give themselves credit for. What if there was so much force behind feminism that it actually gave momentum to an even larger yet less conscious force called feminization? Feminization is the influence of female-ness or woman-ness or femininity  on intellectual, spiritual, subliminal and symbolic aspects of human experience. In other words, feminization takes something and makes it more feminine-like. So the feminization of politics takes it closer to a politics of consensus. The feminization of hockey makes it less violent. The feminization of law makes it more egalitarian and just. You can see from these brief examples that everything the feminine is bringing to the table is good, and everything which was there before is in need of a sort of feminine renovation. I would even argue that art therapy is an example of what happens to psychiatry when it has been feminized. Through this lens, art therapy can be seen as early feminisms response to the patriarchal establishment of psychiatry. Art therapy has traditional roots in women’s work and might even be considered one of the first professional “babies” of feminism. I am proud of that history. In fact, that history may be what makes art therapy so revolutionary and i love it for that reason.

As components of traditional manhood are  systematically taken apart, man must find himself again – somewhere else. In reinventing himself, he must find his way as a man must. He cannot be told how to become one by someone who isn’t one. This sadly ties into a post about what i call the “disappearance of manhood”, which you can find on this blog if you are interested. In that post, i plead for the implication of men in fatherhood – the implication of men as courageous hunters and gatherers of a brave new world where we nourish our souls with compassion.  So much of what was traditionally associated with being a man has eroded. His role as protector has been rendered obsolete by technology. There are no more predators. The only thing man needs protection from is himself. His obligations as donor in the evolutionary cycle can be met through 5 minutes with a one night stand in a parking lot. His role as provider and hunter-gatherer is merely a nuisance as women have demonstrated their ability and desire to do these things for themselves. Man is in crisis and the future of mankind is what is at stake. If manhood goes down the tubes any further, feminism will be the only structure left with any kind of sensible discourse on the nature of gendered existences in the world. We shall have to see what feminism does with all that power. I can only tell you that power corrupts in such an insidious fashion that you don’t realize it until you have already wielded it’s mighty axe. Some feminists in some parts of the developed world may wish to scale back their critique of patriarchy in their own homes and take that same critique to some place it is more urgently needed. Some place other than a conference of white, middle class, educated women sitting in a university. In a province where women outnumber men as medical students and high school graduates,  feminists may need to direct their energies elsewhere. Perhaps the time is ripe for reorganization and reorientation here in Canada. At a time when social media is heavily dominated by women, the traditional media at the foundation of patriarchy is dying a slow death. Women now officially outnumber men as participants and consumers of social media. This means that one of the main beasts of patriarchy has been slain. In the process of all this fighting for equal rights, many feminists may not have noticed that they have actually taken over certain areas which used to be men’s clubs. I suggest that we feminists should consider maintaining the focus on equal pay for equal work because there is still a little way to go on that one, even in Canada and the U.S. The problem with equal pay is that if the man’s salary was too high to begin with, then making women’s pay the same only makes things worse. In a world of limited resources, wanting a share equal in size to someone who is taking too much already is not ecologically sound practice. Mason Cooley said: “As equality increases, so does the number of people struggling for predominance”.  Don’t know who Mason Cooley was, nor if male or female but there are some awesome quotes of his/hers out there. Here is another Cooley quote which ties in to the theme of this huge post: “A real idea keeps changing and appears in many places” .

There is a real danger at present because feminism as voiced by women is the dominant voice on a broad range of socio-political issues in this culture. This means there are few checks and no balances.. If you have no external voice within your ideology then it seems you are doomed to repeat the cycle of patriarchy. Patriarchy is after all, nothing but a homogeneous group of likeminded people pushing forth an agenda with little or no concern for dissenting voices. We have seen, again thanks to feminism, the perils of this absolute voice. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, take it from me, i am a white male. Remember, women can be patriarchal in action just as they describe themselves as feminist in thought. Women wishing to be equal to men within a patriarchal structure become patriarchs themselves while claiming to have achieved the summit of women’s liberation. We say man is a paradox but we mean men and women are. Women can be patriarchal just as men can be feminists but when we see the words feminist and patriarch we see a dividing line between women on one side and men on the other. This may have been useful thinking 100 years ago, but now it is just binary, simplistic and done. Still, there is a danger that we too quickly jump to the conclusion that everything associated with the women’s movement of feminism is for the good of humankind while everything associated with the only movement men have ever known (patriarchy) is bad.  In short form,  this amounts to woman = good, man = bad. Might sound like i am stretching here, but i do see a trend towards this kind of thinking. So i put it to you again : Is time to change the term feminism to something more inclusive? Is it is also time for us men to redefine manhood in a way we can be proud of?

It’s true that patriarchy does have a pretty ugly record but think about everything men’s ways of knowing and doing contributed to our development as human beings. Let’s not forget that nearly all of our primate cousins are patriarchal, organized in tribes dominated by male participants. Patriarchy evolved out of evolutionary necessity. Did it wear out its welcome? yes. Is it obsolete? Yes, it has been for a long time. But did it serve a function at some point in our evolution, it most certainly did. The male protector was his brother’s keeper. He was on the front line as the courageous warrior. Even though technology has long rendered him useless in that capacity, we can’t shame the past. Nor can we judge it through our present lens. The past is what it is and we were all players in it.  If patriarchy had any room to grow at any time in history, it must have initially been because a male dominated social structure was at least very early on: useful. I know this idea may be hard to swallow but in the very beginning of our social development as cavemen and women, descended from primates, it must have been natural for males to call the shots, guard the fires, kill the beasts, build the shelters and fight the other tribes. This could only have evolved into what came after with men as rulers of media, law and politics, holders of weapons, and builders, engineers and soldiers. Females and early women were doing important work too, and it was wrong that for millennia that followed, the work men did was valued as more important. Let’s agree that civilized men should never have been dominant over anyone in any oppressive manner. We were uncivilized for so long. How could anything have been any different in a world where we were programmed to take advantage of our strengths. Black men endorsed patriarchy over black women, white women endorsed the enslavement of blacks, adults held views about children as inferior, and yes, white men held views of women as feeble. How could this situation have been prevented though when we had been living a male dominated dynamic for aeons prior to waking up? We men and women came into the world with an imbalance of physical strength. It was coded in our genes and we had nothing to do with that. How then is a primate or an early human to deal with this power differential once he develops consciousness of it? Well, it is very simply put if you are a Darwinian : man took advantage of the extra physical strength he had in order to survive. He did what any other mammal does. He used what nature gave him to become as successful as he felt he needed to be. We cannot blame man for his past. We can recognize and name that past and then we have to move forward, together. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and we shall have to see if women can learn from men’s mistakes and manage that power better. I am not so sure that women are immune to the narcissism, greed and corruption which quickly poisoned man’s natural inclination to lead.

I have gone on quite far enough by now, so i leave you with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood”.

Art used to belong to the people. It was made in caves out of compulsion and impulse based in a need to relay a narrative. Art`s creations continue to be things of beauty, testimonials of human experience and the embodiment of our very humanity itself. It soon became apparent that the value of Art`s creations extended far beyond their initial utilitarian nature. A cup or a sword or an article of clothing were still useful artworks in themselves, but when inscribed with the visual history of a people, these objects took on new life, new meaning. Greek vases became story books of divine inspiration. Spanish swords gained supernatural strength through inscriptions along their lengths, round and flat metal pieces took on life as the currency of a people through the mere impression of a recognizable face upon them. Such creations had not only inherent social and political value but quickly took on economic value as well within a system of exchange between people living together within a culture. Socially, the objects told stories and brought people together to listen to them. Politically, the objects made statements of a religious or philosophical nature to keep the thoughts of the people running along a common path. Economically, the objects collected value like magnets because they were each one of a kind reflections of our existence, not to mention their often being made out of rare and valued materials like gold and gems. The craftsmanship required to produce the paintings of masters imbued a sort of divine mystery into works of art. People could simply not fathom how these objects came to be.  ”It must be the hand of god” said the people as they stood before Michelangelo’s chapel ceilings. These works took on concrete, monetized value extending well beyond their mere appearances. An ounce of gold will always be worth an ounce of gold, but an ounce of gold flattened into a tablet and inscribed with the stories of Mayan people is priceless. Actually, an ounce of clay inscribed with the ideas of Sumerian people became just as valuable because both the gold and the clay are living pieces of human evolution, gateways back in time to a place of cultural significance to us now.

Cultural “art-if-acts” would be pillaged bought or sold and for some strange reason, people were willing to die for them. Some smart people with a big share of the public trust discovered that when you control the artefact you control the narrative of the people. You can rewrite the story of the people with the artefact in hand. It has been possible for instance to re-author the bible, taking out a couple of paragraphs here and putting in a couple there. So long as one stands behind the artefact, one have special powers. Think for a second about what your national flag means to the people who stand under it. How does that flag shape the ideas and behaviours of the people around you? How have you been affected by the national identity represented to you by those stars and stripes or that maple leaf? People with political power have long known that it is possible to repossess a cultural symbol and supplant its meaning. Hitler did this with the Swastika which was an ancient Indian symbol before it became the symbol of fascism. In Canada we have taken the seemingly innocuous symbol of the Maple leaf while the Americans have taken red and blue stripes and white stars. Take a symbol which is inherently meaningful to a people (unconditioned stimulus) and you can then condition them to respond to is through gentle or coercive persuasion.  You can appropriate the culture and tell people it is their own. One group of people may not want to appropriate a cultural symbol but may decide it prefers to burn the artefact and claim to have no knowledge of its existence. Scary, I know, but that is what a book burning is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4_j4c7Bop0. This is negation of the culture of the culture of the other as opposed to appropriation. That is what happening when the Taliban blows up two  thousand year old statues of Buddha  http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdffw_destruction-bouddha-en-afghanistan_events Or when just about any other religious group massacred any number of people in any number of places by first supplanting the culturally significant symbology.

In Islam, there is no depiction of the prophet because it is forbidden. The art is controlled in that way and the culture is controlled by being forbidden from using its own imagination to ponder the face of its own god. So the point is that if you control the artefact, you control the art and if you control the art, you control the culture. Here in the west, we do not live under explicit tyranny but rather voluntary submission to those who exert confluent force upon the maintenance and marketing of our western symbology. We voluntarily submit to higher authority when it comes to an understanding of our own culture. Our schools interpret it and break it down for us. Our museums give us the impression of preservation of our collective visual representation and art historians read the story to us. By the time we are adults, we have no only seen Picassos and Klimts but probably spent some time reproducing their work in art class or writing about them in english class. By the time we are adults, we get our music from the radio, our knowledge about the world from a text book, our movement and appearance from television, all tightly packaged for us to consume. We are not however active participants in the manifestation and experience of our own culture. Well at least, not until very recently.

Most recently, the Smithsonian presented the work of an artist who appropriated the cultural religious symbol of the Christians and successfully re-interpreted or repositioned the narrative of Christ here:

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2010/11/30/VI2010113006898.html

In this case, the museum was doing its job, exposing us to art, helping us reflect critically upon who we are, challenging our beliefs and assumptions. Bravo. Unfortunately, the museum in this case buckled under pressure and pulled the Jesus bit from the roster. Perhaps the museum was doing its job too well. The only way to get something pulled from the museum by the way, is to have it done by the people who control the museum. If you happen to be of the Christian persuasion and you control the museum then you control the narrative to some extent about the life of Christ. You have in a sense, a loud speaker through which to broadcast your views about the religion of the people and as time shows, people are only too happy to pay the price of admission to hear those views. If you give us Miley Cyrus and nothing but Miley Cyrus we are all going to see the show sooner or later.

We should have taken arms in protest of this pulling of the Jesus from the Smithsonian. Unfortunately, we do not realize how important such acts of censorship are. Removing the Jesus being eaten by ants show seems to change nothing in our lives. Having it there however, forces us to reflect and be disturbed by the images. Removing dissent from museums ensures the status quo which is another way of saying: ‘changing nothing’ or ‘inhibiting change’. Enabling the voice of dissent and then sectioning it off and categorizing it into museum worthy pieces of art is only slightly better. Still, if we are going to cultivate a sanctuary for the voice of dissent, and that sanctuary must be in found in the social institution of museums then i guess that is better than nothing. Now if we are going to prohibit the voice of dissent from breathing in museums  then we shall have to take it to the streets. Prohibiting dissenting voices from the very cultural institutions in place to protect them does not quell the flames but rather stokes the fire. Leaving challenging thoughts and images in an exhibit however forces cognitive dissonance, emotional discomfort, eventually provoking an informed reaction and hopefully some growth out of that. A museum is supposed to be a force for positive creative change -not a force for relishing in the past, maintaining the present or preventing the future, just a force for enabling change. For some that change will be small, for others it may be earth shattering, whatever the case, the museum is there to provide us with an outlet for our own ideas about what that creative change might look like. It is not there to present us with the ideas of geniuses who tell us what change is.

Still, it has to be said that we in the west are somewhat better off than some other places where free speech is under duress. In Canada can actually ponder Jesus on the cross being eaten by ants while in a fundamentalist religious part of the world you can get yourself killed for drawing a picture of a prophet. All things considered, I would rather live here. That having been said, let’s not get carried away as we often do in concluding that America and Canada are the best places in the world because this blog does not want any part of that kind of patriotism.

Over the centuries, schools, religious institutions, museums and the galleries they ideologically parent, have been the only sources for our comprehension of art. If art history were a stage, the museum is the producer, director, playwright, main actor and distributor. It paints the sets, sells the tickets to the show. It works the lights, determining which parts you see at which moments. These institutions have literally been the editor of art history. If the art of a people did not make it into a glass, air, temperature and moisture controlled box in the museum then it simply did not happen. The point I am getting at is that there is a huge concentration of  wealth and power in the art world, localized more specifically within the boards of directors of museums and owners of major galleries. Where there is a huge concentration of power, I am intensely interested in discovering what people are doing with it.

What I have done so far has been to discuss the somewhat under appreciated but inescapable importance of art in our world. I have presented the notion that the institutions we entrust to take care of our culture have been twiddling their thumbs, pandering to the crowds, exercising undue influence on the people`s culture. The museum has been shown as a kind of Doorman at a posh nightclub, which only lets in the people who reflect the narcissistic image of the club. The title of this post is: ‘Art Therapy and the Museum: A Brief History’, so I guess I had better talk about that relationship a little.

As with any of the posts on this site, there is a glitch, a point of tension which causes me to reflect on something in the hope of finding some balance or equilibrium. So here is the rub: Art therapy and museum culture have mostly found themselves at opposite ends of a spectrum as it pertains to their views about the valuation of art.  Where the museum views certain specific artist-creators as a supremely valuable to the understanding of personal and collective culture, art therapy views artistic creation itself as supremely valuable to the understanding of personal and collective culture. Where the museum views the product of creativity as the ultimate object of culture to be preserved above all others, art therapy views the process of creativity as the ultimate manifestation of culture to be preserved above all others. Where the museum-gallery is mostly concerned with the collection of art which fits into a theme, movement or genre in art history, art therapy concerns itself with creative production which breaks from those themes. Museums want something to fit in, Art Therapy is interested in things that stand out. Where the museum is a hierarchical top-down structure, art therapy is a structurally lateralized, bottom-up structure. While the museum determines value of a style of art and type of artist, art therapy assists in honing an individual`s personal style and artistic identity. The differences go on for ever and this is why you have never seen any exhibit related to art therapy happening inside a museum.

                The fact that art therapy and the museum appear to be incompatible is not the museum’s fault. Though i have thrown a few rotten tomatoes at the museum as an institution, perhaps it would be more fair to say that art therapy is its own beast and it may simply belong somewhere else. After all, you can’t sell a process which art therapy believes to be universally located within each one of us now can you? As it happens, somewhere else is exactly where we are finding art therapy. It is happening on the street in women’s shelters. It is being offered in the form of art-as-therapy in community centers everywhere from Montreal to Peru. Art therapy stands at the call, in service of those seeking a creative experience. Beyond those ground level organizations, art therapy is happening within the walls of prisons and off the corridors of mental health structures breathing new life into stale places. In schools, children are gaining greater metacognition and social skills through art groups facilitated by seasoned art therapists. Wherever you look, art therapy is doing its job, serving the public individually and collectively. What has the museum done for you lately?

In this post, i have attempted to understand – through explaining – just what the relationship between art therapy and the cultural institution of museums is. In working this relationship out with words i am brought back to the essence of most of my : 1) art therapy is inherently a force for the democratization of art. 2) Art therapy will remain excluded from the tales of art history and museums because of that fact.

When i am in the shower, my eyes tend to be unfocussed. I know my own body well enough that i don’t have to look at it when washing. I have a mental map of my body which allows me to wash up in the shower equally well whether i use my sight or not. My hands can do all of the work on their own, feeling their way around every cartiledged corner, fleshing their way to any place i direct them. Note that this ability persists in very few other spaces beyond our physical bodies. In the small confines of my shower, i make very little use of my eyes indeed and whenever my eyes are not the primary source of stimuli being treated, they tend to go into a kind of wide angle or blurred mode. In this state, my they are unfocussed,deep and autobiographical.  More specifically, i tend to wander into my past, thinking about conversations and personal interactions retrospectively. A kind of scanning or reviewing of a stream of consciousness which seems to be flowing through my thoughts as the warm water flows over my body.

I have observed this experience often enough to find it systematic. My observations regarding the shower experience are the following:

1) The warm water on my body is inherently regressive as it takes me back to a fetal state when i was basking in warm fluid, attending not so much to sights but to sensations, sounds, textures, vibrations.

2) When i am in that early fetal state, i am most at peace, calm and secure, just as i might have been in the womb.

3) My eyes naturally blur and my visual focus grows wider though less precise.

4) Soon after my vision blurs, my attention is directed to a place of past experience .

5) This place is one in which i am reviewing previous experiences with people who have affected me in some way.

6) As i am in that place, i am simultaneously aware that  i am marauding in the place of my episodic, autobiographical memory and that i am not only reviewing my past while being aware of it in the present, but i am also projecting into the future. As i am projecting in to the future, i  am playing out possible outcomes of situations, conversations and interactions with people to envision possibilities.

So this is a pretty exhaustive and chronological list of the different stages of my experience pretty much every time i take a shower. Having looked at this list pretty closely over the last few months, i can conclude that it resembles very closely the stages i tend to experience in the process of painting. Ultimately, the experience of basking in autobiographical memory is nearly identical. When i am painting, my process is as follows:

1) I clear out my studio of any objects from a previous session and prepare my various surfaces for work. This includes preparing my brushes which conditioner, placing paint tubes in order, taking out and ordering various mediums such as mineral spirits, damar varnish and linsee oil, cleaning palette surfaces, laying out painting knives, rags and other special tools.

2) I look at my painting for anywhere between 10 minutes and an hour, blurring my vision and attempting to project forms and figures onto the canvas.

3) Once i am confident that i can see what i am going to paint, i prepare my palette based on the particular vision i have concocted.

4) I take to the canvas and fight out some colour and shape with broad sweeping strokes and frenetic movement working in the corners and the center almost simultaneously.

5) At this time my vision is blurred and i can see every part of the canvas simultaneously even though my brush is moving in one specific time-place. At times i am focused on the tip of the brush but usually, that same tip is just somewhere close to the central field of vision while the corners of the canvas remain just as prominent within the broad focus i am maintaining.

6) At some point in this process, i become locked in to episodic memory, replaying, re living experiences i have had with people who have affected me in some important way. This usually means playing out family home videos in my head.

7) When i am painting, just as when i am showering, my thoughts oscillate between autobiographical memories in the past and novel thoughts directed towards the future. That is to say that i am spending some of my time simply going over past events, then spending some time putting all that in present context and using it to form new ideas and new ways of seeing things.

I should say that nearly all of my blog posts began while painting or in the shower. Only a few of them emerged in other contexts. If i ever get writers block, i am pretty sure i can unblock it with a 15 minute shower, a few ounces of scotch or a 1 hour painting session.

It has been documented a number of times throughout my blog posts that painting tends to spark a kind of hurricane of ideas for me which i must then race to put down in digital form. I began taking a closer look at how my painting behaviour might be responsible for triggering an onslaught of thought. My research into the fundamentals of neurology led me to discover that the painting activity of my right hand is functionally located just above the area which is functionally allocated for the production of speech known as Broca’s area. I hypothesized, though i have no scientific confirmation of this experiential analysis yet, that there was neural cross talk, or cross firing between the two regions which could account for why i might be mouthing words and producing novel ideas in the process of painting with my right hand. I should like some day to undertake several paintings with my left hand to see if the same phenomenon occurs. If my hypothesis is correct, then left handed painting would not lead to the onslaught of ideas which i experience when painting with my right hand.

When i am painting, i am attending to everything and nothing in particular. Sharp edges in my surroundings turn to soft forms just as lush colours turn to washed out pastels. What i have noticed is that my attention tends to wander into a particular place when my eyes are doing that. My attention tends to get unfocussed, and disparate as it drifts in a typical fashion towards my past. As i mentioned, this experience in painting runs parallel to the experience of taking a shower because both experiences:

1) lead to an initial sense of calm.

2) encourage the temporary blurring of vision.

3) Lead to an experience of reviewing my past.

4) Tend to culminate in novel thoughts which are then either painted out or written down.

The senses are hardwired into the brain. They are the gateways through which the outside gets inside. The ears go to the temporal lobe, the eyes go to the primary visual cortex in the back of the brain, the nose goes to the olfactory and the trigeminal nerves through to the entorhinal cortex, the taste buds on the tongue take you into the AI/FO(Anterior Insula/Frontal Operculum) regions of the gustatory cortex while touch goes to the primary and secondary somatosensory cortices. Each digit of the hand has an area of the brain allocated to it just as each part of the body is mapped in the brain.  It is hard to find a sensory process which is more hardwired than that of vision however. Vision consists of two holes in the front of your head, receiving light through the retina’s rods and cones, then sending the waveform signals from each eye to an opposite side of the head way back into the primary visual cortex of the brain. If you wanted to look at reaction times, you might conclude that the sense of touch is the most hardwired because reaction times to touch are faster than reaction times to sight. This means you can take your hand off a burner faster when you feel it than you can when you simply see it without the sensation of touch. Maybe it is simply that the pathway for touch is shorter, ie. faster and that the pathway for vision is longer because it can undergo different depths of processing as it follows either dorsal or lateral streams. Whatever the case, i am just talking out loud here to see if i really know what i think i know. My point in this paragraph is to take you to a place where you might consider that the different focal appertures of the eye could correspond to different functional regions in the brain. Put another way, i want you to consider the possibility that when the eye is intensely focused with a narrow aperture of the iris, signals are being sent to one area and that when aperture of the iris is wide, a different region of the brain is involved.

My thesis so far has been to suggest that the aperture of the iris is correlated with a functional region of the visual cortex to the extent that large and small apertures go to their respective regions in the brain. It is not too hard to see how this might be happening. If you consider that using a finger on your hand uses a specific set of localized muscles while using all five fingers to grasp an object and lift it involves a much wider set of muscles beyond those used to move the five fingers individually. When it comes to movement, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts because muscles are interdependent and the more muscles you use, the more you need counter-active muscles to ensure the movement.  In conclusion of this post, my theory is that short focus in the eye is useful for work in the immediate present and is therefore a more task oriented focus. On the other hand, wide focus through large aperture is conducive to reflection on one’s past and access to autobiographical memories. There does seem to be some anecdotal support for this theory in the following examples: 1) Movies have historically symbolized flashbacks and autobiographical reflections of lead characters by the intermediary visual effects of blurring the camera. In so doing, the image becomes blurred and the audience is transported back in time to a point where the focus will resume precision and bring us into a new present.Well, that’s it for this post. I want to remind the reader that all my posts are experiential in origin and in no way represent an absolute truth on any subject matter whatsoever. I remain open to the possibility that i may be partially or completely out to lunch on anything i am talking about. For now however, i am one of the few people i know actually considering these issues and taking the time to blog about them so i await the participation of other art therapists, neuroscientists and artists with anticipation! -thanks for reading.

As a man, i have a vested interest in writing about this topic in the most genuine way possible.  There is a lot at stake and i have no intention of being misunderstood. After all, a man is direct, straightforward, confident, strong, bold, authoritative and all of those other things…or is he? What is a man? That is the question I am asking nearly 60 years after Freud famously asked: “what do women want”. Historically, i have had the culturally inherited wisdom of knowing that men want power, sex and status. If this generalization ever rang true, i think there are signs the tune may be changing. While i think we have come closer to understanding what women want, i notice that what men want and what men are seems to be getting more and more abstract. It is not my intention to confuse you by including an analysis of the status of women’s identity in my breakdown of what it means to be a man but i can hardly talk about the identity of one gender without referring to the other. We don’t live in a vacuum and our identities as men and women depend on each other to some extent. If masculine and feminine are essential molecules then genders are hybrid compounds. Do you think men wear suits, go to war, build their muscles just because they think it will have some effect on other men? Do you think women wear makeup, dye their hair, augment their breasts and devote time to fashion because it impresses other women? The answer is yes and no to both of those questions. Our gender identities as men and women are surely shaped by what we see our parents do as male and female gender role models. As our sexual instincts mature most of us become increasingly demonstrative of behaviours aimed at soliciting attention from the opposite sex. We realize that even though we may be different, it behooves us to endeavour to understand the other sex.

The reader should know that i have had a long and unique preoccupation with gender. Not from the perspective of a gay person, nor from that of a transgendered individual. My preoccupation with the question of gender stems strictly from my experience as an ordinary heterosexual male. From the outset, this interest of mine seems odd because we are usually not driven to publicly ask questions about social mechanics when we are in positions of power. We tend to ask more questions when we are oppressed because our discomfort in oppression mobilizes us to seek the causes so that we might bring some remedy.  It was minorities and women during the civil rights movements who asked the tough questions because they had an interest in asking them. I have been taught that a man is always in charge.  I was born in 73, a time when doctors, politicians, university professors, policemen and firemen and military personnel were all male dominated areas of work. The question as to why we say “police man” instead of “police person” was still in the process of being asked seriously when i was born.  Ultimately, this question was asked  by women, just as the question: “why are there no black Canadian or American heads of state?” was asked by blacks first.  People who are in power know  through trial and error that it does not serve their interests well to be asking questions about why it is that they hold power.    Rather than ask questions, people with the power tend to remain conspicuously silent on matters of social structure. So why should a mostly Caucasian male in the largest voting demographic take to asking questions about the gender equation? My experience as a mostly Caucasian man has been such that i could never accept what i heard to be true about men and women. I heard from various sources, either implicitly or explicitly that men are liars, responsible for all of the torment, the abuse, the rape and the wrongdoing throughout history. When we look at history, the facts seem to support this overambitious conclusion but when we peer a little deeper, the assignment of blame for to gender grows seems less substantial. I learned either implicitly or explicitly that women were the “fairer sex”. That women were the unwitting victims of a giant conspiracy plotted by men to rule the earth.  I still meet women who make this case from time to time but there seems to be less of them. Women these days seem to be more interested in becoming the change they wish to see.  Sometime around the age of 20 i came to seriously question what i had believed and now, at 38, i can say that this initial unearthing around the social construction of gender evolved into a systematic questioning of nearly everything i have at any time held to be true.

My unique perspective on gender began to take shape around the age of 4 when my best friend was a girl named Maya. Maya and i did everything together. She lived just a few houses away and we spent our time running carelessly naked in the parc, building snow forts in the winter and castles in the sand of Toronto summers.  For the longest time, i don’t even think we were conscious of the sex difference between us. Our relationship was one of innocence and equality in every regard. At some point too soon, maybe the age of 7 or so, i became sexually curious and our relationship was over. Around the age of 8 i was enrolled in ballet class. Before i could even muster an opposition, my mother had placed me in a room full of little girls and asked me to dance. Wanting to please my mother, i danced my heart out for next 8 years. I eventually grew to enjoy participating in ballet as a spectator and as a dancer. After initially overcoming the embarrassment of playing a game outside of my gender’s rules, i came to realize that some women and men were curiously attracted to people who dared to bend the rules. I grew comfortable in a role as outsider and minority. Of course, i don’t mean to equate my status as a minority with the status of a true ethnic minority facing oppression everyday, because i could leave any oppression i felt behind and choose to return to my privileged existence as a white middle class male. Actually, I was experiencing a duality in which i was at once privileged yet stigmatized, inside yet outside, awkward but special.  Perhaps it is more fair to say that i was temporarily an outsider rather than a true minority and that i experienced the stigma and isolation reserved for people who bend the rules for accepted social functioning. Initially, i did not get much blowback for playing outside the boys game because i also played hockey and participated in other clubs reserved strictly for boys. Had i been gay, my experience of marginalization would presumably have been much greater. In my case, it was not only tolerable, but i grew to enjoy my unique position as “the different person”. There is a certain amount of tolerance for children who bend the social rules of adults. Boys wearing makeup is cute but when men do it, the implications are more disturbing for most of us. In fact the younger the child, the harder it actually is to pin down which gender they belong to.  Gender is a  socially constructed layer on top of the biological determinants of sex and it takes time to be integrated or rejected. We seem to be willing to allow for that time to play out…up to a point.

Around the age of 16, i found love in music and joined various rock bands for the next 8 years. Here, i was in a macho phase. I had long hair, cowboy boots and an buttoned down shirt most days. Trying on this identity for a while, opened up new possibilities and served as my introduction to what i would call a heavily sexualized identity. Think of those rock stars like Robert Plant, Mick Jagger and Axl Rose, Jim Morrison (all men) and their hyper-sexualized and highly feminized personas on stage. Those men shocked us when they hit the scene because they were men behaving in somewhat feminine ways with high voices, lower muscle mass, dance and movement which had previously not been seen in men. Well, that is what i projected myself into as best i could. I wanted to be like them, with all that feminine and masculine had to offer. Until i found my own identity, i was going to try that one on and it fit me pretty well but when my hair fell out, i had to re-evaluate my position (joke).  You could say that those figures were -and to some extent- still are my gender role models. I love them for their force and their sensitivity.

By the age of 22 or so, i took to painting seriously. Painting was different from the other modalities of expression i had known. Painting was an internal sport, played entirely within my mind. This is important because painting seems to be an experience which transcends the socially constructed rules of gender. This means that painting emerges out of something deeper in the human spirit, something devoid of a body and devoid perhaps even of anything we can rationally understand. I started to suspect that there is an existence beyond gender itself. A humanity which transcends sex and gender all together.  A part of the human soul which is neither one gender nor the other but possibly both or neither. I suppose this is close to Jung’s notion  of personality as inclusive of both anima and animus.

In my early 20′s, i was enrolled in a bachelor’s of psychology and i noticed throughout my program that the classes seemed to consist of just slightly more women than men. It seems that the gender ratios in psychology programs have changed from mostly men to mostly women. Actually, it seems that gender ratios in university enrollment have also shifted in that direction. Shortly after my studies in psychology, i pursued a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and noticed a bunch of people questioning just about everything from their own existence to everyone else’s. My fine arts studies also took place in an environment where gay and lesbian voices could be heard more prominently. This aspect of my fine arts training greatly contributed to my current vision of gender as a flexible, semi-permeable social structure which is a fiction built upon some basic facts.  I had grown up during my teen age years on the edge of a gay neighborhood in downtown Toronto so i had already been familiar with the myriad of possible forms which gender can take. I understood that when you take the biological determinants of sex then add the socially constructed nature of gender identity and mix in the biopsychosocial roots of sexual orientation, you start to have a pretty complex picture. As fine arts students, we were also exposed to a fair amount of non sexualized nudity in life drawing classes. I am privileged to have had the rare opportunity to look at the naturally naked human form as an object of beauty without the lens of pornography. I think that not enough people are privy to this appreciation of the human form beyond sexualization. It became clear to me that there are different kinds of men and women, far beyond manly men and womanly women.

At the age of about 28, i was admitted into the art therapy master’s program and here, i discovered that i was not merely the only man in my group of 13 but the only man in the program composed of several groups! There had been men previously but they graduated the same year i was admitted. I wondered how it was that men were absent from my program and came to realize that they are actually absent from the profession in general. I remembered Freud’s argument that biology is destiny. I thought about the angry challenges to Freud’s ideas about the sexes but i also wondered: “what if biology partly explains why men gravitate to computer sciences and women gravitate to early childhood education”? Shifting the focus back on myself, i wondered: “What was i doing in the art therapy program and how did i get there? It did not initially occur to me that the profession was composed of roughly 90% women so i can tell you how shocked i was to discover that i was again the “gender-bender” in a field of women.  There i was again, a dominant white male in a position of being the “odd man in”. I have come to see that my life experiences and my way of viewing the world all contributed to putting me on the path to becoming an art therapist. There are particular senses and sensibilities within me which made it a mere certainty that i would gravitate into the orbit of a profession where there were few others like me.  The gender gap in my chosen field had so impressed me that i decided to investigate the issue further by conducting my master’s research on the relevance of gender in the profession and practice of art therapy. I discovered that men were also conspicuously absent from the professions of social work, nursing and early education. The people i turned to in order to find out where the men were, mostly explained to me that there were issues of lower status and remuneration which kept men away from  those professions. Where had i heard this before? I remember hearing this argument being invoked to explain why men were mostly absent from the early childhood domain.  The problem with this explanation was that it once again presented men as competitive, success driven monsters lusting after financial gain, status and power. It once again suggested that women were virtuous because they devoted their lives to “caring” professions regardless of the external rewards waiting for them. I wondered if there could be other reasons for the gender divide in so many professions. I wondered if some of that culprit “sexism” could be rearing its head in women’s domains. After all, i had always heard that women were not engineers, great artists, politicians and computer scientists because the men in those fields were sexist. Accepting that this claim is at least partly true, it was only natural for me to hypothesize that the same kind of forces might be at play in keeping men out of women’s professions. Is it possible that beyond power, status and remuneration, men do not enter women’s fields of work for other reasons? Could it be that men avoid what has traditionally been women’s work because they feel they won’t fit in with the female majority while also being outcast by their brothers for breaking the social rules governing what men must do?  As I am about to explain, my views on gender roles grew ensnared in the political quagmires of angry feminists and macho chauvinists for a while.  Now, i understand that there is a lot more to gender than just the politics of power even though it may be that the politics of power first turned our attention to gendered lines. This is not a post about the effects of gender in the professional world nor about power lines between the sexes. This post is about masculine identity and its current crisis in the disappearance of manhood.

So far, it has been important to provide some background about how i came to hold many of my current positions on gender. It would not be fair in my opinion, for anyone to present a discussion on the subject of gender without presenting some personal biographical information first. Doing this ensures that the my position remains authentic to my experience and not simply a borrowed opinion or a theoretical exercise in which i pretend to believe what i am saying (Devil’s Advocate).  Far too often, i have been involved in a conversation about gender in which someone pushed forth a political agenda behind the mask of an enlightened discussion. I want to spare you this disappointment later on so it has been important to lay it out for you. I am writing from the perspective of a man who sees men struggling every day just to be men. Every day, i am reminded that men have not had to rise up from underneath anyone’s thumb except their own and that they don’t really know what it means to foster a masculine identity from the ground up. When you are born into an identity which is bestowed upon you like a royal title, you have not had to fight for anything and you can’t know what you have unless it you spend some time without it. Women spent a long time having their gender role proscribed for them by men. At some point, they revolted against this, redefining their roles. We men are only now starting to question what being a man can mean. In a strange sense here, a certain amount of oppression may help to crystallize a groups identity because when we overcome our oppression, we emerge stronger, better defined with a clearer understanding of who  we are. Caucasian men have never had the opportunity to rebel and redefine their collective purpose because they have never been collectively oppressed. Of course, men have fought with each other but this is not the same as oppression. You might say that man has been oppressed by his own doing. His is the perpetrator and the victim of his own aggression. Perhaps i am romanticizing oppression a little here but still, i think the basic argument holds that you really understand what you have when someone takes it away. No one has ever taken away manhood..and yet, you could also say that we men have never finished the job of defining what being a man can be.

Things which were traditionally associated with men only are no longer theirs alone. Those private turfs of economic mastery where men once ruled alone are no longer. The socioeconomic landscape, once ruled by men is in rapid transformation.  The fruits of women’s and minorities liberation movements are now coming to maturity in Canada and U.S. This means that access to education, political, economic and legal avenues gradually opened up and that now women are entering fields which were once the domains of men alone. Women have capitalized on their earned equality moving out of the house and into what was once a male workforce. This is a good thing and the thankful consequence for men is that we are now starting to question what is happening to the world we expected to find as boys. The fact of women’s transforming gender role identities seems to necessitate that men also reevaluate their position. As women enter law and politics, medicine, business and higher education positions, those fields of work are transformed. Hopefully, women entering those areas bring their womanhood with them and don’t simply try to fit in with the boys because we have had enough of that already. Women entering police work should do the job just as women must do it and not as men would have them do it.  They should bring their unique vantage points and philosophy to bear.  We don’t want politics and law and economics as usual being done the same way they have been done since men invented them, so it is a good thing that women should enter those areas and change them in the ways that only women can. I say “praised be the emancipation of women!” Unfortunately, in the process of being overjoyed for women’s emancipation we have neglected to look at how some other things seem to be changing as well. Women’s identities have emerged to include the statement: “We are capable of doing men’s work!” As true as that is, there are basically two consequences of this emergent gender role identity for women which have not been addressed adequately in my view and they are: “Who is going to do the jobs that women used to do?”  and “What will become of manhood given that what has defined us as men is being done by women?” After all, we can’t all be lawyer’s and doctors, engineers, politicians and business tycoons,  some of us have to join the ranks of shall we say: “less glamorous”  caring professions. Children require a lot of care and if women are leaving the home to go to work, and men are defined by the fact that they bring home money, then who does that leave to take care of the children? All of these changes in the socioeconomics of gender roles and gender identities have real consequences for manhood – a manhood which was already fragile at best.

Where can men now go to be useful? In a world were we once said: “boys will be boys” we now say: “girls will be boys”. How can a man use his strengths in the service of his community? With only a bit of levity i would say that men must begin to set their sights lower. Away from the lofty ideals of PhD. studies and astronaut life. Away from the fast cars and bright lights of the big city. We men must set our sights lower, much lower where we will find children running around, needing to be picked up. Lower than that still there is the earth which needs tending.  Hard work like farming used to have a special place in our society. A place of honour. When we lost that, manhood started to slip away.  Men moved from the land to the factory taking on new roles as machinists. They did not know that machinists are just one step away from machines. At some point, technical or trades jobs like plumber, electrician, mechanic and factory worker lost their prestige. Jobs which men used to do in service to the community are now lackluster.

Looking in my drawer today, i pulled out a manual knife sharpener, bought at Canadian Tire a few years back. I sharpened all my knives perfectly in about 5 minutes. I thought to myself that sharpening knives used to be some guy’s job and that for under $20, i could buy a mass produced tool to replace him completely. Every summer to this day, the knife sharpening man comes down the alley, ringing his bell and soliciting clients in need of sharp knives. The job is done more efficiently now and more cheaply to be sure but we lost something important when we replaced that human service with a plastic product. We lost a thread in our social fabric. We lost someone who got us neighbours out of our homes and into the alley, talking to each other. Doesn’t sound like much but it is a big deal in a world where the internet is drawing us deeper and deeper into our own caves. We opted for a less work – more reward approach to living and our manhood slipped a couple of notches when we did that. With more money came more possessions and it slipped still further as manhood came to be known as what we had rather than what we did. A man became someone with a gun, or someone with a nice suit or someone with a car, a hot girlfriend, a leather jacket or a cigarette. A man came to be known as what he had rather than what he was, as what he said rather than what he felt, as what he thought rather than what he did. Today, man sits in front of a computer torn between the allure of pornography and the tasks laid out for him in the hierarchical structure of his office environment.

Of course, when manhood has slipped far enough out of reach, there are plenty of folks willing to step in and make use of that primal energy.The military does a pretty good job of both promising a father, in the form of structure and discipline while also promising access to manhood through the warrior archetype. I am not saying that the warrior archetype has no place in manhood, merely that when the military industrial complex controls that archetype, we fool ourselves as men. Look at the world around you, society, evolution and you can see that the warrior archetype is an outdated vestige of what we men used to be. Today, I has no purpose. Religion also did a pretty good job of promising not only a father but also access to manhood through obedience to the father. The promises made by religion and the military can only make good on a small part of the offer. Being a man is actually a formidable task which religion and the military combined could never accomplish. Being a man is a complex, dynamic and lifelong commitment.  Manhood has become a no-man’s-land and something which belongs to nobody, belongs to anybody. What we have are entrepreneurs vying to control a piece of manhood and masculine identity. Shaving cream, cars, hollywood stars and cigars all promise to uphold manhood just as push up bras promise to hold up womanhood. These economic pushers do not help us on the path but confuse us, diluting the essence of manhood into consumable chunks of prefabricated nonsense.

So what is becoming of manhood? Manhood is going to jail. It is getting jumped into street gangs like the crips and bloods or MS13 and the hell’s angels. It is doing everything and anything it can to make the money to buy the things which men possess. Manhood is dropping out of school, wasting away the time while angrily waiting for a paycheck which is going to the more qualified single woman living next door.   Incidentally, she may be waiting for prince charming to knock on the door and help her take care of her fatherless children while she goes to work…Manhood is making babies and running from them as fast as he can. Manhood is learning to make love like a porno star.  But fear not, it is my job to be optimistic and my mission to tell you that men are known to come to their senses whilst they sit on the precipice of disaster.  We may be heroes yet. But like every hero, we must act in a timely fashion. We must take back manhood just as women have taken back the night. We must reinvent ourselves as new men: fearless, courageous in the face of unknown challenges. We must brave a new frontier in a world where only the unarmed will inherit the earth.

Women have moved into what were traditionally men’s fields. Men have not done the same just yet. We are still hanging on to whatever is left of our own illusion. The good news is that we people are capable of extraordinary feats.  We have a consciousness and a will which enable us to change our course as soon as we have the insight to do so. Of course, better known for our ability to remain on the path of disaster even when we know what awaits us but still, we have also known for our courage in the face of adversity. We can change, we don’t usually do it because we need motivation to change and most people don’t have motivation till there is fire at the door. It is hard work to change. Why would anyone want to go outside and explore an unknown and potentially dangerous world when we can stay in a nice warm bed? We have made a bed but we need no longer lie in it.  Men seem to be looking around for signs that it is o.k to cross the pond. Slowly, these signs are making themselves known.

Women built an identity out from under oppression. Some chose to surmount that oppression through unique ingenuity. Some chose to join the rank and file within the dominant male social structures, becoming lawyers, politicians, doctors and figures of authority- doing those jobs as close as possible to the ways in which men did them. Others still chose to identify with their status as oppressed individuals, presenting themselves as victims. When it comes to men, well we have only really had one choice: To assume a position of authority thrust upon us or to accept a position of subservience for failing to do so. Of course, some men choose neither but these are an enlightened bunch, largely unnoticed in the history books. Men who choose to deny their inheritance as rulers of the earth are pigeon holed as wimps, gay or otherwise defective. The archetype we are buying these days is the same one we have been buying since the beginning: tall, dark and handsome; rough and tough or for those who don’t fit those molds there is the “smart and nerdy” archetype”. You can’t usually be intelligent and excel at sports. You can’t be a great artist and a bodybuilder. You can’t be a thinker and a ladies’ man. The categories are mutually exclusive. Women have molds, men have molds and we are all condemned to be what others tell us to be. I guess, in this regard, we are equal.

Only now are we starting to see fathers and brothers as the true heroes of modernity.  We are at a point in history where a man may refuse to fight and be granted a pardon because he is raising children. Leaving one’s children behind to fight abroad is never a man’s choice in my opinion. Women fought for what was called equality at a time when gender role wars were waged. What women got was something else in my opinion. Equality should have meant equal but different. Instead, it meant “as much like men as possible”. Instead of joining the police force, women should have come up with an alternative force to it. Perhaps something like the “crime prevention force”. Instead of law, women might have considered developing an alternative system of justice operating outside the scope of crime and punishment. If you look at the whole picture of morality and social convention, you start to notice that this may be exactly what women have been doing in some areas. Instead of racing to acquire the power and status of doctors, women could have invented and developed a preventative model of health care, focusing on health rather than sickness. Instead of politics as usual, women could have banded together, refused to vote or take part in any form of political life. They could have developed an alternate form of cooperative government which dialogue rather than opposition was the main event. If anyone can bring balance to the adversarial structure of law and politics, surely it is women. Perhaps i place too much burden of responsibility on women. Perhaps i hold womankind responsible for what it can not accomplish. Still, if there is one thing i can justifiably demand of women, it is that be women and not men. No matter how much social justice, injustice or upheaval, women and men will always be different in some pretty fundamental ways. The question today is: “are we ready to accept and celebrate those differences?”

Today, as an art therapist, i still hold a kind of  fateful position in a professional no-man’s land, living in a world between the roles of two genders. Still, as a male art therapist, i am incontestably a bit of an oddity. Maybe that’s how i like it. Art therapy has often been referred to as a hybrid discipline and this is actually true on multiple levels. It is a hybrid of art and science, of objective and subjective knowledge fields, of age old wisdom and childlike vision, of crystallized and fluid intelligence and i believe that art therapy is also hybridized out of masculine and feminine gender typologies.  As an art therapist, i am at my best when i take everything i have learned from women and combine it with everything i know about being a man.

In the people i see as clients, manhood continues to show signs of crisis. In one of the schools where i work there are roughly 100 boys and only 2 girls. This school is a place for children with behavioural difficulties. I was reminded lately that boys are many times more likely to be diagnosed with a behavioural difficulty. Boys are about 4 times more likely to be diagnosed with Attention Defficit and Hyperactivity Disorder . Boys are more likely to drop out of school and about 11 times more likely to wind up in jail than girls. We talk a lot about violence against women but men are far more likely to be the victims of male violence. Do we talk about men’s violence against other men? Is there a march in the street for men’s rights? There is no march for men’s rights because the running joke has been: “what does the dominant group need to protest about?”. To this day, it would seem strange fro a group of straight, white men to march together in the street in support of men’s right to self determination. Yet, I think a time may be coming when it might be possible to suggest a masculinist movement in favour of taking masculinity and manhood back from whoever has hijacked it.

I heard once that sick women go to the hospital while sick men go  to jail. Are these the two cultural institutions in place to deal with our two genders? Women get empathy and men get punishment? I think there are some problems with building our social structures around the concepts of men as villains and women as victims. I have long felt that men and women both need help facing the challenge of their emerging identities. One has not needed more help than the other, only different kinds of help. One has not been dominant while the other submissive. Both have been suffering. Both have been lost and confused. It is time for us men to ask ourselves: “where do we need help?” “how can we help ourselves and each other?” “can we ask for help?”

Thanks for reading. Those are my thoughts on gender and the disappearance of manhood. If you have seen manhood, please let me know by commenting on this post or clicking on the “follow” button in the bottom right. For further study please consider the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_role

Back in the beginning, when i was doing my internship at a children’s hospital in Montreal, the supervising psychiatrist invited me and my wife to his home for dinner. My internship under him had been somewhat tumultuous over a period of about 8 months because i felt insecure about my competence and particularly inferior in relation to his. I spent a lot of time in team meetings feeling anxious about saying something stupid. This pushed me to do more reading but still, i felt i could not catch up with the overwhelming amount of knowledge held by the psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, occupational therapist or even the parents of our patients because surely, the parents knew more about their children than i ever could. Even though i was determined to increase my knowledge and understanding of clinical issues, an important part of me thought that an art therapist should never compare himself against a psychiatrist or any other professional because there is no other professional like an art therapist. We don’t compare plumbers and ballet dancers do we?

At some point over dinner at the psychiatrist’s house, i was asked by a woman – a hospital administrator, i believe – : “How does art therapy work?” My heart jumped into my throat and my words became muffled, chocking sounds swimming around a drowning question. Eventually, my wife saw me panicking and jumped in with her impressions about what a sustainable answer might sound like. This made things worse because it is inconceivably embarrassing to have your wife answer a question related to what you do for a living – what you have spent you life trying to understand.  I swore to myself at that point that i would not be in that situation again. To this day, my conclusion is that some part of art therapy’s meaning will remain forever subjective, dynamic and hard to pin down verbally because art therapy is after all made up of one part “art” and art has always meant different things to different people.  No one can tell me with absolute certainty what art is and for that same reason, no one can give you an absolute definition of art therapy. However, not all hope is lost because we can still have  a very useful working or operational definition of art therapy. Something like this: Art therapy is the use of art and creative process to facilitate change. I like that working definition actually. It is short and sweet but it does not tell you everything you need to know about what art therapy is and what it does.

The truth is, i had never really felt the need to ask how art therapy works because i stumbled into this field as an artist first and a therapist second. I knew intrinsically that art was good for me. I knew that painting, music, dancing, acting and writing made me feel good and served some useful purpose even though i could not have told you what that was. Art therapy came to me naturally one day following a break up which turned my world upside down. I started painting. The original moment of my beginning to paint has always been a place i like to go back to in my mind.  After one painting, came another and another. With Art’s help, i pulled myself out of a dark hole i had been stuck in. I should mention i was also seeing a psychotherapist at the time but it never occurred to me to conceive that the art and the psychotherapy could be part of the same healing process i was embarked in. I believed in art therapy before i even knew what it was. I had found Taoist Buddhism in much the same way, many years earlier. As a young teenager, i had been looking for a way to improve my outlook on life and make sense my experience of the big questions. To the surface floated ideas which I later discovered to be the ancient remnants of Buddhism. The examples of how i came to reflect on art therapy and Buddhism serve only to illustrate that sometimes we think and do things without knowing exactly why and sometimes the explanation for those things takes thousands of years to come into view. Art therapy and Buddhism were practices existing within thousands of individuals long before they emerged as the kinds of unified bodies of knowledge.

The fact that things can be hard to explain does not mean we stop trying to develop some kind of coherent understanding of what they are and when it comes to art therapy, i believe that people have a right to an answer to the dreaded questions: “what is it? and how does it work?”. It is in the interest of every art therapist and in the interest of art therapy as a profession to have a standardized response to those questions. That being said, it may also be in our wider social interest that each art therapist should have his or her own slant on the “what is it?” question. Similarly, it seems to be in the interest of culture that each individual should make up his own mind about what art means. The what? and why? questions in just about any field including art therapy are so huge that it would honestly take a few hours to get to any meaningful depth. I mean, i could say that art heals but that only takes a second and does not tell you much. I could go a little deeper but then getting to understand how art therapy really works would  require some understanding of art history, some overview of the development of mental health care and the interrelationship between psychology, education and social work. In addition to all of that, one would need experiential knowledge of the concepts because all those hours of learning about theory would not even come close to conveying a complete portrait. You don’t learn what riding a bike is by studying physics! What is art therapy? and How does it work? are questions like: what is a human being? or what is art? Maybe i should not feel so embarrassed when i can’t come up with a short and clear answer to those questions. After all, art therapy will never be able to – nor should it wish to – divorce its meaning from the first part of its name: “art”. Part of art will always remain socially constructed, part of it will reveal itself to science and part of it will remain for ever enigmatic, so the “art” part of art therapy will probably do all of those things as well. O.K, enough about answers and questions for now…

Here is a summarized list of things that art therapy does uniquely. By reading through the list you can get an idea about what art therapy is and how it works.

Art Therapy:

1) utilizes the strengths of creativity and resiliency which clients already possess. Creativity and resiliency are nearly synonymous in art therapy in that both are manifestations of the will to thrive. Resiliency is the innate response to difficulty. It is the inherited and learned ability to rebound from hardships. Creativity is what we use to build houses, cure diseases, make children and art, invent technology, solve problems, develop language and imagine music. Art therapy finds that creativity and resiliency are natural partners which have been part of humanity since the beginning. Art has  always been the most universal way of manifesting and communicating resiliency and creativity. It is something any child does without even the slightest bit of learning to do. By mobilizing those forces through art, clients are empowered towards solutions of their own making. I call this feature of art therapy: Mobilization of creative potential.

2) allows therapist and client to have a chronological record of the course and evolution of therapy. This unique feature of art therapy is particularly useful for reviewing past activity and agenda setting for the future. Viewing all work in succession allows both therapist and client to share simultaneous but unique perspectives on the entire therapeutic process. Client and therapist can use this “bird’s eye view” to return to previous images and uncover new meaning through evolved perspectives. The therapist can evaluate pre and post mental status in relation to concurrent images and this can contribute to a richer understanding of any transformations in clients’ cognitive schemes or worldview.  The “view all” option allows the therapist to observe whether changes in a participants functioning or mental status correlate with observable manifestations in the creative process-product. The view all option also allows not only for the placing of a single piece of client work in the context of all all client work but allows for the placing of clients’ entire body of work in the context of art history. On this last point, consider that you have thousands of years of art history in the form of critiques, discussions, analyses of documented movements and artist biographies to help contextualize the work of each client. It is like being able to place one’s creative work in the context of all work universally. Ideally, an art therapist has studied various cultures and artistic expression throughout time within those cultures. I call this feature of art therapy: “The View All option“

3) allows for the objectification of latent feelings or emotions which are hard to express verbally. bypasses ordinary psychological defenses which are operational through semantic and syntactic language processes.   We sometimes hear the saying: “the body never lies” and this is the principle behind the galvanic skin response measurements in lie detectors. Though lie detectors are not a reliable predictor of lying behaviour, they do seem to reliably detect stress responses in relation to psychological stimuli. The idea is that you can defend yourself and protect your vulnerabilities with verbal language but that your body betrays you in subtle ways when you do because you have a conscience. In keeping with psychodynamic theory, that conscience manifests itself in spite of our best attempts to conceal it. Police officers are trained in the art of detecting and reading incongruous body language. When one is making art, the right brain regions involved are not as well equipped for the verbal type of defensive activity known as denial, or concealment. The right brain literally does not know what the left is doing when one is making art. Art therapists sometimes say that art short circuits defense mechanisms and that people will tend to portray core issues in their art one way or another. It is very hard me to make a painting by anyone other than me, but i can very easily lie and pretend i am someone else verbally. An astute art therapist knows when to be directive with a specific kind of art activity and when to sit back and follow client’s lead.Here we are talking about taking abstract or loosely defined feelings and making them more accessible.  This is sometimes referred to as objectification because when subliminal states are projected into an art object, they transition from subjective to objective states.  Some art therapists encourage clients to talk about mental states like depression in an objective form by reffering to “the depression” rather than talk about it in the personal, subjective form using the first person, ie. “my depression”. I believe it was Albert Ellis, the father of rational emotive therapy who said that “the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem”. This feature reminds me of a funny thing that used to happen when i was a kid. I would stub my toe or trip on something as children often do and my father would encourage me to get mad at the table or the chair i had stumbled into. I would sometimes yell at it or kick it and say: bad chair! It made me feel a whole lot better, in addition to giving me a good laugh. In art therapy,  I call this feature: “objectification“

4) allows therapist and client to address the relatively non-threatening image rather than the core issue directly. This feature is closely related to number 3 above, in that it is enabled by objectification. Objectification is valuable on its own, but it is made possible because the creative process and the product in art therapy circumvent  ordinary unconscious defenses. We sometimes hear that the body does not lie and that to see if someone is telling the truth, you should look in their eyes or their hands. Without being conscious of it, we rely heavily on body language to tell us what is going on with someone else. Lie detectors which use the galvanic skin response are essentially measuring physiological changes in skin conductance in response to psychological stimuli. Though lie detectors are not reliable or admissible in court, they do provide interesting clues as to how the body responds to stress in spite of subjects sometimes contradictory verbal output. The idea that the body and the rational mind are sometimes playing on two separate fields is held to be true in art therapy and this principle assumption is at the root of justification for why image work and creative process are valuable in therapy. We sometimes hear in art therapy that art short circuits ordinary ego defenses. These ego defenses often operate within linguistic paradigms. Lies are told with words and the hard work of a rational mind.  Spontaneous artistic creation is less rational, less predictable and this reduces the potential for defensive behaviour to obstruct it. Of course, on can always intellectualize the image afterwards but the image speaks for itself and it is worth at least a thousand words. I call this feature of art therapy: “Circumvention” because creative process circumvents unconscious defenses.

5) allows for painful memories to be re-experienced in a novel and less invasive way. This is somewhat akin to the concept of systematic desensitization held within a cognitive behavioural approach to treatment of phobias. While post traumatic stress and reactions to sexual abuse are exacerbated by the inability to express and integrate the experience, art therapy allows for a gentle, non threatening method of transforming and re-encoding it as in a novel experience.  From here, it can be re-integrated to consciousness with new meaning. Thus,  some experience previously believed to be fixed is rendered open to change. The creative process has helped us to turn a frown upside down! It is held by me personally as an art therapist that creative process is the means by which we surmount difficult memories. We express those memories in the process of objectification then re-absorb them in a more digestible form.  Thus, ideas and experiences which become crystallized as semi permanent or life defining moments can be re-viewed, re-negotiated and new meanings can begin to emerge with more adaptive outcomes for participants. I call this feature of art therapy work: “re-integration“.

6) allows participants to engage in what many in the field of neuroaesthetics, including Ramachandran and Zeki find to be neurologically pleasurable art making activity. I call this feature: “Pleasure”

7) helps develop artistic skill and technique. This can have a positive effect  on self efficacy and self confidence for participants who have a goal of increasing their artistic abilities while in therapy. Many therapists feel that the objective of developing artistic skill has no place in the context of art therapy but i disagree here because i find that it is possible for art therapy work to include both parts of it’s name, being both art and therapy. Greater mastery in art can only help clients in the long run.  Many therapists seem to think that a focus on artistic technique and skill muddies the waters of art therapy. It does add a parallel process in therapy and this increases the potential for challenges and conflicts to be faced but it does not in my view undermine the potential for good art therapy practice.   It is possible to maintain a dual focus on artistic objectives while also staying true to the therapeutic needs of clients.  So long as the development of skill is a warranted objective in the course of therapy with a particular client, i don’t see the problem.  Naturally, the development of skill is not an objective for all clients but it is a valuable target from many. If skill development in art therapy is one of a clients’ stated goals then i fail to see why so many art therapists object to considering it in the process of agenda setting. I call this  feature of art therapy: “Appeal to Multiple Intelligences” because art therapy can simultaneously function on verbal-linguistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, body-kinesthetic, musical, visual spacial, logical mathematical, naturalist and existential levels.

allows more direct access to sensory memories. A large amount of experience (maybe even all experience) is at least partially encoded as sensory memory. Visual spatial, acoustic, olfactory and tactile memory all play a part in procedural memory for how to do things which involve the body, such as like ride a bike, find your way to a friends house, re-create a food recipe or a dance step.   To be sure, any emotional state we can speak of, has to exist in the body first before we can call it happy, sad or mad. Mad is pupil dilation, increased heart rate and blood pressure, dryness of mouth and contracted muscles first, before it is something we can talk about. Sad is decreased heart rate, slouched body posture, low blood pressure and teary eyes before we can name it. Happy is serotonin-endorphin release, lightness of posture and contracted smile. We laugh at jokes long before we can explain why and we react with anger in the same way based on a few simple non verbal cues such as body language and vocal intonation.That is why they are called feelings : because we feel them.  Emotional memories tend to be encoded with greater long term potential because they have semantic and and physiological weight for us. They are memorable because they are sensory rather than just semantic.  This is why we remember a spanking. Post traumatic stress disorder is characterized by the encoding of traumatic experience into body memory, thus making the trauma reaction particularly difficult to extinguish with traditional talk therapy.  A biofeedback method such as art therapy can be particularly helpful in treating ptsd because it employs the same sensory modalities and neural pathways during the creative process as those which were employed for the encoding of the initial traumatic experience. In doing this, the various art modalities may be directly accessing the neural networks of sensory memory involved in ptsd. Visual art modalities may be particularly well suited to treatment of post traumatic stress because ptsd reactions usually have strong visual precursors. This means that people suffering from ptsd often face frequent re-exposure to image based memories of a traumatic nature and an art therapy modality which is visually based may have an advantage in re-wiring or transforming the neural networks involved.  As most memory has a visual component to it, visually based art therapy may have an advantage over other modalities in general. I call this feature of art therapy: “Ease of Access to Sensory Memory“.

9) is naturally regressive, specifically because art making involves the body in an activity which most adults remember from from childhood. I call this feature: “Natural Regression ”

It should be said here that this is by no means an exhaustive list of what art therapy is and does. This list is a compilation of the features of art therapy which appear most natural to me as an art therapist but colleagues working in different ways would have a lot to contribute here. My hope is that some professional art therapists can give provide some feedback on these 8 features by replying at the bottom of this post. It should also be said that these features are commonly held within the college of like-minded professionals who call themselves art therapists but that i typically venture out in my posts to a world of where conjecture is not only possible but desirable. My posts are not literature reviews, nor research reports in the classical sense but they are  artistic renderings of the phenomenon within my experience. As with all experience, there is some objective reality and some element of subjective fiction. This is not a mistake or an oversight, it is how the exercise of writing helps me to get clarity on art therapy theory and practice. To put it another way, sometimes i am talking about what i know and sometimes i am talking about what i think i could know. In either case, your input has always been valuable to me and i hope to continue receiving it.

the twin towers and just about any mosque

to name a few instances. I could see where Freud was going with what some feminists call his sexual obsession!. The ever-presence of the phallus as symbol also could account for some of the phenomenon of penis envy.The only place where Freud went wrong was to suggest that only women have penis envy when in fact men have it too! Men want a bigger phallus and women want the symbolic properties of any old phallus.  Anyway, back to my post as i seem to have gotten off topic again. Here is an etymological breakdown of the term: sublimation: From latin: sublimare sub = at the entry/beneath, limen = door step/threshold. In other words, sublimation means operating below the conscious threshold. In art therapy, sublimation takes on an added meaning of transformation. The sublimated material becomes something else. Maybe the phallus is a tree or a rock. Maybe violence is a certain kind of handshake or two waves colliding in a painting. What this means is that we construct the world in the image of our repressed instincts. We make god in our image, not the other way around. It is not the only way we construct the world but it is one of the more important ways.

Destructive instincts must also be sublimated because like sexual instincts, our civilization does not usually tolerate their direct expression. Former Roman and Hellenic societies just had orgies and mass killings when they felt like it but we don’t do that anymore. We sublimate. In the case of war, you might think that we are not sublimating. It is true. We are intellectualizing and rationalizing the motivations for going to war which reside deep  within the reptilian brain. When it comes to sublimation of an aggressive impulse, the practices of sport or art would be comparably good examples. In sport we compete to win. We strive to succeed in a hockey game and that often means plowing someone down into the boards.  We fans love to watch. NHL hockey is a less subterfuge sublimation because the aggressive impulse remains present albeit in an attenuated form. It is because we can witness the framed fights, the brutal aggression that we forego our true unconscious wish for raw, unadulterated violence. Sublimation usually means that the impulse will be expressed in such a completely different way that you may no longer recognize them. After all, if you recognize it, it is no longer working as a defense mechanism. In the hockey example, the aggression is attenuated to the extent that rather than kill your opponent after the game, you hit him on the ice, playing within the rules of conduct and within the parameters of the game. The aggression is intense and it is of a murderous variety but because it is contained within the parameters of “fair play” within a socially sanctioned cultural ritual, everything becomes digestible.  Sometimes the aggression gets way out of hand and you have permanent injuries in football and hockey.  Because the aggression is sublimated through the guise of sport it is diminished and becomes more tolerable and therefore acceptable to society. We can say of the football tackle that it was necessary whereas tackling someone on the street is criminal.

Let’s look at the example of art for a second because it can be a sublimation of either aggressive or sexual drives which is slightly more nuanced and complex than the previous example. Through an abstract painting we may be witnessing actual expressions of unconscious desires to murder, rape, destroy or make love to some external object. We might never know by looking at the colours and shapes on a canvas or the form of a sculpture but the theory behind sublimation does hold that artistic expression is to some extent a sublimation of such feelings. Sublimation explains why the phallus is a symbol which surfaces in just about every culture’s’ iconography.  The phallus is such an important part of our everyday consciousness because it is a stand-alone symbol for power, it appears throughout modern architecture in everything from 28,000 year old neolithic art, to Greek obelisks and everything in between.  When the phallus is expressed as a phallus it is a literal representation, however when it is embedded subconsciously into the iconography of a culture it takes on the function of uncosciously affirming an unconscious desire. The whole thing happens on an unconscious level but this has very real implications on the reality we experience consciously.

Now let’s look at the closely related term of supplantation. I should level with you and tell you that i created the word supplantation from the word : supplant, which means: c.1300, “to trip up, overthrow, defeat, dispossess,” from O.Fr. supplanter “to trip up, overthrow,” from L. supplantare “trip up, overthrow,” from sub “under” + planta “sole of the foot” (see plant (n.)). Meaning “replace one thing with another” first recorded 1670s. Interesting sense evolution parallel in Heb. akabh “he beguiled,” from akebh “heel.” Notice that the sub of sublimation is the same sub we find in supplantation. So while sublimation is the unconscious manifestation of an unconscious drive, supplantation is the conscious substitution of one symbol for another with the sinister intent of commandeering the original image. One prime example of supplantation is found in the Nazi swastika. The swastika is an ancient symbol that has been used for over 3,000 years. (That even predates the ancient Egyptian symbol, the Ankh!) Artifacts such as pottery and coins from ancient Troy show that the swastika was a commonly used symbol as far back as 1000 BCE. (I have plagiarized the last two sentences from here: http://history1900s.about.com/cs/swastika/a/swastikahistory.htm). Another supplantation is found in the double meaning of the word “Star”. A star is something which hangs in the sky above us, which has meaning we do not understand, which existed before we did and will exist afterwards but it is also the name we give to a human being who lives in Hollywood. This is a clear supplantation of the the word star. The star of David is another example and the stars and stripes is yet another. The last two examples are even more dangerous because they are at the imaginal roots of cultural and religious identities. Supplantation is a kind of stealing of an idea. You take someone else’s idea and call it your own. It is a form of culturally significant plagiarism of the image. Because you can’t copyright a symbol like the the religious cross or the star of David, you can’t own it and it is up for supplantation at any time. Because supplantation is here to stay as a human behaviour, it behooves the next generation to supplant previously dangerous symbols and make them safe. Thus, we must re-appropriate the swastika, take over the pepsi and coke symbols and use them to push forward our agenda of having quality education and daycare and justice. Maybe we could re-appropriate the symbol for the Royal Bank of Canada and use it for some organization that protects the earth from pollution. It seems that logo would be so appropriate for that type of thing. After all, the royal bank of Canada appropriated the symbols of the Lion and the Earth. Why can’t we take that back? Why should we accept the logo of corporate, banking interests as a lion with it’s paw firmly in a dominant position over our planet? I say reject it and re-appropriate it. Defy the trademark when it defies you!

So there you have it, a breakdown of the relationship between supplantation and sublimation!

In any form of psychotherapy whether it be humanistic, cognitive behavioural, psychodynamic there is some high degree of importance placed on the establishment and maintenance of a therapeutic container or frame. The notion of a therapeutic container is taken in part from Winnicott who stressed the importance of the initial holding environment in the development of personality. Donald Winnicott rightly noted the importance of that initial bond between infant and caretaker (usually mother) in the development of an individual’s basic psychological makeup. Kohlberg, Maslow, Erikson and Freud were a few other notable humanists with a similar emphasis on the initial holding environment. It has been held, to this day, with much scientific support that the early environment has a profound effect on later development and that relatively minor events occurring in that environment could have relatively pronounced and rather long lasting effects on later life. I guess this is why mother’s tend towards over protection.

Art therapy, which draws simultaneously from cognitive behavioural, humanistic and psychodynamic types of therapy, has placed enormous importance on the value of the therapeutic container or frame. In accordance with Winnicott’s definition of the initial holding environment, a primary  focus of art therapy is to create and foster a secure container within which the proper conditions for therapy can be provided. The container consists of a specific time and a specific place. You can draw a parallel to the 9 months spent in the womb here. Gestation happens over a course of somewhat specific time and an extremely specific space. It happens in the womb over a period of approximately 9 months. Therapy ideally happens in the same place at the same time over a period of time just as gestation does and if you want to walk further down this analogy, both gestation and therapy lead to some form of birth (in the case of gestation) or rebirth (in the case of therapy).

In therapy just as in life, the developing individual benefits from some form of consistency. Somewhat regular feeding hours, somewhat regular rest, somewhat regular stimulation and somewhat predictable environments. Change is o.k, so long as it is carefully gauged and properly timed. Any change too great, or any change introduced with awkward timing is likely to throw the entire system out of whack. I remember the doctor just last week telling me not to take the blanket of my soon to be newborn son too quickly because this could overwhelm him with anxiety as he comes to realize he has limbs! This is why we say that loud noises should be avoided with newborns and precocious challenges should be avoided in therapy.  If a challenge is ill timed in therapy, you can experience a set back which can be devastating for a client. In my training as an art therapist at the one of only two master’s programs in Canada, a fair but heavy consideration was placed upon the therapeutic container. I say fair because it is true that the therapeutic frame is one of the only things which the therapist can guarantee. I can guarantee that we will meet at a regular time and a regular place but i can hardly guarantee anything else because the client is necessarily responsible for everything else that happens in the container. As a therapist, my job is to preserve and protect that container by ensuring not only time and place but also confidentiality. There are the important physical elements of time and place but also psychological elements of confidentiality. If confidentiality is broken, the container is broken. If it is preserved than the container can survive even if therapy moves to a different time or a different place.  You could say that time and place are necessary conditions of therapy but that confidentiality is sufficient for most. This also means that time and place, although necessary, are not sufficient on their own. Still, overall, you want those three elements present in a solid and consistent fashion if you are going to undertake helping someone in a psychotherapeutic relationship. This notion of therapeutic frame is consistent across all modalities and all types of therapy. This being said there are exceptions and it does not serve any kind of therapy well to employ a dogmatic stance on this issue.

Like most of the theory related to psychotherapy, i believe that dogma must be avoided. We know through science and through con-science that certain rules serve us well but I have always believed that what does not bend must break. So there may be times when the therapeutic container becomes flexible or semi-permeable.  One obvious example i can think of is in the case of family interventions for drug addicts and people engaged in other destructive behaviour. Clearly, a therapist must by law break the container any time he feels that a client is at risk of harm to self or others. If a client is at risk to self or others, no lawyer, no doctor, no priest and no therapist should consider maintaining confidentiality. The therapeutic container instantly dissolves any time that happens.  I do realize that the idea behind family interventions is contentious and that there are many therapists who support the process while there seem to be just as many if not more who have determined that interventions do not work and are never an appropriate application of therapeutic principles. The concept of interventions does remain a topic of popular interest among pscyhotherapists and lay people based on the abundance of reality t.v. shows dealing with the subject. I remain divided on this issue but i think i believe that an intervention can be deeply therapeutic in some cases while exacerbating a problem in others. A number of therapists have suggested to me that experimental methods reveal that interventions do not work, but i have yet to see these studies and for now, i can not even comprehend how a valid scientific study could be conducted in this area because so much of the result of the intervention is determined by individual characteristics of those upon whom the intervention is being practiced. Not to mention the fact that there is little in the way of standards or protocols regarding how an intervention should be conducted. Anyway, i want to come back to the idea of interventions in a later post, for now, let’s stick to the concept of the therapeutic container.

Another example of a situation where the therapeutic frame could become flexible is the following: A client whom you have been seeing for several years has gained autonomy and self confidence. That client has evolved over the course of therapy to be able to tolerate modifications in the frame such as changing time, place and context. Of course, the aspect of confidentiality remains unchanged because it is a essential condition of therapy but the framing of time and place might become flexible at some point. A therapeutic relationship could transition into life coaching. A situation where the therapist goes on the road with a client at specific times and places, just as a reported gets embedded in a context for greater clarity. I am not advocating that this is a situation which a therapist should strive for but only that it is possible to transition into that type of relationship and to produce positive results while doing no harm. Of course, playing around with the container is risky business. Many clients naturally tend to try and warp the container for their own reasons. Borderline clients are known to everything in their power to modify the frame. The same could be  true of clients facing addictions, anger management or gambling issues. It is natural for any client to want to modify the frame for any number of reasons and a seasoned therapist has to be ready for that when it happens. If a therapist allows the frame to be modified at some time when it is inappropriate because of unconscious transference or counter transference motivations on the part of the client or the therapist, then  the clinician will surely find himself in very hot water indeed. By hot water, i mean a highly uncomfortable situation which places the client at risk, places the therapist in a highly compromised position with possible legal and professional ramifications. It is for this reason that most therapists prefer to not even consider a flexible frame. After all, a solid frame is safer for everyone. Yet, if there is no posibility of modifying the frame ever than that is tantamount to a therapeutic protocol which knows no exceptions. My position is that such a protocol is bound to break in some cases or at least be limited by its own laws. This would be like having a medication which could help someone but not giving it to them because they might have side effects.

Ultimately, the container is there for a reason as i have just mentioned. It keeps us all safe. Let me give you another example of when the container was modified. In my internship at a children’s hospital, i was once asked by the attending psychiatrist to leave the door open an inch or two while i was seeing a 6 year old female patient. I asked why and she responded that the mother was prone to getting the “wrong idea”. I surmised that because i am a male therapist and because over 90% of pedophiles are male, i should avoid even the suspicion which can be sparked in people who perceive a male stranger in a room with a 6 year old girl. I obliged the psychiatrist but never fully got over the strange feeling that this left for me. Surely, i was facing a gender issue here as i thought to myself “would she have asked the same of a 20 year old female intern?” Whatever the case, in this instance, the container was semi transparent because of the open door and this supposedly served to protect not only the young patient but me as well. This is one instance in which transparency of the frame can be mutually beneficial. In another case, the same psychiatrist suggested that i might take a young male, 13 year old day patient out for a walk to the store so he could buy his favourite candy. At first, this went against all my understanding of what therapy is. Then, i learned that this 10 minute walk advanced our therapeutic alliance by several hours and launched us into what turned out to be some good work. In a later post, i want to talk about the clinical aspects of family interventions and their relevance to the notion of therapeutic containment.

My brother was visiting from toronto with his hockey team, about 11 men, and got a couple of tickets from one of his team mates. The team mate decided to give up his tickets in favour of staying with the rest of his team in a pre-arranged location where the madness he sought was guaranteed. So, my brother and i went of to the show. And what a show it was. At first, i could not find the Bell Center in my own city and thought about how ridiculous that was because it is so huge, it is just that i have never been there before. Then i thought about that old saying:  The best way to see your city is through the eyes of a tourist. Eventually, with a little help from my phone, we found it and made our way past the scalpers lurking in the shadows of bright neon lights.

At the first point of entry, the ticket taker jokingly says we can not get in because i am wearing the wrong hat. My brother and I look at each other and wonder what is going on. Then i remembered that i was wearing a toronto maple leafs hat and that the ticket taker was pulling my leg. Once inside, the first thing i notice is an increase the in the general energy such that there are people everywhere yelling to their hearts content. The volume and movement have both gone way up. For a second, i feel as though i am in  a centuries old Greek marketplace but here, people are selling beer and pizza and memorabilia. First we pass the box sitting areas where important people are getting drunk on bottomless cups of alcohol, sitting in prime seats with a perfect view of the game. Here, business is being conducted, men are wooing women and corporations are flexing muscles. Walking around the long winding halls i notice that the girls all look similar. The girls hired to hold the gates, also known as hostesses are dressed in the same blue skirts, white shirts, red ties, blue blazers but there is more. The waist to hip to bust ratio is about the same for all of them. I know it is roughly the same because i am scanning everything. I am scanning everything because it is what i generally like to do but also because this NHL game is a somewhat novel experience and your senses are peaked when that happens.  As I look around, i am noticing that most of the boisterous people walking the corridor are similar in age, stature and it occurs to me that i am bathig in homogeneity. I don’t think i saw a single black person the whole time, but maybe i just wasn’t paying attention to that observational parameter.  I am dumbfounded by the price of the beer and pizza. It is $13.00 for a beer and $20.00 for a beer and a pizza. Healthy food other than water is absent from the building. I knew the prices for concessions would be outrageous but it is starting to sink in that all of this is paying the salaries of all of these workers and some of them are getting paid on a huge scale. Up the escalators, through the doors, around the stairs and we are finally at section 317, row C, seats 20 and 21. Our “nose-bleed” seats actually offer an unobstructed view of the ice.

There are some Montreal Canadians fans behind us. They are muttering insults to me under their breath and one of them is touching my Toronto Maple Leafs hat, which i admittedly wore for provocation. I wanted to experience the full weight of the sanctioned aggression of this cultural event upon me. Yes, i am masochistic when it comes to wanting to experience the full range of human emotion. After a short film played for us on the cube shaped monitor hanging in the middle of the ceiling, the opposition team takes to the ice, drowning in the deafening boo’s of the home fans. After a couple of minutes of that charade, the home team sends out a couple of children, ages 8 or 10, skating in Montreal Habitants uniforms. The away team sent out brutal, despised men and the home team sent out a couple of cherubs. Our hearts melt for the future those children represent to us. Our emotions have been stirred. If the away team wins then the myth of slaughter by a foreign invader comes alive but if the home team wins then the righteousness of the chosen people is confirmed.

The game starts and $40 worth of beer later, the first period ends. We are in the washrooms urinating. There is a man, a hardcore Quebecer who is cursing in the face of the New York rangers fan urinating next to him. The new york rangers fan speaks no french and so he pays no attention to the man. Next, the man is cursing at me because of my hat. The other thing i noticed is that for the first time in my life, the lineup for the men’s room is 2 to 3 times longer than it is for the adjacent women’s room. This is an indication that there are many more men at this event than women and that the men may have been drinking more as well. Once this is all done, we are headed  back to our seats for the second period.

Half way through the second, a short fight breaks out and i am honestly relieved. Sure, the violence disgusts me but the game has been boring me so badly  that i am awakened by the violence. My nervous system reacts with increased alertness and a mild fight or flight tingle in my blood. The fans are feigning outrage and the fight is over. Next thing i remember: The game is over and the Canadians win 4-0. Toronto also won that night 6-1. My two favourite teams won and somehow that is pleasing to me. The highlight of that event was sharing in a communal experience with my brother. But to be honest, it could have been any event and i would have had that pleasure. I did not need to contribute to the brutally inflated salary of some savage man’s sport fetish to have a good time with my brother. But then, i guess there are different kinds of people in the world. Introverts tend to like to spend time in small groups, getting to know the intricacies of individual traits while extroverts like a huge crowd and live more on the periphery of their senses. That night, i learned where the extroverts are hanging out.

A Ted Talk by one of my favourite psychologists Phillip Zimbardo talking about boys brains and why they are failing globally.This talk touches me personally as i work with boys who are largely fatherless and without direction, kicked out of so many schools…

A Ted Talk on Gender and the Fall of Man. I usually enjoy any intelligent conversation about gender. It is an endlessly rich and complex subject and just when you think you have seen everything to do with it, there are new perspectives which emerge. I liked this talk a lot because it is presented by a woman who seems to have a lot of empathy for the state of manhood today. I have always thought that we can only have justice when women march for men, whites march for the rights of blacks and we all march for compassion. This speaker makes the compelling argument that boys are in dire need of direction because the positions which men used to occupy are no longer available. Her talk is one of the most graceful, humble acknowledgements of women’s new role as leaders of society which i have ever heard. I particularly enjoy how she claims some responsibility for the state of men in society today and positions women as ultimately responsible for ensuring men’s success in the future. It is in my view an enlightened position.

Ted Talk on Compassion. This is a wonderful talk too. I have to say that everything the speaker says about compassion i was following with much interest but for some reason, she makes her message explicit to women and draws links throughout her talk between women and compassion. It seems to me, if there is one thing you want to be inclusive about, it is a discussion about compassion. I think there can sometimes be a bias, or a tendency towards linking nurturing, empathy and compassion with women’s work. I resent such implications, but still the talk is interesting overall.

Ted Talk on Looking Inside the Brain

I will let you judge for youself why this short talk is both fascinating and scary.

I have recently noticed another type of expectancy effect which does not seem to have a name in the psychology literature and seems most closely related to the one we are talking about. It is a type of expectancy effect, only in this particular manifestation, one unconsciously resists compliance to what one perceives to be the desired outcome. Thus, if i feel a person may be testing me in some fashion, i may feel inclined to “mess with their heads” as it were for the simple unconscious purpose of demonstrating my autonomy and my freedom. We know this type of behaviour exists by observing the “occupy wall street” sit-ins. People have assembled not to protest exactly but simply to affirm and assert their right to speak. It is a type of show and tell without necessarily being conflictual with the order in place. Very small children seem to engage in this type of behaviour as well but we call that “opposition”. What if it were the adult being contrary and opposite to the child. Necessarily if one is opposite than the other is as well no? Anyway, i am deviating from my original idea as usual. Actually, maybe not so much of a deviation after all. Let’s look at an adolescent for a minute. An adolescent will invariably identify with some form of role model. Perhaps the same or opposite sex parent, or someone in the community. That identification may take on a positive or negative form. If the case is positive in the extreme then the adolescent says : “i want to be like that person” if the case is negative in the extreme she says: “that person is an example of everything i do not want to be”. In either case, there is an identification with the model. If the identification happens to be negative then that adolescent is disposed towards a type of cognitive influence i would call the counter-expectancy effect. This term refers to one’s tendency to do the opposite of what one feels the other expects of them.

If you have come across anything in the psychology literature which expresses this effect more succinctly please forward it to me, otherwise i am going to telephone the American Psychological Association and advise them of my new discovery immediately! (joke).

Sometimes, the person being picked on at school is projecting a big lack of confidence into the environment. I certainly don’t want to blame the victim. No one should be picked on, ever, by anyone. Still, that lack of confidence and lack of assertiveness permeates the environment and sadists see an opportunity for some fun. Others, not necessarily sadists but rather equally insecure individuals are faced with the fight or flight response. They say to themselves subconsciously: “If this person is affraid of everything, then i must be the monster they are afraid of. ” And so, when the monster looks in the mirror and sees it’s reflection it becomes either very afraid or very angry. Perhaps it runs away and avoids the insecure person or perhaps it strikes because after all, striking down an insecure person is empowering in terms of evolution. The strong survive, remember?

Similarly, an angry person may project a lot of anger into their environment. They may see the world as a collection of conspiring foes. Seeing the world in that way seems to draw that kind of energy inwards.  I believe this is what Mihaly Csikszentmihaly refers to as Negentropy. The tendency for negativity to pick up momentum as it goes along in time and space, like a snow ball rolling down a snowing hill. This is why we have the saying: “when it rains it pours”. This means that when a couple of things fall apart, a few more things are going to tend to fall apart with them.  Negentropy is the tendency for negativity to be drawn inwards into a sort of black hole of negativity originating in the depressed or anxious person. Of course i say that the black hole originates in the depressed or angry or anxious person but those people became that way for reasons which were initially external. We may be born predisposed to those emotional states but environment goes a long, long way to making us slaves to those states. Thus, the angry person finds himself fighting all the time because according to him, he lives in a world of idiots, where everyone needs to be taught a lesson. Everyone is asking for it. This is what is meant when an angry person beats someone up and says: “he was asking for it”. The truth is that the beating was on offer before anyone could make a choice as to what they wanted. The angry person got a beating before he knew what it was and now he dispenses the beatings the way he was taught to do. We can make the same argument of sexual abusers since the majority of pedophiles and other sex offenders were themselves abused as children. If you were abused as a child, you should know that the probability of becoming an abuser in adult life is greatly increased.

A smile goes a long way. Smile at people on the street and you will see that many or maybe even most smile back at you. We implicitly know that what we project has some important relationship to what we ingest. I think this is why Gandhi said: “we must be the change we wish to see in the world” . I think this is also why the bible says: ” Mathew 7:12 : so in everything do to others what you would have them do to you”. The words of Gandhi and the words of the bible are saying to us that change starts with us and is amplified through our actions. Of course, bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people (if there is such a thing as good and bad people, which there is not). Let us just say that sometimes what is fed to an individual is not what they actually put out there. Take the example of a person who has done charitable work and been kind through nearly all of her life but finds herself one day abused and mugged. The Buddhist notion of karma and darma may be of some assistance in conceptualizing a framework through which to understand such incomprehensible instances. These instances are those with which the rational mind and science can not contend.

The problem with ego is that it does not really ever look at itself. It just is. It is the you which is being the you and doing what the you is doing. Superego can look at it but i can’t actually do anything. It is like a program running without an operating system. It is exerting an influence and bringing the ego into check but it is mostly running in the background and ego only allows into it what it can reasonably tolerate so there is no guarantee that anything going on in superego will get through in a meaningful and insightful way. Ego may simply decide to ignore superego. Unfortunately, the risk here is all too often, a number of gruesome psychosomatic symptoms which take on the very appearance of physical diseases. For all we know, those psychosomatic symptoms are directly linked with physical diseases. In this way of looking at things, the psyche may have tremendous influence over cancer, diabetes, heart health etc. We know that stress kills because of the hormones and neurotransmitters released during stress. It is therefore not that far a stretch to imagine a direct and causal relationship between emotional states, psychosomatic symptoms and the manifestation of actual biological disease. After all, if a thought can shape a neural reaction and a way of thinking can shape a neural network then our ways of thinking could just as easily be affecting us elsewhere in the body. I know that when i get nervous, my carotid artery starts to throb. When a male gets the psychological stimuli required for sexual arousal he experiences an erection and so forth. Let’s just agree that mind and body are inseparable and that all theories which separate the two out are barking up the wrong tree. There can not be one without the other.

So back to the subject of this post: what we do in the world affects what is done to us. We wear suits and ties to blend in so that the others don’t find us different or peculiar. Women of a certain age dress a certain way for the same reasons. If you want to belong to a culture, you are required to conform to that culture to some extent. This is ironic because we often hear that culture is what makes us unique. Perhaps there is a distinction to be made between personal and collective culture here. But that is another post entirely. Ultimately, i believe as an artist and art therapist and human being that what we put out has a direct relationship to what we get. While it is extremely unfashionable to suggest that women who are victims of sexual assault sometimes play a role in their own victimization i must say that women who dress a certain way are bound to get a certain kind of male gaze. Of course, this in no way excuses the violence done to women under that pretext but still, it does make you think about how what we do affects what is done to us. Ultimately, i am an advocate for the diminishment of ego and the augmentation of empathy. There seems to be a trend currently towards an investigation and reconsideration of the role of empathy in human evolution. I hope this trend continues because I believe this precious, dare i say sacrosanct human ability just might save us from the ego. Empathy allows us to put out what we hope to receive. It allows us to better understand why what we received seems so different from what we think we put out. Empathy puts an end to an argument and transforms it into a discussion. Empathy allows for the human trust bond to thrive and that is a good think because the human trust bond is the glue of our interrelationship, our economy and our society. Without it, we simply cease to exist, finding ourselves on an accelerated path towards apathy, sociopathy, negentropy and ultimately our own destruction.

So far, what i am saying is that most of us have an innate ability to relate on an emotional level with each other. You and I can’t do this now because each of us is sitting behind a computer screen and we are communicating on an intellectual level. You have no emotional cues to use in your relation to me, and i have none for you. Just words, ideas, thoughts on a screen. Still, let us assume we are relating. The most striking cases in which people do not seem to be able to relate on emotional levels seem to be found in people with asperger’s or autism spectrum disorder and psychopaths. For a person to relate on an emotional level, the following seem to be essential:

1) The inherited neural structure for relating emotionally. This structure is the scaffolding inherited across millennia of human evolution. It is the raw parts upon which is built our ability to relate emotionally. These raw parts include the structures of the limbic system such as the Amygdala, Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Cerebellum and hypothalamus to name a few. In their raw form, these parts of the structure are not developed but the potential for learning based development exists within them.

2) The experience dependent neural networks for relating emotionally. These parts of the inherited neural structure develop through time, as learning occurs and depend upon experience of the environment. The difference between 1 (inherited) and 2 (experience dependent) listed here is analogous to the difference between the inherited brain areas for language (Wernicke’s and Broca’s) and the experience dependent development of neural networks which actually contain what and how language is used. You are born with Wernicke’s and Broca’s but the specific neural pathways you employ when using language are unique to you, developing over the course of a lifetime of practice. Whether we are talking about non-verbal emotion or verbal language, ability in each area is determined by a combination of inherited and experience dependent features.

When I comes to the experience dependant part of the equations, environmental factors such as climate, nutrition and geographical location are all relevant to the extent that where you are born determines your culture of origin and that culture of origin goes a long way to determining how you relate emotionally and how you use language. Thus, there may distinct temperaments associated with individuals depending on whether they come from dry-tropical or  Mediterranean climates. Come to think of it, I have heard someone refer to a : “latin temperament” and “southern hospitality”

Being able to relate emotionally is one of the main things which make us human. As anability, it is up there with the ability to use tools, metaphors, fire and ingredients in a thermally processed meal. It is not that animals don’t related emotionally, in fact, perhaps that is all they do, but it is that humans seem to have a broader range of emotional nuance which is conveyed through a highly complex variety of signs and symbols. Some of those signs and symbols are actual spoken language but I believe that is only the tip of the iceberg. A person’s face can convey a dozen different shades of amusement while a chimpanzee probably only has a couple of shades of those things such as either amused or not amused. This is probably why the areas of the brain involved in facial recognition (fusiform gyrus, aka. fusiform face area or FFA) in humans is so highly developed. I am delving in conjecture here so let me get back to some things i know with a bit more certainty…

For a very long time, say, going back to the first caveman, any psyche to speak of was dominated by needs based emotions. I need no proof to accept the premise that man did not start out as a rational being as the bible would have us believe. I am willing to accept this premise on faith, no pun intended. We see in children that needs based emotions are first to appear as well. These appear before any rational ability in a child, just as they appeared first over the course of the human evolution. Our emotional roots developed before our rational minds. By the way, this is why we continuously look back on the past with contempt and think that people were such barbaric fools. The original needs based emotions motivated the fashioning of tools, the fabrication of clothes and ultimately everything we can now see around us. Those things were created out of needs which triggered emotions, which triggered creations. My premise so far is that needs based emotions are at the root of everything we have built including religion. We made god because we felt lonely. We felt lonely because we needed a friend. We needed a friend because we were inherently uncomfortable in cold, dark and dangerous environments where food was scarce. We realized that hunger made us needy for food and that made us angry because it was hard to find. We also realized that satiation made us calm and cool headed so we made tools to hunt with and we learned to plant seeds. We realized that we were happier when we were warm so we made clothes and fire. We did everything we did to survive because our instincts revealed to us in emotions that we needed to do those things. When our emotions went left, we went left, if they went right, we followed. Our emotions are the interface, the operating system through which we come to know our instincts.

lover's chess. A game played with hearts and minds.

Obviously, the physical brain structures for rationality and intellectual processing were there to some degree from the beginning. The seeds were there and those seeds evolved because as we all know, you can’t get something from nothing. What an intelligent design! The ability to reason in a more objective way, abstracted from emotion had to have developed much later. This take on the chronological course of events is seems evident in the development of a newborn’s brain. The right side usually develops faster for the first year or so to such an extent that it is physically larger. Remember, the right side is usually dominant for processing everything a baby needs to survive such as the tone of his mother’s voice, the odor of the nutrients being put in his mouth, the texture, temperature and pressure of his father’s touch, the physical location of his mother’s breast. Later on, that baby is still predominantly using the right brain to detect the emotional context in which he finds himself by analyzing the emotions being carried in the voices and on the faces around him. The left brain is developing from the beginning but at a slower rate and the fruits of that development don’t really get expressed in the behaviours of the infant until about 2 years into the game when he starts using verbal communication with any effectiveness. Even then, his words are all needs based. For the first few years of language acquisition everything the baby says is related to what he wants. Anyone with a child can confirm that the first words usually include designations of emotionally salient objects such as important people, objects and food. It is likely that if you have a child, you noticed that the first attempts at a sentence are something like: “I want”. It is going to be a long, long time before the baby is talking about anything which is not directly related to it’s own needs. This is called (by me) an extension of primary infantile narcissism. A few people learn to leave this state behind but most of us seem to do, make, say, think everything else on top of it as a building block.

Religion is one of the first major attempts to place rational thought upon the work of needs-based emotional thinking. It is the rational process of inference which allows for religion to hold as strong as it does. The higher order rational processes of deduction and verification were never applied by religious people to fully examine their doctrines. In fact none of the higher order, scientific rational processes were ever employed at any stage of religious thinking with any rigour. When scientific rational processes were used to examine religion, they were subverted and commandeered by emotional, needs based processes producing a sort of Frankenstein of information which confuses most of us and inevitably convinces many of us. I believe that the blind faith in science which currently exists is a result of needs-based emotions having dominated the human intellect for so long. Science is indeed exacting a just revenge on the emotional brain.

Let me finish this part of the post by summarizing that emotions evolved before reason and that rational thought culminated in what we now call science while emotional processes culminated in what we call Art or interpersonal communication, stopping of to create religion along the way. On one extremity, science is divorced (or wishes to be divorced) from emotion while on the other extremity, emotions defy reason and transcend our rational comprehension. I have also made the point that the evolution of the brain with regards to rational and emotional capabilities in human evolution finds a parallel in the development of those capabilities within one human being. What you can observe in the human mind over the course of humanity can to some parallel extent be observed within an individual over the course of their lifetime. When the changes in the brain occur over millennia for humanity we call it evolution and when the changes occur over the course of a lifetime we call it human development. Though I have not read it, I believe that in his book: “Descarte’s Error”, Damasio makes many of the arguments I am making in this post. It is on my list of books to read.

Wired For Language

So, where does all of this leave us? Ah yes, I began writing this post because I was reminded this week end that people think differently and that those differences are varied, nuanced and profound. At the same time, there are main lines or streams that people tend to belong to. Just as human sexuality is divided into primarily male and female types there may be a cognitive equivalent in primarily thinking and feeling types. Carl Jung wrote his entire theory of personality around the idea that people’s psyche’s exist along intersecting axes of thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting modalities. I haven’t read much about how he came to devise this interesting perspective but perhaps his creative process and research involved some of the ideas posted here.

I was reminded that people live along rational and emotional lines because I was talking with someone who I feel to be more rational than I and I was finding it difficult to navigate the ocean between us. Since I started learning about brain development and differences in personality I have observed that these two basic types exist all around me. Many times I have spent hours trying to convey the emotional content of an experience to someone who simply cannot grasp it, while another person in the conversation understands it perfectly. Naturally, whether a listener understands the content of what you are saying or not depends upon your communication style and the content of your message but that is exactly my point: Some people are more receptive of emotional communication and others are more able to receive what I call schematic or data type of communication. We have historically held the stereotype that women belong to the first category of empathic listeners while men belong to the second category of data oriented communicators. Of course just about everyone is a combination of rational and emotional being but most of us tend one way or the other and I believe that aspergers, autism spectrum disorders and to a different degree sociopathic behavior all serve as examples where rational thought has little or no emotional-relatedness as counterweight to it. I am not saying that there is not emotion in those states of existence but that the ability to relate on an emotional level is diminished. Some people can be assessed as having low I.Q and I am suggesting that some people can be assessed as having low E.Q (emotion quotient). Perhaps autism is an overwhelming right hemisphere with no rationality to temper it. Whatever the case, the main distinguishing attribute of these 3 states of existence is the inability to relate emotionally. The individual with Asperger’s is relating in a distorted manner with little attunement, the individual with autism is relating in a confused and cahotic manner with little or no comprehension of the other’s emotions and the sociopath is relating with no regard for the emotion of the other. In the case of the sociopath, there is no actually relating because emotional relating requires empathy.

One might argue that humanitiy’s interest in the relationship between the mind and the heart goes back to the earliest beginnings of culture. Since the beginning of recorded use of symbols we may find some expression of the relationship between heart and mind. The Taoists have made it their life’s work to examine the relationship between thought, feeling and action. Shakespeare devoted his life’s work to the subject. The television series Star Trek based it’s main characters on opposite but complimentary sides of the equation with Spock being the voice of reason and Kirk the voice of emotion. References to our implicit knowledge that a rational mind and a feeling mind are different things can be found cross culturally throughout history. In the bible, the ten commandments might be interpreted as the rational mind’s overlay upon emotion. An academic critique might be perceived as revenge of the rational mind upon art. When science came out to challenge needs based emotional thinking, it was punished pretty severely. Galileo comes to mind here so I guess it is only fair that science return the favour now. Your thoughts?…

With advances in neuroscience spurred on by Penfield’s neuroanatomic discoveries and Roger Sperry’s split brain experiments we have come closer to seeing the mind and thought itself as a set of functions localized in the brain. Research into the functioning of implicit and explicit memory tell us that there is a process of encoding semantic, declarative memory for schematics and facts while there is a different process for the encoding episodic memories of emotionally rich, autobiographical experience. No, the information is encoded with a marker to so that sensory triggers can induce implicit memories (like a perfume reminding you about how you felt on vacation) and certain words can induce semantic memories (like when you are primed to think about “white” and “cold” when I say “snow”). Without going any further about function and localization here, let me say that the current scientific direction appears to be that by knowing the brain, you can know the mind. By taking it apart and rebuilding it you will know everything there is to know about it. While this may be completely true of a machine, the mind is not a machine. However, I believe the premise to be essentially true except that I reserve a portion of my faith for the belief that there is some part of human experience which is unknowable to science. Just as there is some part of being 80 which is unknowable to a toddler or some part of being a man which is unknowable to a woman etc… (I hear science laughing at me here…but only because science has no feelings!)

Betty Edwards wrote a book about Drawing on the right side of the brain in the late 70’s or early 80’s applying some of neurology’s discoveries into the practice of art education. A number of books and methods were produced to illustrate and in many cases oversimplify the concept of lateralization. Because research into the area of neurology has broad political implications, any information we get from studies should  treated with scrutiny. Before this period in neuroscientific investigation different brain types or personality types if you prefer were cause for much misunderstanding. Now that we know a lot about people’s brains, there is not much less misunderstanding unfortunately. In fact, the old feud between art and science persists, each thinking the other a fool. On the positive side though, I should say that there are signs of relief. Concordia recently inaugurated the arts and science building which houses engineering and fine art faculties in the same house in the hope that the two will fight no more. Also, art therapy emerges as proof that art and science can live together and accomplish great things. Leonardo Da Vinci proved this marriage was good first, but still, art therapy is happy to follow in his footsteps. Finally, art therapy emerges to walk the fine line between reason and emotion on the tightrope with heart on one end and mind on the other. I apologize for this shoddy and brief history about how art therapy came to be a player in the discussion but I only wanted to mention it. I will add that art therapy is the most current movement in the fields of art and science leading to a hybridized and highly sophisticated understanding of the relationship between rational linguistic thought and pre-rational, non-verbal emotion.

Back to my motivation for writing this post again for a second. You know, now that I think of it, it’s funny. I set out to write a post because something triggers my interest on the path of my reflections. In the process of writing my post I go here and there and ultimately get far away from the origin of my motivation. Let me focus on it for a second here. I began to write this post because the gap between schematic and emotional thinkers has troubled me. Quite often I have seen differences between the two types lead to conflict, lack of respect and coldness. Many times I have found myself in conversations with data heads, trying to communicate some idea about the inner workings of the emotional mind and felt I would do better explaining it to a dog. Many times I have felt that a data head was exhibiting a non-verbal behavior and verbal language which was offensive or at least very boring. Many times, I have been talking to data heads and watching their heads role as I communicate in the area of what I believe to be the most important discussion we can have. So many times I have heard brutally conservative political views which seem to lack any kind of understanding of the deeper, emotional qualities of human experience. People who employ black and white type thinking to human relationships tend to be data heads. They count the numbers but don’t see the real human issues behind the numbers. They may become administrators but not very good ones. Anyone who is good at anything has balance and equilibrium between the two essential sides. They have what Jung called Integration. No knowledge exists in a vacuum. No specialist is anygood to anyone unless her knowledge is placed in context and counterbalanced by knowledge in another field. Ultimately, all types of knowledge and modes of thinking must come together if we are ever to get a complete picture. The faith in specialists should be treated with extreme prejudice in most cases and questioned at all times.

On another note, I have come to make peace with those who I believe to be data oriented, schematic thinkers. They are not bad people. They feel love in their way and they seek closeness with others in their way. We can all get along. Emotional players have their faults as I mentioned earlier and they need the scientific mind to help them contain and structure their feelings. Alas, it seems we are together for the long haul so we might as well try to close the gap between us or learn to live with our differences.

I think that is about the gist of it. Thanks for tagging along on this massive post!

Suddenly, one of the psychotherapists gets up and asks: “Why should the psychotherapist be thrown out of the physicists’ discussion when the physicists’ contributions are welcomed in the psychotherapists’ discussion?” and: “is it true that all opinions, ideas, contributions bear equal weight in the realm subject matter related to understanding human behaviour, motivation, psyche?” In the case of the phsysicists’ discussion it is not hard to see that the intrusion of the psychotherapist is not welcome and that his ideas are not relevant. Yet the physicist who in this case has never given much thought or energy to understanding human relations has been given a place at the table. How can this be? What can he possibly contribute with so limited an understanding of the forces at play in human dynamics. Let’s assume for a second that he has done some reading but has not practice or experimental understanding of what it means to be immersed in those dynamics as a therapist. He still has not one iota of understanding about how to apply what he thinks he knows about people. Why should his opinion even count at all? His perspective as a sentient person who has lived in relationships and experienced the psychodynamics he has read about should perhaps be of some value. However, if he is really sitting in a room of seasoned therapists with 40 years experience in clinical interventions then his opinion has already been taken into account in the discussion and he is at best redundant. Of course therapists would likely validate his views and give him whatever credit those views may merit but they would listen to him because that is simply what a therapist does. However, they would probably talk about how useless his input was and how little insight into the problem the physicist seemed to have. If the physisist persisted in pushing his point of view forward, i imagine that one of the therapists would politely ask him to shut up.

It is clear that physics is a discipline with problems and solutions which are either right or wrong and usually not both. In the realm of psychotherapy however, things are less certain. Because the field of psychotherapy is experience based and less empirically veryfiable a certain degree of subjectivity prevails and just like in politics, everyone’s opinion counts. I suppose,  it is a good thing in a democratic society that everyone should participate in politics and in defining our conceptualizations of mental health and illness (which in itself is a hugely political process). At the same time, i don’t believe that everyone’s opinion in the fields of humanities and mental health have equal weight. I guess that is why we have schools to teach us which views have more weight. Even though some direction from above is warranted, it would not be quite right if all matters of mental health were to be decided by only a small group of specialists such as psychiatrists and pharmacists.

I am not sure what the answers are here but i know that these are the questions we need to be asking. Obviously, physics and psycholotherapy are different matters requiring different approaches. The area of psychotherapy does not lend itself easily to pure experimental methods. The one exception to this rule is found in cognitive behavioural psychotherapy because this form alone has a robust scientifc base to it in the form of experimental reliability.

On the other hand, this form of therapy is only suitable for some people and then, only for some issues. When dealing with people, there are variations of culture, individual differerences, inherited and learned variables all needing to be considered and  which, once taken into account provide an image of the quality of human experience rather than any quantitative knowledge. In a sense the difficult situation presented in the illustration of this case really presents a comparison between the domain of physics and the field of psychotherapy when, there is in fact little similarity between the two. It is a comparison of the proverbial : “apples and oranges” to some extent. Nonetheless, we must strive to have some uniformity in a theory or set of principles guiding a theory of psychotherapy. We strive towards a unifiying set of principles which will hold regardles of individual or cultural differences. These principles must ultimately be written into universal code for all cultures to review, modify and ultimately adopt. Cognitive behavioural theory and Ego theory come close to reaching this goal. Though this idea might sound like fascism to some, i believe it is in the best interest of all people to accept to find themselves in acollective mirror of our psychological existence, just as we accept to find our physical selves reflected in the mirror of medicine. The principles must be flexible enough to include every human being yet rigid enough to withstand those irrelevant opinions and useless introjections  steming mostly from ignorance.

In a sense, i am saying leave wisdom to the wise and let them share it with us but let us not all fight for the status of the wise man.

These masks speak for themselves. Made by 10-11 yr. olds with special needs.  Plaster casts of ready made faces. Acrylic paint and Psyche.

1) Fast tempo music for which the beat is synchronized with the step of my run is more motivating and can increase the length of my run (Stamina).This type of music makes me determined and converges my focus on the task.

2) Slow tempo music which is more melody than rhythm can affect my mood positively and decrease my attention to time passing by drawing my attention to beauty of the sound and enhancing my visual perception. This type of music makes my focus divergent.

3) My velocity changes depending on whether i am running, rollerblading or biking such that my speed and distance increase in proportion to the method of transport used.

4) The faster i move, the slower time feels to be moving forward such that i cover the same distance in less time. Ie. The 5 km jog takes more time than the 5 km bike ride, thus time feels as though it were moving slower.

5) The slower i move, the faster time seems to be felt. Jogging at a slow pace means covering  less distance over the 24-28 minute exercise. Thus at the end there is the impression that time has moved quickly, ahead of my body’s movement in space.

Summary

The dependent variable in this study were my personal experience of time. The independent variables were type of music being played (Fast or Slow) and means of transport (slow: running, medium: rollerblading and fast: Biking). The findings indicate that both music tempo and speed of transportation affect the experience of time passing during physical exercise.

Conclusions

This experiment was replicated roughly 20 times with consistent results. It is therefore the present working hypothesis that speed of music and speed of movement affect the perception of time passing to such an extent that the faster the music and movement, the slower the perception of time.

Discussion

This experiment was highly subjective. In fact, it could be argued there is little objectivity to it at all since the subject of study is the experimenter himself. The lack of empirical methods in this study should not serve to discount its value. Rather, it is argued that the most adequate means of assessing and understanding subjective experience is through subjective means. While many tests have been devised to assess the quantity of human experience through likert scales and score evalutations, few tests have ever approached an understanding of the quality of human experience. I argue here that art does this better than science does and that when it comes to experience, an understanding of it’s quality is far more valuable to human knowledge than any quantitative assessment could grasp.

It must be said that other factors such as fatigue, mood, level of hydration, climate, time of day all affect motivation and therefore the experience of time passing. Some days, i was tired before my run and the exercise seemed more painful which all contributed to a sense of time time and distance moving more slowly. This experience is what i call the quicksand experience. It is one in which the more one struggles to get out, the more one feels entrenched. Notwithstanding these confounding factors, over a period of 20 or so trials, it was definitely observed that music type and speed of travel affect sense of time passing. The implications of this for sport and motivational psychology would be that the correct music for an individual practicing a given exercise increases motivation and therefore endurance. The music factor could be combined with specific visual cues to give the illusion of greater speed and possibly increase performance by reducing the perception of time passing. This combination of visual cues and correct music could be useful in a fast moving hockey game and might actually slow players perception of time to such an extent that they gain greater control over the movement of the puck and greater endurance while also getting less tired.

When someone asks you who you are or what you do, your ego is answering. When you ask yourself who you are, your ego is answering. The fact that you can ask yourself who you are is a pretty good indication that this ego thing of ours exists. There can be no I without it. Being an I means you have one. Freud’s psychodynamic theory posits that this ego is your primary identity and that it is the interface between you and your external world. Jung might have referred to the ego as the mask or the self but we need more research to see if these terms are equivocal. In any event, when you look at yourself and say this is who i am, you are most likely talking through your ego, ie. your sense of self. If you are really balanced and really in equilibrium, that ego encompasses your desires, your fears, your conscience and you are not too defensive. You accept yourself as you are with your failings, your successes. Your failings are not dramatic causes for depression and your successes are not used as narcissistic means of inflation of your ego, thus making you an ego-maniac. Ego maniacs or egotistical people revamp stories of successes again and again all with the expressed interest of self inflation or feeling better about themselves. If you are too defensive, your ego becomes rigid, inflexible and prone to cracking. Remember that what does not bend, breaks. If your ego is not flexible enough to tolerate a certain amount of criticism and judgement than it will invariably become so rigid that when it finally does break, is will be destroyed. This, according to Freud would be one primary cause of psychosis. This is the stuff that ends one up in a mental institution. It is generally believed among psychodynamic practitionners that a flexible or semi-permeable ego is more adaptive for the human psyche. On the other hand, an ego which is overly permeable has no boundaries. This will  also lead to psychological trouble. We may all know of one or two people who refuse to draw any lines in the sand or commit to anything. Everything is always fine. Usually these people are advocates of anarchy and cahos choosing to believe that there is nothing to be done any way you slice it and that a certain kind of nihilism is the best position to adopt. These boundriless egos are led left and right and unfortunately, they are often enslaved by the rigid egos who need them to do their bidding. You can see that most of the boundariless egos are on the bottom of the social strata while most of the rigid, authoritative and inflexible egos belong to people at the top. People at the top naturally have an interest in the more flexible and maleable egos because they can be controlled, much to the dismay of the individual who calls himself an anarchist.

Freud’s psychodynamic theory centered around a number of concepts but none is perhaps more central than that of ego defenses. Freud observed in thousands of hours of psychoannalysis that patients were defensive. If he poked in one area, the patient would reinforce the wall. If he poked in another area, the patient would bite back. At other times, a poke at the ego would lead to a spiral of depression or hysterical outbursts. Freud eventually came to name many defense mechanisms which his patients tended to employ. You can witness any one of these defense mechanisms daily in any of the people around you, though i do not suggest you make it your job to do so because you will stop living the relationship and begin intellectualizing it and this intellectualizing is in itself a defense mechanism. The defenses described by Freud are among others: Intellectualiztion, denial, reaction formation, sublimation, displacement, repression, regression to name some of them. If you are interested, there are others listed here:

http://www.internet-of-the-mind.com/list_of_defense_mechanisms.html

There is a lot at stake  in the ego. After all, if you can imagine that the ego is everything you think you are in this world, there is a lot to loose by having that concept smashed to pieces. Look at religions as a prime example of the manifestation of ego. Look at how inflexible religions are to each other. Look at how unwilling each religion is to accept some part of the others. This is ego defense in action. Ego defenses of course, operate on the instinct of fear. Fear of death to be more precise. The destruction of the ego means nothing less than the dissolution of self and ultimately, you can not live without a self. It is metaphorical and litteral death for anyone who experiences it. Naturally, we are willing to kill to protect it. This has been known throughout history as dying for what you believe in. Countless people have done it through the ages and many do so as i write this. Fear directs behaviour. Freud saw this early on and put into words the idea that we run from death towards libido or love and that we kill to overcome our the fear of death or put another way, we kill to survive. Or so the ego believes. Of course our consciousness or superego tells us differently. Our superego tells us it is wrong to kill, but it only tells us this once the killing is done. The ability for the superego to reflect to us an image of who we are is only secondary to the egos drive to be who we are. Based on this, i believe that a significant portion of behaviour and human action is actually not cognitive in origin. Put another way, our behvious is thoughtless dribble which is reflected upon afterwards. Freud saw this too in his notion of Id. The id is an animal within us made of pure instincts. It is driven to satisfy those instincts without any thought being required anywhere in the process. Drug addiction would be an illustration of Id overcoming ego. All instinctual behaviours such as obsessive compulsive behaviours are essentially unthinking behaviours which are eventually followed by thoughts like: “maybe i shouldn’t do that” or “why am i doing this?”.  Cognitive Behavioural specialists posit that thoughts themselves are at the origin of those behaviours and while they make an incredibly solid case for this view, i continue to feel that much, if not most of our behviour transcends thought or at least precedes it.

Now that we know we have an ego, what are we going to do with it? The Buddhists propose that we forget it. Or more precisely that we condition ourselves to observe the illusion of ego. Buddhists meditate for lifetimes on end to this effect. They focus on the formlessness of form. What is ego but a bubble which one has built to contain the I within it. It is a uterus which the human psyche can not do with out. We are born into this world crying and we can not bear the initial trauma of that separation at birth so we spend our lives recreating that initial environment of protection by building a house. When a buddhist says we must destroy the house that ego built, this is what is meant. Still, even a buddhist can’t have no ego. I think it is more that the ego becomes so flexible that it is immutable and invulnerable to attack. Look at a blade of grass. It is walked on, rained on and a hurricane may even blow over it though it may remain intact. Of course there are conditions which must be met in order for the grass to grow and be healthy. For a buddhist, i think these conditions amount to compassion and humility but i’m not sure. I hope to ask the Dalai Lama some day.

That’s it for now. this is a big topic and i could see myself updating this post in a few days. Please consider that I write these things for nothing else than the pleasure of having you read them.

Namaste.

So far, i have described the path i followed from a starting point of lowly victim to ascendant overcomer.  I should finish my original description of the incident by telling you that i got into my car without my gps system and eventually got lost on a detour and that all this eventually led to me being about 20 minutes late for my first day of work. The whole time this was going on, i was imagining myself catching the thief red handed and rendering some swift justice. But the point of this whole post is not to fuel the fire of my initial rage at having been disrespected and abused. The point is to tell you how i have tried to move past this. So, as my story goes, i move from a position of victim to a position of privilege because you could say that anytime you can learn something about the world and human nature, you are experiencing privilege in it’s most raw state. After all, learning about our world makes you smarter and this means nothing less than the survival of your genetic lineage over time, or so Darwin tells us.

Following the empathy for my abuser, I am lead to a position of greater self awareness. From this resilient transition, this transcendence from the initial problem i become more humane. After having been through this cyclical transition a few times, i find there emerges a certain form of habituation to the problem. It is a fact that i have become relatively more comfortable with the reality that people steal things, rich from poor, poor from rich and that this is an ordinary or at least common part of our experience. We may all gradually become habituated to the reality that theft is common, to such a degree that we do not even question whether or not a purse will be stolen when it is left unattended. When the purse is stolen, we look at the victim as having made a mistake by leaving it.  I find myself getting almost this habituated each time i turn the other cheek. Of course, turning the other cheek is not exactly what happens in my case because there is no criminal to confront. No note of thanks and no apologies for the offence. I don’t really have a choice in that regard. The only choice i have is to either stay angry, or choose a more light hearted path towards some kind of forgiveness, or at least acceptance. So far as i am growing and moving forward in my consciousness towards more enlightened places i am on the right path. It is what happens afterwards – the apathy – which frightens me most. It is that process of habituation, normalization of horrible acts which alarms me. Now is a good time to turn to the last part of this post about  Abuse, Resilience, Habituation and Apathy.

While a certain amount of normalization is a good thing, it can go too far, turning us into complacent fools and slaves of our own making. Normalization allows me to limit the trauma inflicted upon my psyche. It is the process through which i say to myself: “It’s not so bad. This kind of thing happens all the time and I should not take it personally because it is about material wealth and in the end, materialism is at the bottom of the list of things which account for the humanism that i want to be part of “.  Still, to take one step further in this process of normalization, is to walk too far into the abyss of apathy. An abyss where I feel nothing. Where i expect robberies, muggings, violence to occur nightly, and when they do, feel nothing. Yes, it is apathy itself which is the scourge of our humane existence. It is apathy which is that most harmful legacy, left behind for victims to collect from abusive transactions. The abuser already has the virus of apathy. After all, you can’t hurt another person unless you able to muster the apathy to do so. The abuser is infected and you must find a way to live with that abuser in your midst without catching the bug. There is no other way to help yourself or others. Empathy is the bridge, compassion is the cement. I walk a path between two places, for the stakes of doing nothing when waters rise is far too high. The tally incurred by refusing to walk  that path is nothing less than the loss of your very soul to the careless abandonment of care.

Joni Mitchell wrote a song called Shine a while back and it evokes the thought and feeling of this post for me. Check it out.

Conference announcement & invitation: (see poster below)

The AATQ (Association des art-thérapeutes du Québec), invites you to attend a conference entitled Braving our Unicity. This timely conference will look at the uniqueness of the arts used within the context of therapy. Our keynote speakers, René Bernèche, Yvon Rivière et Julia Byers will explore the particular contribution of arts therapies to the vast field of mental health.

This event highlights the 30th anniversary of the AATQ and will be held in Montreal, on September 24th and 25th 2011. It will bring together creative arts therapists, health practitioners, educators, psychosocial workers and students. We will examine the approaches used by humanistic, positive psychology as well as by psychotherapy through creative arts, in order to identify the specific characteristics of art and the creative process within clinical practices. This conference is an opportunity to acquire and share knowledge relating to the vast potential of these approaches, which implements theories from different disciplines. In the late afternoon, an experiential, interactive workshop will further explore these notions with the participants in a collegial atmosphere.

An exhibition of the work of artist and art therapist Thomas Shortliffe will be presented. On Saturday evening, we cordially invite you to an evening celebration, complete with dinner and festivities, held on the theme “originality”.

Visit the AATQ website for further details, registration and regular updates. www.aatq.org , www.facebook.com/CreativeArtsTherapiesQuebec

L’AATQ (Association des Art-thérapeutes du Québec) vous invite à la conférence « Risquer l’Unicité ». Cette conférence donnera l’opportunité d’examiner plus attentivement l’aspect unique des arts dans le contexte spécifique de la thérapie. Nos conférenciers, René Bernèche, Yvon Rivière et Julia Byers, nous guideront dans l’exploration de la contribution originale des arts thérapies dans les pratiques et applications dans les vastes champs de la santé mentale.

Cette journée vient souligner le 30e anniversaire de l’AATQ et se déroule à Montréal, le 24 septembre 2011. Elle réunira tous les thérapeutes par les arts, praticiens du domaine de la santé, éducateurs, intervenants psychosociaux, et étudiants. Nous examinerons les approches de la psychologie humaniste, positive et de la psychothérapie par les arts créatifs, pour cerner les particularités de l’art et du processus créatif dans les pratiques cliniques. Le colloque sera une occasion d’acquérir et de partager des connaissances relatives au vaste potentiel de cette approche qui permet si bien la réalisation des théories puisées de plusieurs disciplines. En fin d’après- midi, un atelier expérientiel interactif pour tous les participants permettra une exploration dans une atmosphère de collégialité.

Une exposition des œuvres réalisées par un artiste et art thérapeute, Thomas Shortliffe sera présentée. Vous êtes ensuite conviés à la soirée du samedi qui est réservée à une célébration avec dîner et festivités sous le thème de «l’originalité».

Consultez le site web de l’AATQ pour de plus amples détails, l’inscription et des mises à jour régulières. www.aatq.org ,www.facebook.com/CreativeArtsTherapiesQuebec

–

Thomas Shortliffe, CCC, ATPQ
B.A psych, B.F.A, M.A.A.T
Chair of Ethics, AATQ

Anyway this whole story started because i was sitting at a table with some friends. Then a couple of new faces were introduced to me. One seemed absolutely angelic and pure while the other seemed more challenging. The challenging one definitely got my defenses up a couple of times by asking questions of an intimate nature. Questions which would expose me as vulnerable in some manner. I realized that I was probably producing a defensive reaction in him, even though i had barely spoke a word. My face, my posture, my behaviour, these were enough to trigger  a defensive reaction. At that moment, i believe the individual chose or felt compelled to strike. Biology only equipped us with a couple of choices here: fight or flee. On this point, Freud corroborates Darwin implicitly because Freud’s theory of instincts runs parallel to Darwin’s theory of the evolution of fight or flight responses even though neither author ever alluded to each other.

When the more challenging individual came to the table our amygdalas fired instantly as i recall. Like two cats gone prone in an alley, hair raised, immersed in scents, sounds and movement. A certain proximity of age seems to have been a factor. The justification for this hypothesis is that closeness in age and perceived social status my on one hand instantly draw two people closer together but on the other hand, they may view each other as competing for ressources.  In fact, a man never seems to fully know whether he should be cooperating or competing. Invariably, he is doing a bit of both at any given moment. Whether he sits with family or with foe, he must selectively cooperate and compete. A miserable state of affairs i assure you for the future of humanity, yet since we seem to be obligated to this destiny, i choose to question it, look at it and wonder what my role in it is. Luckily, there was nor violence nor extreme love but the man did seem to leave early after arriving and i wondered about that.

To sum up, novel faces are novel stimuli for the brain. When novel stimuli arise, the brain scrambles like fighter pilots dispatched to reorganize chaos. When that happens, consciousness experiences  a heightened state of anxiety and discomfort without being all together overwhelming. The mainframe still has control but the battle station is rattling a little from the bombardment of stimuli. Here are a few of the regions involved in facial recognition and social reasoning.

While teaching i am: standing, speaking, dictating, demonstrating, offering food for thought, answering questions, organizing, expressing rationally, intellectualizing and theorizing. As you can see from the characteristics of learning mentioned above, the features of teaching appear to be quite different if not opposite. It becomes hard to conceive of how learning and teaching might exist simultaneously within the same place. At first glance, it appears that teaching and learning would be at opposite ends of the spectrum. Can they co-exist? I suggest here that they may not be in perfect simultaneous co-existence. I present here that they may be mutually exclusive to some degree. It is true that there is a saying which goes: “you know you have fully learned something when you are able to teach it to others”.  when you enter: “learn something teach something” into google you have About 15,800,000 results and the first many pages are about the notion that you fully understand something once you have taught it to others. So i would conclude that there is obviously a relationship between teaching and learning but that they do in fact exist at chronologically distinct ends of a spectrum to the extent that when you are doing one, you are most likely not doing the other.

When it comes to teachers, parents are expected to be the best. In fact, whether or not they are any good is besides the point because they are the best any child learner has got. Circumstance plays a role here but i am trying to stay on topic. So my interest in teaching in learning has manifest itself through many years of asking people close to me: “which one are you, a teacher or a student?” I have asked my own parents, my best friends this question and both groups usually look at me with bewilderment. Yet, i find myself preoccupied with the sources of knowledge by finding those who disperse it and those who seek it.  To my own father i have asked: “have you learned anything from me?” to my best friends i have asked: “where have you learned what you have taught me?” My hope has always been to learn what the origin of origin is. Ironically, my friend has suggested that if you seek your source, you are circular. Still, i can not help to look for the meaning of meaning. It is in my nature.

I have sometimes accused those who are in a position to teach as being false prophets. At other times, i have accused them of being presumptuous, over zealous, egotistical and defensive. The learner is not defensive for he has no defense. He can assume a defense of course as any of us can but he will only appear as ignorant to the teacher. For a true learner to be recognized as such, he must be ignorant of  what he is learning and must therefore assume a position of subservience to the knowledge before him. Only in doing this can the learner learn. If the student assumes greater knowledge then he is either a teacher or an ignorant fool but nothing in between. In the words of one of my favourite hip hop groups Le 3ieme Oeil: “the one who says he knows is not wrong. The one who says he does not know is not wrong either. Wrong is he who says he knows while he does not”.

The questions which i raise in this post are not benign. They attend to the very processes through which knowledge is communicated in our society. My questions address the very nature of academic education and the role of authority in the transference of information. The role of mass media in the communication of knowledge is being seriously questioned at present and it is therefore timely that my focus on epistemology should surface. I ask you: “who has knowledge? who does not?who shares it?” put another way: “who’s got it, who wants it and who needs it?” As i tire, i realize i must come to the tip of my point. I can no longer indulge in this hypothesizing about the nature of the relationship between teacher and student. I must come to develop operational definitions and a theory of the dynamic between the teacher and the student. So i shall come out with it now. The teacher and the student are forever inseparable. Yet, focusing on one deletes any attention to the other. While one is engaged in a process of learning, one can not teach. Whilst one is teaching, one can not learn. Teaching and learning in fact must occur in the space between the two. I have heard that a conversation is an event in which people take turns being silent. Perhaps that is what teaching and learning is all about?

So on i go, reading about neuroblast migration and i think of people marching across the desert for 40 days and nights without food. I hear of the inferior parietal lobule and it’s function as a treatment center for visual, tactile and auditory senses. Then i think about the father, son and holy ghost. The father is the image of what is there. The son is what you can feel and the holy ghost is what you can neither see nor touch. It is what touches you. Schizophrenia has often been identified in concordance with a number of different types of auditory hallucinations which are sometimes god-like in nature. Many people suffering from schizophrenia have been prone to hearing the voice of god. They have also been prone to disorders of thought and language which is why it is currently held that schizophrenia is a formal thought disorder affecting primarily the temporal lobes. I hear the voice of god but it’s not schizophrenia and i am not even religious. How do you like them apples?

As i read futher into the words about brain trauma and how strange events can lead to extreme outcomes,  I think of how a certain kind of knock on the head from say a sports injury can lead to temporal lobe damage in particular and produce a number of massive shifts in an individuals perception and language abilities. I think at that point about how the bible talks about godly events leading to miraculous  realities. I hear terms like transpotentiation and i think of things in the many books of the christian bible transforming into many others. I must again assert that i am not a religious man. Still, i think we created the word of god for reason. It had to have a function for us and the evolution of the human psyche. In fact, i become aware now of my bias towards Darwinism. I place the premise of evolution above the premise god. I assume that if we have a bible or religion at all, it must be because it serves some evolutionary function. Intelligent design supporters believe the opposite. They believe that if there is evolution at all, it is because god wanted it that way. It is the classic chicken and egg scenario. Speaking of chicken and egg…

It seems that this is the biggest question which a human being can face. Which came first? If it is not the biggest question, it is surely the one which gives us the most trouble. The chicken or the egg? Wordsworth said “the child is the father of the man”. I think he was on to something and may have actually been Buddhist without knowing it. We have a big bang, but nothing before it. We have a consciousness with nothing before it. We have being with nothing before it. No wonder we have spent all of human history trying to get the bottom of it all! It is confusing to have an answer with no question or a question with no answer. In a sense the perpetual motion machine of  human consciousness is the question: “which came first”? Did i notice that girl on the subway or did she make me notice her? All of politics revolves around the same query.  Replublicans and conservatives believe that each individual has a choice and is born equal. The individual choses to be either good or bad. Democrats and liberals believe that somethings happened before you were born and that those things, over which you had no control, had tremendous influence over your life. In our beliefs, we are all a combination of both views. Sadly, we are all obliged to choose one or the other. It seems that permission to believe in two things is not permitted in our society. It seems that as Bush said: “you’re either with us or you’re against us”. Our society is extreme. Look around you and tell me, do you see a tempered, balanced equilibrium within a just society?  Or do you see opportunity, motivation, quest, dominance of force over weakness?  The weak perish in the social Darwinism we have been forced to adopt. It’s either you or me but not both of us. Isn’t that the message we are taught? I mean sure kindergarten teachers like my wife teach us to share. But those teachers don’t stand a chance against our biological imperatives for survival.  Nor can those teachers compete with the lust for love and acceptance which haunts us all. Advertisers feed on it and we are but sheep in their lairs.

I have come a long way from my original intention of posting about the relationship between neurology and the narrative we know as the christian bible. That  is only because it is impossible to talk about neurology and the bible without including absolutely everything in the universe. I hope you will forgive my digression and continue to indulge my multi directional methodology. Remember, the title of this blog is ” Art Therapy and Neurology”. I am thinking of adding the work “society”  in there so that the blog title would read: “art therapy, neurology and society”. It is a little long but then again, it is a title that represents everything in the known universe. I have never claimed to be a specialist. I am a generalist and as all generalists do, i attempt to look at everything at least once.

Welcome to the Abstraction Slideshow

Welcome to the Figurative Slideshow

Welcome to the Lightbox Slideshow

Welcome to the Collage and Early Works Slideshow

It is interesting to note that the functions at which Watson excels are primarily left brain functions. For example, Watson is very good at analyzing syntax and responding appropriately most of the time to the Jeopardy clues but is not so good at understanding symantics which require a kind of analysis carried out by right brain functions. Time and time again, you can see the stand-in Jeopardy host laughing his head off as Watson comes up with answers which make sense on a syntactic level but don’t add up in terms of symantics. Children make these kinds of logical errors because  they lack the experience necessary to provide them with contextual cues which would enable them to differentiate the finer nuances in meaning which adults are perceptually aware of. If you say to a very small child: “do you want to go outside?” and you say it in a way which indicates that you want to go out and have a fist fight, the child will not necessarily pick up on the prosody of language and therefore not understand that the proposition is actually an invitation to fight. The child may answer yes or no thinking you mean only to go for a walk. An adult can more accurately assess the intonation and the delivery of your words and distinguish between an invitation to go for a walk and an invitation to do battle, even though the syntax remains the same in the sentence: “do you want to go outside?”

Unfortunately, for centuries the term intelligence has been defined as a measurement of rote learning. We now come to understand that intelligence is far more complex and involves the activation of many if not all parts of the brain. The fictional character “Rainman” based on the real life person named Kim Peek, is a perfect example of what happens when intelligence occurs in mostly half of the brain. Kim Peek possesses a huge vault of factual knowlege but can not dress or wash himself. He can not entertain any reciprocal type of social relationship beyond the exchange of factual knowledge. Like any autistic person, including autistic savants, his ability to relate to people is severely compromised. The parts of the brain required for social interaction are enormously complicated and actually occupy a huge amount of cortical space. I read somewhere that the ability to relate socially is what most accounts for the higher proportion of brain mass to body weight among humans as compared to all other species.

I once posted that autism seemed to me to be an extreme version of the typical male brain. I made this observational hypothesis based on a couple of sub-observations. First, I observed that the traits of autistic savants most closely resembled the traits required in traditionally male dominated professions in general.  In particular, i know a couple of engineers who might be considered high functioning autism spectrum disordered if it were not for the fact that they hold high paying respectable jobs as engineers. I am thinking the area of engineering is male dominated not only because of sexism but also because of naturally occuring sex differences which probably make men in general better engineers than women in general. (Note that this does not mean there are not exceptions nor that some women can not be better engineers than some men. It means that the best or most competent male engineer will probably always outperform the most competent and most qualified female engineer. The same holds true of professional tennis players though for different reasons having to do with inate and inherited visuospatial abilities and inherited differences in muscle mass).  In the case of male engineers, some common traits appear to be: a tendency to categorize, organize, be less emotionally reciprocal and attuned, less socially oriented, quicker to assess cost-benefit analysis, perform deductive reasoning and calculate visuo-spatial data etc… To some extent, male domination in some professional areas has been hypothesised as resulting in part from millions of years evolution as hunter- gatherers. Males and females split the work up a long time ago and the things that women did made them better at those things while men excelled at the tasks which they undertook.

So the first assumption i used in forming the observational hypothesis that autism is related to typical male brain functioning is that traits of autism are qualitatively similar to traits valued in professions where males remain dominant. The second assumption is loosely based on the litterature about the effects of excess testosterone in utero, on the potential for the devlopment of autism in children. There is currently some evidence to suggest that a surplus of testosterone (the male sex hormone) in the womb is correlated with the incidence of autism. A third observation contributing to the hypothesis of a connection between the male brain and autism is in the fact that the male to female ratio of autism incidence is roughly between 4-6 : 1. The higher prevelance among males is a pretty good predictor of the validity of the hypothesis that male genes and the male brain are somehow play a part in the occurence of autism. Of course autistic females would be interesting cases for the falsifiability of that hypothesis.

So after a long winded turn about on the subject of autism and the male brain, let me come back to the artificial intelligence machine known as Watson. Watson is essentially autistic. He is a male machine with a propensity for the retention of factual knowledge. He has no right brain. Not to say that men have no right brain because the history of art clearly contradicts that proposition. It is to say that the left brain is a natural starting point when attempting to develop artificial intelligence because it contains all the conscious knowns-everybit of knowledge you can look at, quantify and assess.  All the words, most of the logical-linear functions, analytics and factual data are contained within left hemisphere’s functionality. Of course, if the left hemisphere were involved in decision making exclusively, we would never be able to make any decisions because as it happens you can’t even pick out the cereal you want in a supermaket if your right brain isn’t helping you. As it turns out, the left brain is more actively conscious than the right. When you are asleep, dreaming there is an increase in right brain activity while the left brain is almost completely dormant. This accounts for all that strange, surreal imagery you are likely to encounter in your dreams. That is not your left brain talking. You can tell by the content of the dream that your right brain has gotten hold of some of the words, thoughts and actions carried out by the left brain and it has interpreted them according to it’s own parameters. When you wake up, your left brain is dominant, for most people and your right brain runs in the background performing highly useful but mostly unconscious functions throughout the day. Content in the right brain includes image based thought processes but while an image may be worth a thousand words, a right brain can’t put a single word on an image. The right brain’s functions are intuitive and contextual. They put the data into context and give it meaning by relating it to sensory experience  and integrating the data into (implicit-procedural) memory. By integrating the data to memory, the right brain can then compare and contrast the information while sharing it with the left side in a process known as learning. Intuition and contextualization remain two of the most illusive features for A.I specialists who themselves are probably men, thinking as men do (generally speaking). So, as it stands for now, the right brain illudes A.I developers. Hopefully, none of this will sound too sexist to you.

In the fiction: “2001: A Space Odyssey” the super computer HAL (stands for: Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer) becomes sentient. I don’t remember how this happens exactly but he crosses over from the equivalent of Watson and becomes sentient. However, because he is mostly an analytical machine with a thin layer of empathy draped over it, HAL turns out to be completely psychotic. This is what can happen when the equilibrium is derranged.  Anyway, because HAL is using the left side of his computer brain, he makes some very wrong decisions about how to relate to people and if memory serves, he ends up killing the people he was designed to serve. This is the Frankenstein fear which we all have about super intelligent computers. We fear that they could one day end up controlling us. Anything which exhibits an enormous amount of knowldge, coupled with no amount of wisdom is a dangerous thing indeed. Anything which can learn everything about human nature, history, experience and still show no signs of caring is surely something to be feared. The right brain has been getting a very bad rap lately because it turns out that it dominated us through most of our evolution. It pushed religion on us and gave us “The Word”. Our left brain slaves simply spoke the word as dictated by the emotional right brain. On behalf of the right brain, i would like to apologize for that. That was bad. The right brain should have allowed more reason to temper it’s conclusions and should have been a little less emotional when those conclusions were tested. I think the right brain is getting the point. Slowly. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water in our current drive towards scientification. Let’s not assume that we can be human without emotions – or that we would even want to be. Let’s forgive the past and work together interhemispherically.

I left the comfort of my family`s home nearly 18 years ago. According to my parents, from my earliest childhood, i was running as far away as i could from their hugs and from the security of my family home.     For the first few years that i was away from home,  there was a transition from adolescence to adulthood. This first adulthood was more like a prolonged form of adolescence where i had a lot of the rights and relatively few of the responsibilities inherent to being a real adult. I lived free. Free to make my choices, stay at home or go to class while my rent and school were mostly paid for. Still, I chose to work, to use my own money (about 7000$ of money earned at minimum wage over a period of about 3 years-weekends as a busboy in a toronto restaurant). I did not have to use my money. My parents never asked me to.  It was a virtuous thing to do in some ways because i could have put the money under a mattress and invested it for my own personal gain. I was not raised to do that though. I was raised to contribute. To take the harder path, even though an easier one was available to me. I guess that is virtue. Virtue means you do it because it is the right thing to do, not because someone is looking. The reason why i can`t claim to be virtuous is that i have done things which i knew were wrong.  I think we all have. Sometimes the temptation is great enough and the supervision is absent and well, you just think you can get away with it.  In general, the reason why we don`t push each other out of the way on the subway platform or in movie line ups is because there are people watching. Then again, sometimes we do things in a crowd that we would never dream of doing alone or face to face with someone.

The road to virtue is supposed to be lonely. It is lonely because there are few people on it. If you choose it, you will be lonely because you will be marginal, seen as different. Some may despise you for it. Actually, there is a long history of virtuous people being stoned to death, hung, crucified and the like. Not hard to see why really. When someone chooses a higher or more enlightened path they are perceived as menacing to us. Their simple existence confirms our failings. Their every action drives home our inadequacies. When they speak about their views on life, they contradict everything we need to tell ourselves just to go about the days business. They are seen as: annoying, not focused on the real issues, preachy, holier than thou etc… The one cop who won`t take the bribe is usually not going to last long.  A common hero narrative depicts that one virtuous individual against all odds, fighting for the truth. The story of Siddartha is one such narrative. Jesus is another.

There are few virtuous people in my opinion. Not because people are bad or weak but because there are serious consequences, as mentioned above. Choosing a harder path often, if not usually means going against the mainstream. Swimming upcurrent. Who wants to do that? For what? To what end?. People who have children can sometimes be virtuous, although contrary to many parents’ beliefs, having children does not render you automatically virtuous. No, that would be too easy. Having children to suit your own selfish and narcissistic needs is no virtue indeed. Raising your children well however is difficult. It takes time, patience and tons of introspection. None of these things will pay you a dime, but all of them will help you reach virtue and instill it in your children. When you are introspecting you are engaged in  the virtuous activity of questioning yourself. It is countersocial though in the immediate moment because it is time not spent on facebook or the internet or in front of the tube.

In summary, i am not sure where the road to virtue lies. I know i have been on it at times and stubled right off at others. The times when i am on it, i seem to be struggling like hell to remain on it and extremely uncomfortable as my thoughts and actions grate up against the social sandpaper which always seems to rub me the wrong way. Oddly enough, when i am on the virtuous path, as uncomfortable as i am, I am somehow also quite proud of who i am. When i am on the easy comfortable path, i feel no pride, just comfort and ease. I don`t question myself because tthere is no need. I look only through the out-facing iphone camera at the world and take only the picutres i like. I am in control and direct things so as to have them fall in line with my personal comfort. Actually, it sounds pretty good when you put it that way! Alas, the comfortable path is an illusion. Working out is pain now for long term gain. The comfortable path will leave you in peace but you will not have anything of interest to contribute to a discussion. You won`t have any adversity to talk about or any experience to relate. Everything you say will revolve around how good it feels to sit on your couch and how bad things happen to you through no choice of your own. Though it sounds like i do, i do not devalue those who have chosen comfort over introspection but it is true that i prefer to talk to people who have chosen virtue.  I prefer talking with those people because they are a rare and special breed who see value in what most of us just consider to be pain and hard work. I like talking with them because there is something to be heard in their voices – something raw and researched. Something deep and sophisticated. There is pain there but never without resilience and that is the voice of those who are truly living.

Another person i know said that it only counts as giving if it costs you something. I think i remember that when Ted Turner gave 1 billion to some poor people in Africa, he qualified his donation by saying that it was the least he could do.  Some people seem very generous but that is only because they have so much to give. Should they get the credit for giving so much? Have they really given anything of themselves when they had so much in the first place? How did they get so much? Surely they have so much because they must have received at some point in their lives. Then the question becomes: “did they earn what they received?” Maybe they just received it for free by being born fortunate, into a wealthy family. Maybe they won the lottery and so have no work to show for the millions they have. I would find it easier to receive a million dollars from one of these people than from someone who had worked for it their whole lives. I would not want to take the money from someone who earned it through blood, sweat and tears. i would feel guilty about that. but if you won the lottery, i would gladly accept a part of you free fortune. Psychodynamics are such that receiving often entails some form of obligation. For this reason, women are particularly sensitive to who they might accept a drink from. The women who receive drinks from any person who offers will find it more difficult to receive than to give.

One must find a balance between giving and taking. As a rule, one should not feel badly about eating the last piece of pie but one must not jump on it too zealously either. One must not assume upon receiving a gift from another that they are generous, nor must one conclude that those who give us no gifts are not generous. In fact, giving seems to be an art form which some people are better at than others. In order to learn how to give, you must have been given some lessons in life. Your parents would have taught you a couple of things about sharing as a child. Your experiences would have led you to a certain state of consciousness through which you would have become able to understand that sharing is beneficial to you and that taking too much might leave you even more wanting. Conversations are great ways to practice give and take. At the end you can ask yourself: ”did i ask questions or answer them? was the topic centered around me or around the other party? was i an active listener or did i just hang on, hoping for the whole experience to end?” Really though, you don`t have to wait for a conversation to practice because giving and taking is part and parcel of what we do and who we are.

The miners in Asbestos Quebec were given jobs. They took those jobs. As a result, we give Asbestos to India and take money in exchange. Asbestos gives Indians cancer and we don`t give a shit. We take no credit for that. So you see, giving and taking on even the most basic level has implications and consequences. Most often, when we take something, it means someone else will not be taking it. When we take a second serving, it then means a second person will go without. However, it is possible to take a walk in the sun, a swim in the ocean, a cause to heart, without taking anything away from anyone.

The narrative in this movie revolves around the relationship between two brothers and their mother.  It is about the difficuties encountered through lack of education. One brother is successful and the other is less so. Or perhaps I should say that he is successful in another way and that the way in which he is successful is less understood and less appreciated by the larger public. He is successful by overcoming drug addiction and by maintaining his self. The more successful brother is so called because he achieves a higher ideal, more idealized by a larger public. His ideal is success through victory in fighting. This archetypal narrative has been so instilled in us through thousands of years of blood shed that we naturally gravitate towards us like a pavlovian dog, salivating at the sound of a bell.

Limitless

This movie features Robert De Niro and another famous guy, can’t remember his name… It is a fictional rendition about the story of ecstacy. I can tell you from experience that this dramatic representation is accurate. That is that it accurately represents the power and the danger of ecstacy. With regards to the drug war, this drama illustrates the reality that drugs are ultimately linked through sale and distribution with the highest levels of authority. So it is in Mexico, as it is in the U.S as it is in Canada. You can see how this fictional pill in the movie resembles the fictional pill in the movie series the Matrix. The drug allows you to see things you are not ordinarily allowed to see. Colors are enhanced, social relationships are amplified and actually simplified on a more base level. It becomes o.k to think about and discuss sex. It becomes o.k to curtail the small talk and get to the heart of the matter.  I have always been short on small talk. Actually, i am convinced i can not do it.

Just as with ecstacy, the pill in this film has a darkside. It takes you to the top but once you get to the top, you are changed, never to be the same again. You can not forget what you have seen, what you have learned. If the memories are positive, they are consolidated into the new you. If the memories are traumatic, such as in the case of a bad trip, they are also assimilated into the new you. In the 70′s psychotherapists used mdma in counselling because it actually does have the potential to enhance empathy. They stopped using it because they realized that it also had the potential to trigger psychosis. The potential of the substance is huge but overall, i think the same effects can be achieved naturally. It is possible to get to a place in your mind where you can feel the effects of ecstacy. It is not easy. You need to forget your pain. You need to let go of your anger, your expectations and your dissapointment. Now you are ready to experience the present. You can find bliss here. It is here. The wind is blowing in the trees, the sun shines on you, you are jogging, honoring your body, people pass you by in the opposite direction, smiling at you. Your mp3 player is playing a song which acts as fuel in your system, elevating you further. I had a moment like that today. I was aware of it in the present and saying to myself that i was experiencing the flow. Shortly after i became conscious of the moment, it fadded away. Like a dream when you realize you are dreaming, you know your time is numbered.  Consiousness really ruins everything that way. I think that is ultimately why people take drugs. Alcohol makes you forget does it not? Coke makes you so narcissistic and self absorbed that you can only think about the now and your own selfish urges. Acid takes you away to another place where you are just stuck on the stuff moving around you. etc. etc. Drugs take you away from your ordinary consciousness and that is why they are so appealing.

I believe that when you scratch beneath the surface of drug addiction you ultimately discover a world of pain which the addict is escaping. Why would someone look for something better unless they were dissatisfied with something they were living?  This piece of film portrays the dynamics of money, power and drugs. It shows  us the truth about how they are related. In fact, the actors do a good job of showing us who we are and what we do. That is why they get paid the big bucks and why we allow them to get famous. They show us who we are.

Greenberg

I had the distinct impression upon watching this movie that i was myself embedded in the fictional character: Greenberg. I think this movie is an ingenious piece of film. Movies don’t get to be called movies anymore in the age of the internet. The term movie denotes something unique and autonomous. A one piece show. You will know at a certain age, having seen a certain number of movies, that there is no such thing as a movie. As the Beatles said: “there’s nothing you can sing that can’t be sung…there’s nothing you can make that can’t be made…there’s nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game…Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be  you in time…”

After a certain time on the earth, it might become clear that there is only one story to be told but many ways of telling it. Arguments are of no use. Only can these help you if you are not evolved. Then, they can only help you for a moment before you fall back to where you were or worse.

Greenberg is a fictional person who is so real, it is impossible for me to avoid the suspension of disbelief. The director shows his or her skill by rendering him so naturally, and flawlessly flawed as a human. He is introspective beyond what most of us would be willing to admit we are. He questions everything and has coincidentally spent a good deal of time in a mental institution. Mental institutions are where people who are different go. Now, he is on medication, working it out. Working through it. There is one scene in which he engages in meaningless sex. The sensation is palpable. Most of us might know it. A moment where you are engaged in the most primitve, primal, natural, wholistic, spiritual moments of your life, but somehow feel absolutely nothing. His reason seems to overwhelm him at times because he is thinking things through. At the same time, you could easily say that he is a sensitive, feeling person who uses his intuition to pull him through every moment.

The narrative is about finding oneself.  The relationships considered are between heterosexual man and woman or perhaps simply between two loving people. As I myself have two brothers, i was drawn to the fraternal relationship portrayed in this piece of film. One brother is considered an outcast, an exile, while the other is considered successful, beautiful and intelligent. Like Greenberg, my younger brother used to write letters to corporations, complaining of either fictitious or real offenses. They would send him apologies and coupons for free merchandise. Quaker oats apologized for the reported insects found in it’s serial box and sent him a coupon for a free box of cerial as i remember it.  As an art therapist, i am hypnotised by the power of the personal narrative to construct meaning out of experience. In this film, you see how the different experiences lead to different perception and conceptualizations of reality. As though sitting in a documentary or a reality t.v series, the director places you in a position of intellectual power. You can decide who is right and who is wrong. You can decide who you want to identify with. You are a god, as reality manifests itself through the voice of fiction. As you watch, you may be inclined to think, as i did that Greenberg tells us something universal about our selves. The further he looks into his own heart, the deeper the truth he finds about others. The more he finds himself, the more others find him.

Is is as though the first part of the movie is in black in white because every thing is simple and behavioural. In the second half, colour slowly imbues as though technicolor had taken over the film. Now, the characters have emotional significance. They are less in the mundane and more in the eternal. This is not to say that the mundane bears no fruit. In fact, i have posted on the subject of how ordinary life events can be absolutely full of wonder. Everything from sitting on the toilet to sleeping on a train can be incredibly exhilerating. Freud picked up on this in : “the psychopathology of everyday life”.

Finally, i will say about this piece of film that it is like so many great things in that it bares the appearance of muteness when it is in fact a very loud voice. Art therapy suffers from this perceptual distortion as well. It is my belief that Greenberg represents a great many of us and that this piece of film brilliantly shows us a piece of who we are.

The Wire

This is  a drama about the beat cop. He/she is a common man. I like this show because it demonstrates the humanity of cops. It also demonstrates the brutal futility of the drug war. It show the drug dealer as a man who is trying to get ahead in society- a simple man who wants to be loved and honoured. It shows some criminals with good hearts and some cops with evil thoughts. It shows how what we think we know is just that and that what we really know is only what we have been led to believe. Overall, a good show with a social commentary worth a gander. It shows that the further you push a people beneath the surface, the harder they fight to get above it. A testament to the human spirit and resiliency. We could all be put in a position to lie, steal and cheat to save ourselves and those we love. Know this and you know your base self. I will also tell you this: at some point in the 4th episode of season 1, a cop lit a cigarette. When he did this, i instantly felt the urge to smoke. I was catapulted back to a time 15 years ago when i used to crave cigarettes like a nicotine addict. I became entranced with the biological craving in such a way that i have not been for 10 years. It became clear to me that smoking in film can in some circumstances induce the urge or  propensity for smoking in a viewer.

The fourth season gets kinda interesting. The first three seasons seem to focus on the drug trade pure and simple, at the street level. The first three seasons are about the corners and how the common African American is forced to engage in illegal activity in order to make a living. His living is therefore illegal. Very telling. The only way you can tell the story of the common man is to tell it through dramatization because it is forbidden to show the truth. There are mechanisms in place which forbid the showing of truth. In fact, the only way you are allowed to show it is through dramatization. Through drama, the forces of influence can always plead that fiction does not represent reality. Yet reality is actually stranger than fiction as someone once said. This particular drama seems accurate to me. From my experience and my sense of people, this drama seems true to reality. Of course the blood is fake but this drama allows for the suspension of disbelief to such an extent that i can feel the reality of the Baltimore people portrayed in the film.

So anyway, the fourth season gets interesting because it gets to discussing the role of education in the development of the drug problem. It shows how corruption in the field of pedagogy is polluting the environment. The fourth season is a testament to the reality that education is big business and that politics is at it’s root. Education is run by politics and politics is run by money. Money happens to be the one thing that drugs are about. Do you get where my right brain is going with this? It also places teachers at their rightful social status in society. It shows them as people full of love and aspiration for a better place fighting the forces of influence. People who believe in a better future, fighting an uphill battle, swimming upstream just to find themselves nowhere. Yet, the little progress they make suffices to give them motivation to continue. These are the people who deserve the million dollar salaries. The only problem is that they don’t take the money. They really just want to see more beauty in the world. I am biased to be sure. I am an educator. An art educator no less. My mother was a teacher for 30 some years. My wife is a teacher of grade two children. I am biased. Still, somehow, i think i am biased in favour of a better place. One thing is for sure, i ain’t trying to hurt nobody.

Season four shows the interplay of politics, economics, education and drugs. Frankly i am surprised the director has not been assassinated yet. Maybe HBO has some muscle of it’s own. Maybe they have some enforcers to account for their persistent telling of the  truth. On another level, telling the story of truth as the story of dramatic fiction tends to diffuse the explosive. This means that presenting a true story as a fictional one has adverse effects. This means that the emotion which people feel for the true story becomes invested in the HBO fiction. Rather than express their emotion directly to the cause of the emotion, they ventilate it, diffuse it, de-program it. John Stewart also has this adverse effect. He criticizes, ridicules and points the finger at all those who commit purgery, but in so doing, he makes us laugh and deprograms our anger. Anger is what we feel, but John Stewart turns our anger to laughter. My argument here is that sometimes, anger is what you should be feeling. This is the danger of comedy and fiction. This is what Michael Moore means when he says he is against fiction and Hollywood.

In the fourth season, the fight is between politics, economics, schools and police. There is a close focus on the interplay between police and education. The politicians are forced between funding schools or funding crime prevention. It is no surprise that there is a direct relationship between crime and education. The more educated a people, the less crime they commit. This is not to say that important crime is not committed by highly educated people. Hell, the first country to give us the PhD also gave us the holocaust. The series definitely illustrates how high education can be associated with high crime. White collar crime. Nonetheless, crime pays and when you don’t have an education, you have to find some way to get paid. So the politicians decide to fund schools in Baltimore because the schools are what the voters are focused on. As a result, they cut pay to the police and the crime rate goes up. In the end, it is all about what the voters want. What you and i want. The politicians will do whatever we say. Because we are not organized into a collective voice, the politicians take turns saying what one group wants then what the other group wants. When we have a calm unity, a collective consciousness, the politicians will have no choice but to follow suit. that is the moral of this post. Until then, we remain a people divided against itself.

Deadwood

This drama series, also HBO, is set in the wild American west of the 1800′s. It is gritty and brutal. Women are either whores or educated from distinguished Victorian social class. Today women are in between. In the wild west, there is no middle-class. Your life is either harsh, short and brutish or just short. If you’re a man, violence is common currency to be exchanged for goods, bought and sold like any other. If you are a woman, nothing could be more important than the family you are affiliated with through birth or through marriage. Interestingly, the story of Deadwood is in every way analogous to the story told in the other HBO series ”The Wire”. The first series is set in the wild west and dirty south of the 1800′s and the second is set in the wild west (Baltimore) of the current time.  Deadwood deals with the plight of the modern man for democracy and the quest for power through violent means. The wire focuses on the plight of the modern man for democracy and the quest for power through violence. The two drama’s are really the same story being told about different periods. You can see how little we have evolved.

So tell me, now that we have killed religion, who can i believe in? The holy father used to serve as a sort of surrogate for the earthly father who was so often absent, fighting wars, dying young and living a horrible life alone, away from his childrenu. No there is not even a holy father to look up to, so who then? Many of us are fortunate enough to have a role model or a hero in our midst to look to when pondering the essential questions but i think most of us do not.  Many of us have experienced, informed and caring parents but many do not. When you consider that millions of tween-American females look up to or aspire to be like Miley Cyrus you start to get a hold of how deep, how pervasive the problem of not having modern heroes can be. Or perhaps i should say that the heroes we look to are still  but fools in heroes clothing. Yes, it is my value judgement upon the heroes we embrace, that they are infact but illusions masquerading as what we think would be heroes.

Well, i think my questioning for this post has gone on long enough. Do you want me to tell you who i think the modern hero is? I’ll tell you anyway. The modern hero is the guy or gal who gets up and goes to work everyday.  You know, the one who questions things, examines life. Not just anybody who goes to work though because that could mean any old robot who goes about life unquestioningly, following trajectories set for them by others. These are not heroes, these are the ones who need heroes and who seek them out desperately, clinging to the illusion. The boy or girls who crosses a boundary by breaking a gender barrier is a hero.  Heroism requires sacrifice as its main attribute. A whistle blower, the guy who sat in front of a tank in Tiannamen square.  You have to know what you are sacrificing and do it anyway even though the result may be at personal expense to you.  The hero is no ordinary being on one hand  but on the other hand, heroes are just common people, working, living to the best of their abilities. In this life, we will all know trials and tribulations to be overcome. Rich and poor will face brutal upset and moments of brilliant opportunity but my point is that heroes do not live on the margins of opposites between rich and poor, good and bad. They are common place you’s and me’s. They  are everyday people, struggling against adversity.

You might be inclined to find that rich people are not born with the  same adversity as poor people. Guess that is true in some sense but then the adversity faced by wealthy people may consist of particularly extreme difficulties in finding authentic relationships and purpose in life. Whereas poor people may find their purpose is to work, marry, have children, get an education and move up the ladder. I know that heroes can come from rich or poor classes but that they are much more likely to have faced intense adversity early on in life. This early adversity usually gets them to thinking about the big picture while people born into comfort may have less opportunity to question the world around them and wonder what others are doing. I am pretty sure that heroes can be found in all corners of the globe and that they are far less rare than we are led to believe. Everytime two people choose to work it out rather than hate there is heroism. Every time someone chooses to help rather than ignore, there is heroism. Anytime someone gives to another, at personal expense to themselves, there is heroism. The other kind of giving is just philanthropy and as Ted Turner once said after giving millions to poor people: “it was litterally the least i could do”.  Where the rich are concerned, heroism can be seen in those rare times when an individual leaves inherited comfort behind to explore a more uncertain and potentially perillous  environment, there is heroism. A few rich people do this but then again, when you are rich, you are probably asking, why the hell would i want to do that? Taking a risk is heroic if the outcome of taking the risk could potentially be heroic, otherwise it is just risky behaviour.

For the most part, children can not be heroes. They lack the ability to evaluate consequences fairly. They take risk yes. They seek adventure but rarely at the expense of whatever comfort they enjoy and rarely with any knowledge of potential outcomes. Their drive for self preservation is stronger than their drive for exploration. If it were not so, hardly any children would survive childhood. Feminists, at least the early ones ran the risk of social ostracisation because they crossed gender barriers, socio economic norms. The risk they ran took a toll on their psychological wellbeing and what little social advantages they had. The rewards were of course much more appealing but much less likely to be obtained. That is what i call a risk. A soldier going to fight a war can not be a hero for choosing to do so. He might be a hero for saving someone elses life, or putting himself in danger to help someone else but he can not be called a hero simply for enlisting. That would be too easy and i would like to suggest that we get those people out of the hero category as soon as possible, before some young boys become convinced that they are the heroes we need. Simply enlisting to fight involves too many extrenuating circumstances such that a person needs to eat, has a social role to fill, molds himself to the expectations of his family etc. One could argue in many cases that an army volunteer is simply looking for a college education and an opportunity to travel and is jumping through army hoops to get those. In addition to a college education and some travel experience, the army volunteer will see thrust upon him, the admiration of his nation complete with all of the perks this entails. Perks may include increased desirability amongst women, due in part to the salary he will earn and in part to the fullfilment of the iconic and archetypal characteristics of the wounded hero. Many country songs are in fact hymns to this archetype and serve to illustrate its importance in the hearts and minds of the American psyche. In spite of all this, he or she is no hero. Why? Well, because the enlistee can not possibly know what they are fighting for, nor can they know thy enemy. The manifestation of politics and economic necessities is such that the soldier does not know what the captain knows and the captain does not know the officer’s thinking while the officer has no clue what is on the general’s mind and the general is just taking orders from the commander in chief who hopefully, is not himself a puppet.

Mohammad Ali was a hero because he came from black disenfranchisement to appear on tell it vision kicking white peoples asses. He also refused the draft publicly spoke out against Vietnam war efforts. He was a hero because everytime he stepped in the ring, he did not know whether he would walk out. The only regrettable thing about Ali is that violence was his process and he ironically made us worship violence because we admired and believed in him. Heroes are people who have families, but before you go out and tell everyone you are a hero, remember that anyone with functioning genitals can go out and make babies. Making a family is a little more difficult and you don’t actually need genitals for that. I don’t want to toot my own horn here, but heroes invariably and absolutely make art. Not visual art but the Art with a capital A. Art with a capital A is creativity with a capital C. Creativity is what gets you through the hard times and a hero is by definition, someone who gets through the hard times to some ultimate advantage.  Any survivor of abuse is a hero because they employed some creative mechanism to pull through. If you died as a result of the abuse you suffered then you don’t get to be a hero. You get to be a martyr. A martyr for the cause. But don’t despair, for being a martyr is still helpful and contributes to the cause because your name is remembered in concert with the trauma and you serve to remind us of something we must not forget. But before all you self exploding bomb fanatics go out and call yourselves martyrs or heroes, just remember you are doing so on the assumption of an afterlife which you actually know nothing about. You are being a martyr within a social and cultural climate where you were told everything you believe from the time before you could actually think for yourself. I would argue that not only are you not chosing but you are not aware of the consequences of your actions even if you can be said to have chosen. You are not aware because you have not experienced the afterlife, and you are not aware of the consequence of your actions because you are dead. No chance you are a hero and only a slim chance you are a martyr because you probably killed yourself to uphold an economic imperative masquerading as a spiritual one.

Heroes are common people. Most heroes are unsung heroes because most don’t go around telling others of all their great sacrifices.  To do so would lack modesty, and heroes must be modest if not humble. Modesty and humility are essential to the definition of heroes because if lacking in these, one is inclined to personally benefit from ones heroism. When one intentionally benefits personally from a heroic deed, the heroism is lost. It has been distorted, reduced from it’s original spiritual origin and debased to a mere reward versus punishment issue. It becomes mere acting in self interest. When one acts in a mere reward versus punishement fashion, psychological science can tell us what went on, but when one demonstrates true heroism, we are left with the question: “what in the hell possessed that person to sacrifice themselves?” It is simply greater than our scientific comprehension can grasp. Many sacrifice for love but then we don’t know what love is. To be a hero you have to give something at net loss to yourself even though you and your people could gross huge. Feminists directly involved in protesting daily inequities were heroes because they suffered firing, more direct and abusive forms of oppression such as humiliation and violence but they gained in the gross for women  as a whole because women eventually got the vote, equality and recognition in many areas. Same holds for blacks and other minorities. Ghandi took a personal beating for a larger cause. Siddartha left his riches to experience life as an asetic. He was a rich man  who somehow overcame the extreme odds against becoming a hero and then became a hero in spite of not wanting to be one! The hero faces paradox and contradtion, overcoming both. So like i was saying, the hero is truly a mere mortal, assimilated by the masses, blending in with us on the sub or high ways. 

At this point, i thought to myself that music is really a kind of spiritual food. It nourishes our emotions, works its way into memories, transits through our bodies, carries us with it or pushes us somewhere else. Music is so important we don`t know how to explain how important it is. It is like trying to explain why life is important. There is no proof that life is important scientifically. We just know it is and that we are not supposed to harm it. Everything that sustains life is important. Everything which makes life more enjoyable is important to us. Throughout history, music has helped us commune with nature, and communicate with each other. On that particular rainy day the music took me out of my sorry thoughts and lifted me out of the rain i was in. Like an audio lotion flowing through my ears, the music calmed and reassured me that whatever pains i knew of could be let go for a while. Like a solier marching off to war, i was for a moment, no longer afraid of what i might be facing. Rather, i was under the spell of a universal voice. A voice which speaks more forcefully than reason but also more softly. A voice which knows how to whisper only to me. A voice which knows me better than I know myself. It is the sound of me before me there was.

I have previously observed that running seems to take my mind away, emptying it of thoughts. Cleansing it of anything which bothers me.  I run for half an hour and seem to think of nothing. When i come back from my run, i am refreshed, compressed. On the other hand, painting seems to fill my head with thoughts and ideas. While running, i noticed that my drive to exercise was greatly reduced to such a point that it became very difficult to maintain my motivation. The direct cause of that decreased motivation is in my opinion, the result of having attended to the audio book. While abstract music might have helped or even increased my motivation to work out, as it has done in the past, it seems listening to the data points contained in the audio book on the subject of neurology was too cognitively demanding. The audio book seemed to be taking some of the concentration away from the primary task of moving my entire body in unison on a treadmill. This experiment will have to be repeated several times if i am to form any type of hardfast conclusions about it. For the time being, i am posting the hypothesis that attempting to assimilate verbal auditory data is hindered by the process of full body exercise. As a second hypothesis, I am suggesting that the assimilation verbal auditory data is enhanced by the process of painting. The second hypothesis is supported by the known processes inherent to the inferior parietal lobule. As the left parietal lobe is the lobe of the hand and the regions of the brain responsible for sequential hand movements required for painting are annexed by the regions of the brain required for language comprehension, notably Wernicke’s area. Thus the process of painting produces a high rate of neural firing in the areas adjacent to Wernicke’s and receptive and expressive language processes are thereby also stimulated. This is supported by the anecdotal evidence that we point at what we are talking about and that we learn to count on our fingers and that the index finger in particular is a bodily extension which serves to illustrate the sentence: “look at what i am about to tell you about…”

1)  If faith is no longer to be placed in organized religion, then surely there must be another use for the remarkable power of faith. This faith which gave us hope to believe in. This faith which at once nurtured the will to survive and the quest to identity. This faith which  allowed us to sink to the dark depths of the human spirit in the Spanish inquisition while also lifting us to the high heavens through the expression of artistic renaissance. This faith, divorced from religion must become our friend again, and we must together believe in something. To throw out faith is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

2)  At the time of the first Christian church worship service, people were hungry. Without adequate clothes or shelter people suffered hard and short lives while suffering threats of decimation due to diseases of which war is but one. How comforting the thought must have been to those poor barefoot souls, that a cathedral palace would welcome them any time, offer them bread as the body of Christ and wine as his blood. However little food it was, and however symbolic, they must have walked away from church services satiated for  a while. Given that son’s and fathers were wiped out in droves by violence, it must have been comforting to the people of those times to find a Holy father who could never die and would love them forever.

3) Our faith in religion may have done some good for us, in spite of all the negative attention it has drawn. It deserves the negative attention after all. Any group claiming to know the whole truth, the absolute truth, and nothing but the truth is worthy of scorn indeed. Still, our religions have helped step up and some might argue they have hurt as many people through wars as they have helped through benevolence and structure in the absence of structure. Some might argue that faith in religion was the first drive towards unity, collective existence; the first drive towards a huge cohesive family stuck together by the common understanding brought on by a common faith. Still, today we are finding that faith is not common and everybody interprets god in his or her own way. We only think we think the same thing. When we really do think the same thoughts, no words are necessary and you certainly don’t have to write a big book to convince me that our thoughts are similar. If we are meant to think and feel alike then our existence will prove it.

The word slut is an insult with rather old origin intended to police a behaviour which was thought to be innappropriate for civilized society. It was intended to point out women who were sexually promiscuous, easy to get. On an evolutionary level, we probably did not appreciate the behaviour because it was conducive to the spreading of sexually transmitted diseases and illegitimate children not to mention deathly duels between competing men. Labeling by the word “slut” was a social convention with some adaptive, evolutionary functionality. Perhaps it should have been applied to men as well back then. I guess the word has outworn it`s use but where does that leave us? Now that we have technological advances in birth control and protection we are able to take as many partners as we wish but is this freedom? Women have the right to dress in anyway they wish even if it is extremenly sexually provocative and confusing for young men and women growing up to be bombarded with constant reminders that we live in a pornographic society. A society which places appearances over substance, words over actions, constantly telling us that what god gave us is not good enough. Unfortunately, i think a slut walk just reminds us how true that is. I am not defending the use of the term “slut”, only attempting to understand it at this point.

In the 20′s so called first wave feminism, there was a push towards political and economic equality. Equal pay for equal work and recognition of houshold work as economically valuable were two of the bigger issues women fought for. Second Wave feminism of the 60′s seemed more focused on social equality and intellectual equality. Women were tired of being left out of the classrooms and boardrooms of Canada and were tired of the more implicit lack of respect accorded them by society. They already had the vote, pay parity in some areas, matrimonial adjustments to law enabling a more equitable valuation of domestic work so what they needed then was some plain common respect. Respect from traditionally male dominated areas like politics, economics, and a multitude of professions which were mostly the domain of men. The second wave of feminism also brought about so called liberation of the female form. The groovy 60′s and women’s liberation. Largely, this meant sexual liberation. Pow! the mini skirt appears. Pow! birth control. Pow! Woodstock. Pow! sexual freedom. Sexual liberation had everything to do with women’s liberation.  The taboo world of sex was after all, one of the primary areas where women were disenfranchised. The were at risk of being stuck with pregnancies and so had always had a vested interest in making sure that the men they had sex with could be reasonably adequate fathers and spouses. They were at higher risk of being sexually assaulted so they also had vested interest in developping screening processes to determine who was friend and who foe. The birth control pill changed everything. It freed women in bed like the washing machine freed women from housework. Sexual freedom and sexual liberation was born. Good times for men in the 60′s i hear because sex was pretty easy to come by. Nowdays, you have to boil people before you can sleep with them…Anyway, women took control of their bodies and this was evidenced in less restrictive fashions of the day, a wider spectrum of social style, the begining of penetration into previously closed male milieus and an explosion on artistic and  intellectual fronts. Still, I keep coming back to the sexual aspect of women’s liberation, perhaps because i am a man or perhaps because i am interested in the stuff we don’t usually talk about so much.

This next part is complicated so let me think out loud for a second. See, the thing is that sex has a lot to do with power. It takes two people to have sex. Legally, the two must be willing participants. Usually, they are equal, albeit anatomically different partners. I would argue that sexual relations is one of the social areas where women actually hold more power than men. Women select who they want to sleep with and usually have at least a couple of options. Right there, by the fact that women are the “selectors” tells you that they have a particularly powerful vantage point from which to view gender relations. I heard a man the other day, comment that because he was elderly, he had no choice but to pay for prostitution because all of the women he was attracted to would not be socially available to him. Of course you can say the same of older women. Some argue that a women’s sexual power declines much more dramatically than a man’s does over time. I would have to agree with that but that is only because we live in a youth obssessed, beauty fascist, superficial, image based, pornographic society. Still, up to a certain age, women have the power when it comes to sex.  This is why women want to get married earlier than men do.  They make more money off the production and proceeds of pornography than men do by a landslide. They control who is mate-worthy and who is not. Only very rich men are able to reverse this power dynamic by themselves becoming “selectors”. So what does all this add up to? Well, if you consider that sex is a gross domestic product, as i do. And you consider that unpaid labour is the greatest economic contributor, far surpassing paid work.  And you consider that much of the things which are sold are marketed through sex, because sex sells. If you consider all  the direct and indirect money that sex produces in an economy such as ours, i am pretty sure it is up there with alcohol or some other enconomic giant. Remember, people drink to loosen up and people go to bars to find sexual partners and people diet, shop, buy clothes, cars, makeup, drugs, perfume, all with the implicit understanding that these things boost sexual power and may facilitate sexual relations. Maybe all of this is too unconscious for you but i am aware of it and i think most men are. I mean women put makeup on every day without once stopping to think: “why would i want to boost the redness of my lips, the darness of my eyes and the longness of my lashes, the blush of my cheeks, the eveneness of my tone, the colour of my hair and nails, the brightness of my teeth, the largeness of my breasts?” The only way a woman is going under the knife to have her breasts augmented at huger personal and financial cost to herself is if she is getting something out of it. Cosmetics is huge business because it is directly tapped into sexual power. What is true in the animal kindgdom is just as true here in human world: a woman who attracts a large number of mates has better chances of finding one who is suitable. What do we men do? we compete. Competing is something we’re good at. It is something you might say we were born to do. War is a competition. Capitalism is a huge competition. Surely, you can see that a system based on competition has to have incentives otherwise people don’t see the point. Well, i am making the very simple point that sex is a primary incentive in getting us people to do what we do. It is more of an incentive for men than it is for women. Women are still driven towards procreation based sex, which leads to a family while men are more driven towards sensation based sex which lasts the time it takes to have sex then goes away for a few hours. Men’s interest in sex makes them behave like addicts willing to do or say anything just to get some. So am i making the point that sex sells and that the one who holds the position of “selector” is in a powerful position indeed?

I could easily understand if some of what i have just said offends you. You might be interpreting that i am dehumanizing sex by providing you with a market value assessment of it. Still, i am sure you will find that i am only trying to give credit where credit is due and make sure that we provide an adequate valuation for what may  be one of the largest economic contributors we people know of. That being said, it is beyond the scope of this post to advocate legalized prostitution as has been done in Amsterdam for quite some time. I am not advocating prostitution or pornography. Just the proper socio-economic valuation of sex in our culture. So when it comes to slut walks which you can read more about here: http://www.slutwalktoronto.com/ or here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2011/05/slut-walks-are-they-helping-to-bring-about-change.html, i personally am all for it, so long as it includes all women and we can explain to 12 year old girls, struggling with their identities, why they might think of themselves as sluts and so long as it includes all men and ends in a new wave of sexual liberation where everyone puts down the barriers and lets it all hang out. Then i am for slut walks. Until then, i am apathetic, thinking only that this is another misdirected quest for power over others, falsely labeled as feminism and masquerading as women’s liberation.

I am a man in a women`s field. I work as an art therapist (95% women) in a Primary school (85% women) so i am posting this as a straight man who has crossed over a couple of gender borders (barriers). I want to say that reclaiming a word  like slut can be empowering but we could also be fooling ourselves into feeling empowered when we are in fact merely becoming more tolerant of abusive terminology either sexist or racist in nature.  Unfortunately, a lot of women are going to use this issue as a photo opportunity and a chance to get on the front page in a miniskirt and fishnets for the purposes of personal advancement. Thus behaving like sluts. Let`s not forget that a women`s attractiveness in this society is worth it`s weight in gold. We live in a biological cast system through which the attractive reap all kinds of rewards which intersubjectively less attractive individuals will never know. Sex and rape are about power we are told. This is as true for women as it is for men, although we usually only hear this in relation to men. Power is not the same as freedom. I think there is a difference between those feminists who seek personal freedom from oppression and those who seek power. I am among those in the former category. After all, freedom is the only power one can truly have in this life.

What if most of the talking we do essentially serves the purposes of productivity and the communication of data? This would mean that most of the talking we do is not serving the much needed purpose of communicating actual feeling states, the truth about our intentions and desires. For these things, surely, words do not suffice. Action is required there. As it turns out, nothing impells us to act more than the upsurge of emotional calling. We do need a left brain to balance this out, lest we take a trip back to our more primitive selves. Or maybe, we do need a trip back to our more primitve selves? Maybe that is something which art therapy can serve us collectively or individually. There is a big difference between the “exchanging” done through verbal communication and the “being as one” achieved through singing and other collective, creative enterprises. I think that is it: Words are for exchanging about being while feeling and doing are for being itself. Take love for example. Words can only convey so much of its meaning. Never can those words come close to what the actual thing does to you.

I think we get caught up or tripped up in our own verbal language because we are neurologically designed to attend to it and find meaning in it, decipher and encode it. But what if we are fooling ourselves? What if we are trapped by knowledge as i attempt to portray in this work of art: http://tomartist.com/2011/04/27/trapped-by-knowledge-closeup/.What if it is all little more than babies jumping about, making noise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JmA2ClUvUY (no offence to the wonderful babies in this clip) I don’t want to downplay what they are saying, as they surely believe it is of the utmost importance just as we believe that we communicate something important through words. But do we? Is there anything you can say or is there as John Lennon suggests: “nothing you can say”? Perhpas as Lennon and McCartney point out: “There is nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time”.

These are my questions for this post. Hope you enjoy them.

What do you think?

Because I have an interest in art, therapy and neurology and I read in those areas, I was curious to know how this phenomenon could be explained neurologically. So I asked: “how does the act of painting facilitate or even trigger my thinking of these thoughts?” I set out to find some answers by doing what I usually do: asking everyone I know. I spoke to a few psychologists, blogged on a couple of forums, asked a few doctors (neurologists are unfortunately a little hard to come by because they are all busy rewriting the human narrative right now.) None of the answers completely satisfied me until I came across my new favorite site: http://www.brainmind.com/ . In reading chapter 3 on the Left Hemisphere, it started to hit me… Here is an excerpt from that chapter:

“…there is considerable evidence that the evolution of language and linguistic thought are related to and in part are outgrowth of right hand temporal-sequential motor activity. The right hand appears to serve as a kind of motoric extension of language and thought in that it acts at the behest of linguistic impulses (Joseph, 1982). In fact, the hand and oral-facial musculature are neuronally represented in adjacent cortical space and are intimately interconnected with Broca’s area which lies immediately posterior-lateral and anterior to these motor areas…Hence, we find that the ability to extract denotative meaning from language is dependent on the ability to organize and coordinate speech into temporal and interrelated units –an ability at which the left hemisphere excels, and an ability which is at least in part an outgrowth or a function of motoric processing and the predominant use of the right hand for gathering, tool making, food preparation, and related temporal and sequential activities…Ontogenetically, it is first via the hand that one comes to know the world so that it may be named and identified. For example, the infant first uses the hand to grasp various objects so they may be placed in the mouth and orally explored. As the child develops, rather than mouthing, more reliance is placed solely on the hand (as well as the visual system) so that information may be gathered through touch and manipulation…As the child and its brain matures, instead of predominantly touching, grasping, and holding, the fingers of the hand are used for pointing and then naming the object indicated. It is these same fingers which are later used for counting and the development of temporal-sequential reasoning; i.e. the child learns to count on his or her fingers, then to count (or name) by pointing at objects in space…In this regard, counting, naming, object identification, finger utilization, and hand control are ontogenetically linked. In fact, these capacities seem to rely on the same neural substrates for their expression; i.e. the left inferior parietal lobule. Hence, when the more posterior portions of the left hemisphere are damaged, naming (anomia), finger recognition (finger agnosia) object identification (agnosia), arithmetical abilities (acalculia), and temporal-sequential control over the hands and extremities (apraxia) are frequently compromised. It is relationships such as these which lend considerable credence to the argument that over the course of evolution the predominant usage of the right hand enabled the left brain to develop neurons specialized for counting, naming, and for subserving the development of the temporal-sequential properties necessary for the mediation of grammatical-syntactical speech and language.”

So there you have it. As the neuroscientist Norman Doidge says: “Neurons that fire together, wire together”. Basically, if two things tend to occur consistently at the same time in your head, there are good chances that those two things are wired together in a direct kind of way.  For example, if seeing your spouse makes you feel warm and fuzzy, then there is a neural connection between the act of seeing and the feeling state accompanying it. Straightforward no? As usual, when given the neurological explanation for why certain kinds of mental activity happen the way they do, we can go about observing all kinds of supporting anecdotal evidence for the theory. For example, we say: “can you see what I mean? Or do you see what I am saying?” and we also say: “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Seems to me that these ubiquitous statements could be references to the neurological relationships between the visual pathways, and the language centers of the brain, notably Wernicke’s area.  No hard for us to imagine that the caveman was pointing at something long before he could name it. When language came on the scene, he was then able to point with his right hand and say: “danger” or “food”. So here is my summary of everything I think I have learned so far:

When I am painting, I am holding my brush in my right hand and most precisely with my index, middle finger and thumb. Incidentally, index literally means pointing finger. These three fingers represent the most finely tuned motor control of the hand. While I am painting, sensory feedback is generated to and from the primary motor cortex through afferent and efferent neuronal signals. As this is going on, the visual or occipital lobe is firmly plugged in to the operation. The dorsal stream is gauging where my hand is moving, and all aspects related to visual spatial orientation while the ventral stream of the occipital lobe is activated in trying to figure out “what” it is looking at. The dorsal stream is gauging where the hand-object is moving while the ventral stream is gauging what we are looking at. This is referred to as the “what and where” functions of the visual cortex. Naturally, the “what” pathway is going to have to hook up with Wernicke’s area at some point. If it doesn’t do that, then we can’t name the object. Before it connects to Wernicke’s the ventral stream takes a run over to the Inferior Parietal Lobule (IPL) which performs an auditory-visual matching function. However, this is where things get interesting and I break away from what I think I know to what I think, I think I might know. At this point, there is not auditory language-visual matching possible because when I paint, I am essentially creating clouds of colour and chiseling shapes out of amorphous blobs of paint. Something like looking at a cloud. So I think here, my visual cortex is working hard to determine what it is looking at and it is coming up with the answer: “could be any multitude of things, keep searching…”. As it continues to search the database of memory and the language centers for suitable matches, it spends a lot of time coming up empty, finding no clear and concise answer to the question: “what am I looking at”. In the process, the Inferior Parietal Lobule is receiving signals from three main areas as a sort of relay station. The IPL is receiving signals from both streams of the visual cortex, from the auditory/language areas of the temporal lobe and from the primary sensory/motor cortex. The IPL ties in the three senses of touch, sight and sound, to do its best to categorize and label what the visual cortex is looking at. If it can’t find a word in the auditory cortex, it seems to go to asking: “what does the object feel like? Is it related to any memories, emotional experiences? What are the qualities of what is being looked at? Is it soft, hard, moving, still, smooth or rough?” To ask these questions the IPL naturally needs to go to memory and experience which are directly known through the body on a nonverbal level as implicit memory.

Because I can spend somewhere between 4 and 8 hours playing around on the canvas in this non-verbal, amorphous mud of paint without having a clue of what is going to emerge, I personally believe that my left brain gets tired of working so hard. Remember, left brain is logical, systematic, detail oriented and more likely to come up with single words when naming things. My hypothesis here is that my right brain takes over the perceptual task of defining what my left brain is having such a hard time understanding. As a result, the wholistic, creative, spatial-perception oriented right brain strives to make sense of what is going on.  Here is what Rhawn Joseph, Ph.D, Academic Press, New York, 2000) says in his chapter on the left hemisphere here: http://brainmind.net/BrainLecture3.html :

“In most instances in which the IPL is activated via internal or external sources of stimulation, multiple trains of inquiry are initiated via the numerous interconnections this area maintains. Impressions, memories, ideas, and feelings which are in any manner associated with the initial stimulus probe, are aroused in response”.

So while left brain can’t name what it is seeing, right brain is simultaneously grappling with the problem but because right brain is so generally minded it is pulling up data on anything and everything even remotely related to the stimulus probe and feeding it back to the IPL which then sends that data to the language centers so that my ideas (usually not directly related to painting) can be written down.

So that is it for today’s tomartist update about art and neurology. I am glad we could spend this time together. You can see the post here: http://tomartist.com/category/blog/

As usual, I accept and respect your feedback on what I send you. Especially any corrections to the neurology data featured in this post. Enjoy the art. It is from my heart to yours.

I came to this conclusion in part through my own creative process as a painter. I realized that every time i began painting, i immediately forgot whatever i was doing before. In this specific example, i turned on my computer. I had to enter my password within about five minutes because otherwise my computer would go back into hibernation mode. Each time i turned on my computer i reminded myself: “as soon as it boots up, don’t forget to enter your passord”. However, each time i turned my computer on, I went back to my painting for a few minutes while i waited for the operating system to load. This process takes a couple of minutes. Each time i did this, the computer eventually shut down because i was so engrossed in the creative process that i forgot to go back to what i was doing and enter my password. My computer shut down each time as a result. Every time, i went thorugh the same routine and every time, the result was the same. The information i was trying to hold onto in working memory was displaced or erased by the act of engaging the creative process.

Really, equality is like a blinding drive towards power. Trust me, i am a mostly white man and my people have supposedly held most of the power since the beginning of time and i can tell you, all that has happened from where i am standing is that women have vied for power and rightfully  taken some of it. We call them rights but you could also call it good old power. I suppose that is good if you consider that power and wealth redistribution is a good thing, which i do. However, now what we have is more power, more lust for social status, more greed, more people with their eyes on the prize. Don’t get me wrong, i am not suggesting that women’s rights should be rolled back or that they don’t deserve everything they have fought for. I am simply drawing attention to the fact that women are earning most of the rights and privileges which once only belonged to men and with that, they must also accept the inheritance of all of the ills and evil of the world. An equal share of all of the responsiblity for the shame of humanity. Boy, this is sounding like a grim celebration of women’s day indeed!

The times where a woman’s beautycould be idolized and pedestooled is finished. Problem is, men are programmed to respond to female attractiveness and it makes us weak. Maybe that is why Muslims cover their women. Maybe Muslim men just can’t bear the feeling of being before feminine beauty and they don’t know what to do with it. I am not advocating that certain Muslim traditions have a place in our modern western world when it comes to women’s dress. However, some humility or discretion would be appreciated. We don’t allow a man with muscles to push his way onto a bus so why should physically attractive women be given so much privilege?  The constant bombardement of media messages telling us that beautiful women rule has been systematically eroding the very fabric of gender relations for centuries. It is evolution punching the lights out of civilization. I thought we were supposed to be smarter than monkeys. Maybe we are just smarter at monkeying around. It is as if the monkey brain said: “let’s make sure that no matter how smart we get, we still leave room in our social structures, laws and policies to continue being monkeys”. This is planet of the apes except we are the invaders.

Congratulations women! your equality means that your bodies are now just as ugly as men’s.  Sure, women can escape the degradation of time with teeth whitening, makeup and hair dye, breast implants and facelifts but what feminist wants any part of that? This is after all women’s day, not a day for worship of a soul-less pair of silicone implants. Not a day for the worship of” Maybeline” even though their commercial tagline is: “Maybeline: maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s maybeline”. Sex is currency in this world and that is why the old adage tells us: sex sells. If women want full equality, then the issue of sexual power needs to be addressed. It also needs to be redressed. The currency of feminine sexual power must be returned to the central bank just as postmodernist women asked men to return the fields of authority and truth to the public domain. Let’s trade. All the political and economic power you want, in exchange for all of the sexual power men want. Women wanted the imbalance of power to be destabilized for very good reasons, but in an economy where feminine beauty is cold, hard currency, why would a man not be justified in asking for some consideration of the issue. Do you have any idea what kind of social advantages go to women of a certain height, weight and breast to waist to hip ratio? They are similar to the social advantages which go to a man born into a wealthy family.

Who are these beautiful sexy women and what have they done to earn a place at the helm of this ship? They are the anti-feminists. The ones who tell us that work is for losers.They are the Paris Hiltons telling us it is o.k to be a child role model one minute and  a porn star the next.  Don’t get me wrong, alpha males are just as toxic most of the time (except in periods of crisis when we like to have them around because they keep us organized) but my point in this post is not to pick on men, because we have done that long enough. Men need healing. Men need a man’s day. I have heard some joke that: every day is man’s day. Well, in a sense that is true because men generally still do run the political and economic spheres but in another sense, men have never really had their day. They have been born with the culturally inherited notion of world dominance over women and children. They have not had to fight for it like women have. The brute physical force differential simply put an end to any arguments in the past over who was in charge of making the big decisions like whether to go to war or not and how to build cities and economies. In fact, we had to establish laws to protect women from the disproportionate amount of physical power within the average man’s grasp.  Women’s counter to that power differential has always been dominance through sexual power and subversion. Think about it, what would you do if you lived in a camp as a prisoner of war? You would think of ways to get some of the control and power back. You would look for ways to escape. You would become extremely good at reading the facial expressions of your captors. By the way, i think it is generally recognized that women have superior abilities when it comes to reading facial expressions or at least facial recognition as you can read about here: http://www2.hh.se/staff/josef/publ/publications/bigun01halmstad.pdf

Now what would you do if you were a woman and your own sisters turned on you and joined the tyrants holding you captive?  You would eventually come to believe that your place was there, in that little cage, and you would begin to act like a slave. This is in some regard the status of the youngest generation of feminists who are merely chanting like robots: “we want freedom, we deserve equality” without having any notion of what the freedom entails and what that equality will make them into. Trust me, i have had a good look at the man’s culture of violence, cult of power and you should not aspire to be equal to any man within that system. As shocking as everything i have said may sound i present to you that men turned on their own brothers and made them miserable throughout history and there are women who erode the quality of women’s experience, betraying women collectively for the sake of personal profit. In a world where both sexes are equal, we should not only ask who will share the spoils of freedom and success but who will share responsibility for all of the bad stuff that people do? In a world where men and women are equal, men can no longer shoulder the burden of responsibility for all of the evil in the world.

As it stands now, there is a cold war in the realm of gender relations. There has been an eternally long stand off by where women seem to be saying: we will losen up sexual restrictions when you give us equal access to the economic and political institutions. This is essentially what happened in the free love era of the 60′s.  However, men have always known that money and power can get you sex anytime you need it. A sad trade off in my opinion and a sad state of affairs in the global direction of gender relations to be sure. Ultimately, all this drive towards equality has meant that no one is doing the work that used to be associated with being unequal. You know, teaching and taking care of children, that kind of pointless, poorly paid activity (i joke). Finally, all of this drive towards equality has been somehow mixed up in eroding the fragile trust bond between the sexes. Equality has not reinforced it in my opinion – at least, not yet.

So where are we now as men? A little lost if i assess the situation correctly. There is a plethora of contemporary documentaries about the dissappearance of manhood. Women seem to have crossed gender barriers but men remain stuck to one side of the equation, failing to see the value in the work women used to do. Feminism hit the scene like wildfire from a spark set in the 1920′s, giving way to blaze after the 1950′s. Women abandoned housework or used it as bargaining collateral along with sex towards getting more basic respect and human dignity the same way a union strike tends to increase the valuation of employees. The thankless jobs of raising children and fostering caring relationships through the quality of empathy have been shoved aside for more status yielding alternatives. Sure, women still want children, but not so much at the expense of a career and men seem to be looking at this situation carefully wondering if they are up to the challenge of being primary caregivers for their children. Men have historically clearly said: “we are not doing that work cause we are busy doing other very important stuff”. Men were after all were refusing to give due credit to that work through the application of judicial protection, essentially laws recognizing the value of women’s work. Women’s work was trashed by the economic structure which had no intention of compensating something which had been free for so long. Sure, you can get alimony if you get divorced, but who wants to get divorced? I can’t answer Freud’s question about: “what do women want” but i think a lot of women want a man who is consistent and dependable and able to step up to doing what women traditionally have done. Paying for the work women had been doing for so long would be like freeing all the slaves in all the American cotton and cane fields and paying them fair wages over night. We are talking about total economic collapse, or maybe not, but whatever the case, nobody was willing to do that.

So, women correctly assessed that education is the gatekeeper to all of the goods that the economy has in store. Like scarface said: “first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the woman”. Women wanted social status, money, power and well maybe not a woman, but they wanted the rest. Thing is, there is only so much money and power to go around.  We can keep printing money, but it won’t have any buying power after a certain point. The same way the number of LED televisions and refrigerators which can be produced is finite. By the way, word to the Chinese and Indians: “really happy you have a growing middle class and you are going to be equal to the us Westerner’s economically. Good for you!  Unfortunately, there are no more commodities for you to buy because we simply ran out of natural resources to produce iphones, so you will have to go on living as poor people even though you are educated. Sorry about that!

Women were after the wrong things. Men were after the wrong things too and because a lot of women set their sights on what men had as the ultimate goal of achievement, women were after the wrong things too. As Steven Tyler said on American Idol the other day: “I would like to agree with you, but then we would both be wrong”. And here, i have to think about Freud and his notion of Penis envy. Women hated that idea. It is still one of the biggest disclaimers of any freudian analyst and one of the main arguments feminists use to discredit Freud as a thinker. But what if the penis is just a symbol for power. What if it’s not really the penis, but just the power behind it that women want? Then Freud is totally right. After all, the word penis is a slightly less uncomfortable word to say when compared to the word vagina. Most people would rather say penis. I bet you can test this empirically by asking a million people which word sounds nicer. Penis is the status quo and we people are pretty good at getting comfortable with that. That is why the big P appears from time to time in my paintings. It is the penis of patriarchy which i am alluding to – the penis of power – the universal phallus. That is what you see in some of my work if you dare to look.

Poor men! who would have thought that we would have to compete with women for all of the jobs we thought up in the first place. Who would have thought that women would be so interested in taking over this crappy racket? Now women outperform men in nearly all traditionally held fields. Men, your move…As far as i am concerned, women can have it. I am staying home to raise children. I am going to school, having conversations and making art. I am using both sides of my brain. I am gentle and tender and I will walk this earth lightly. I will fight by whatever means necessary, any who fight with me because i am still a man and there is some part of me that craves a good fight.  So long as the respect is there, the courage, the understanding, the development of genuine feeling, i will be there. Don’t ask me to go to war and kill people i have never met for reasons i don’t understand. I am not that kind of man and that man is not kind.

So where are we? I have no clue. I know that men must let go of the power they have been born with. Just as the wealthy classes must learn to share with the 99%. I also know that women must not blindly rush in to seize it whatever is in the palace when they break in. I know that men must cross over to do what women once did, in the fields of empathy but that they must be men in doing so. We need men in those fields to bring what only men can. Only a man can love as a man does. Men can not replace women in those areas, any more than women can replace men as leaders. We do different things for the same reasons and that is o.k. Whoever told us it was wrong to be different only hurt and confused us. Religion comes to mind here. So, I guess that is it for now. As usual, more questions than answers. You can participate in this discussion by replying to the post. Unless your post is abusive or rude, i will gladly put it up on the site for all eternity. If some of these ideas rubbed you the wrong way, it may have been intentional on my part but always out of love.

It occured to me the other day while soaking in a hot tub that my experience at my favourite spa was in some relative sense a microcosm of an individual’s experience in society.

For example, as my body is soaking, i realize that my calm head sits above the water. Here, my rational mind is chattering away, even though i have become better at silencing it. But still, i can hear an occasional rumbling emanating from the black box which sits atop my neck. It is cooly and calmly ingesting the experience and processing it while looking for novel information. The thing with the mind is that it is always looking for something or trying to figure out the thing it is looking at. Mainly though, it is attempting to remain in the moment at this moment. The moment of the experience of now. Below the head is the ever quiet body, sensing and sending. Soaked in a warm bath, my body receives the heat of the water, the movement of H2O propelled against my back while the bubbles lure themselves into my trunks, draging along my spine one vertebrae at a time. And so it occurs to me that my body is the right brain, immersed in experience, unquestioningly doing what it knows how to do. Above is my left brain, analysing, integrating and processing that experience. Possibly even recording it. Then I think about Freud’s analogy of the psyche being something like an ice berg with consciousness about and the unconscious below the water.

Later, after a steam bath a sauna and a nap, I get a massage and i am again silencing fighting with the chattering monkey. The last thing you want to be doing when you are getting a massage is thinking. Within about 15 minutes i am totally asleep. While I sleep, i am wondering how it is possible to sleep while someone is completely working you over with a deep tissue Swedish massage. It is possible to leave your body behind even though it is being stimulated, i can assure you. If the stimulation reminds you of being a small child in the arms of a nurturing mother then you will just fade to night with not even a stars light to distract you. I also wonder how it is possible to be thinking if i am completely asleep but i have learned not to question that too much. I go into a dream which i am vaguely aware of when i step out of it 5 minutes later but my thoughts are not on my dream at that point. No. My thoughts are on on the question of what it means to have a total stranger perform a service as intimate and therapeutic as a massage on me. On one hand, I am feeling completely immersed in the soothing pleasure of gentle human contact but on the other hand, I am feeling akward about paying money for something so human as touch. I guess it feels like being engaged in prostitution. Every prostitutional (if this word does not exist, consider it currently in existence) encounter involves two prostitutes in contrast to the commonly held notion that there is only one prostitute and one client. There are two, but this is perhaps another post. Suffice it to say that in this case, the prostitute of the body is me because i surrender it and pay money, and the prostitute of the soul is my masseuse because she does for me what one ordinarily reserves only for ones most intimate of companions. Surely, this comparison may be a little far fetched for even the most avid Tomartist reader but there are parallels and i have promised to draw them where i see them. So we are both willing participants in an action which does both of us a lot of good for different reasons. In that sense there is a parallel to be drawn between an encounter with a masseuse and an encounter with a prostitute. In the case of prostitution however, the gains are illusory and what the client wants is never really achieved while what the prostitute pretends to offer something which is never really available. In the case of getting a massage, the client does achieve a real and lasting sense of satisfaction from having been treated with dignity and the massage therapist ideally gets some satisfaction from having done a good job and from having been generous with another human being. I do not in anyway suggest that a massage therapist is akin to a prostitute. That would not be reasonable. But i do not either want to debase the profession of selling sex for money. They are different, and each has a place in society, I do not place moral judgement on either, in spite of what my words may lead you to believe. But if we are going to discuss one, it would be good to remember that there is a correlate in the other. Each scenario has something to learn from and teach the other.

The masseuse spends months training to ply the trade, makes a good living out of it and brings real, long lasting therapy to a client. A client receives therapy in this context and finds that their mood is lifted, their stress dispersed. We could agree that physical ailments are not the only or even the main cause for consultation. Pleasure is the main cause. Human contact is the main cause for consultation. And so it is with prostitution. In the case of the massage, it is the human contact and only the human contact which can alleviate the stress and anxiety causing us to seek help. Only the physicality of human touch and the empathy it embodies can help to quell the anger which settled in to rest in our bodies after we thought only to invite them for a moment. Anger is a big reason for consultation with a massage therapist. It may be a reason for consulting with a prostitute as well. I don’t know but i think prostitution is more about sadness and despair. Anger though will tense up your muscles, clench your jaw and change the look of your face. If you are angry enough, often enough, your appearance will be that of an angry person even when you may not be angry in a given moment. It can settle in and damage your immune system. It can rewire your brain. In a sense it is not the anger of others for which we should be affraid but our own anger. This is not a post about anger. The massage sinks in, redistributes the body memories, drawing attention to some places where some things happened, while taking attention and memory away from other places. Massage is a re-boot on your system. You don’t come out of there feeling rested, you come out of there feeling re-born. I am pretty sure that massage could prove as effective a medical intervention as most currently accepted mainstream interventions including medication and emdr for stress relief or depression. But as you know, this is just theory based on personal experience rather than any scientific data. Intersubjectively, I am pretty sure everyone who has had a massage will agree that any stress they may have been feeling prior to the experience was substantially alleviated.

When it comes to prostitution, there is no therapy. No creation of new understanding. No evolution but merely a temporary alleviation of desire. It is not even the real desire either. It is just an alleviation of the illusion of a desire which comes to sit upon the true desire for human connection. It manifests itself as a sexual connection because the desire for intimacy becomes confused by a number of confounding factors including sex instincts, the socialization of masculine roles and stunted self esteem. So the poor client of prostitution is usually left at the end of the transation feeling more bare than he was to begin with. More empty, more worthless. The alleviation of the desire for intimacy is only effective in the process of the transaction and fades mere moments afterwards. Just like a cigarette really. The illusion of a craving placed on top of a genuine human need for happiness and satisfaction. This is by the way the main tactic of advertising which seeks to piggy-back a product on top of a desire which itself sits on top of a fundamental need. A brutal game really consisting of divesting humanity of its very soul. Right, so back to the spa for a second. Relaxing music, the scent of lavender and lemon grass. Dimly lit candle light carressing the walls adjoining infinitely recessed ceilings of a thick pulpy blackness…are you with me?

Then I thought, it does seem strange then that we should pay for something so natural and so abundant in our world as human contact whether it be in the form of sex or a straight forward massage. For that matter, it is strange that we should pay for education, psychotherapy, police, healthcare or any other social service which we have in such abundance. After all, these are the only gifts we have to give one another. If we charge money for those things then the only kinds of gifts remaining will be those left under the christmas tree and who wants that garbarge?

The problem is that we don`t pay our taxes of free will. You actually don`t have a choice. It is taken off your pay whether you agree or not. Yet, in 2011 there must be an objective or scientific way to evaluate whether or not a politician achieved what they set out or promised to do. Taxes should be proportional to what what achieved. A bonus tax should be levied when a politician achieves everything they were voted in to achieve. A political party which achieves nothing, pays itself more, spends millions on futile and non sustainable endeavours ought not be entitled to levy any taxes. In this way, the society which is doing the voting will also be accountable. If that society votes for a crook who spends all the money on war and p.r. campaings to spread lies then that society should pay the consequences knowingly by seeing the taxes go down along with social programs while each individual gets richer. Soon enough, that society would decay sufficiently to be in a position for revolution. Nobody likes revolution. We would all prefer not to do it.

Bottom line, taxes should be proportional to the efficacy of the government who is managing the taxes. When the government does nothing, taxes go down, when it serves the public dilligently and effectively, taxes may go up accordingly.  Ineffective governments therefore appear useless more quickly and people will boot them out more quickly rather than allow them to continue siphoning the peoples ressources for ever and ever without ever being held to account. On the other hand, highly effective governments should produce such noticeable changes withing health care and educational and other social wellfare systems that they could be entitled to ask for more. Ironically though, more effective governments require less taxes to do more work by definition. As a result, the system corrects itself and prevents effective governements from becoming corrupt. In this scenario, an effective government which asks for more taxes would always be motivated to demonstrate why and where new taxes are needed.  Make no mistake, the way income taxes are levied currently undermines democracy because the ordinary citizen has no choice but to pay whatever is asked. The conditions of taxation are not determined by the people but by a structure put in place by a few people. The situation in the U.S is different because it is based and a more sever application of capitalist principles which promote social Darwinism (a doomed adventure if i ever saw one) by where the individual with more wit can legally steal from another with impunity.  This is the ”profit’ model of economics by where if something makes money, it is deemed good. Deregulation of the banking system is proof enough of that. The situation in the U.S is different because it seems the ordinary, working class american citizen just doesn`t want to to pay taxes based on some constitutional principles. This is why the u.s is a terrible place to get sick if you have no money.  Taxes remind Americans that they are monkeys like the rest of us.  No offense to Americans, I love Americans, i call myself a monkey all the time.

Ok, so that’s it for this post. Bottom line, there are multiple ways of knowing but those ways of knowing the world which happen to be localized primarily on the language side of the brain are valued while those ways of knowing primarily located on the right side of the brain are systematically selected out.  We remain like a racist society, actively inhibiting those who do not look as we do. Except with the current definition of intelligence, it is those who do not think as we do who are the outcast. The left brain seems to process information which is more readily available to consciousness while the right side is like a computer program running in the background. You can learn to pay more attention to your right brain though. You can learn to attend to odors, intuitions, sensations, feelings and these things can give your life richer meaning. I think the next post will be about the two brain halves and what i think i know about them. Thanks for reading.

Dr.David Burns

Feeling Good

Boris Cyrulnik

Parler d’Amour au Bord du Gouffre.

Baron-Cohen, 2009

Art Therapy and Clinical Neuroscience

Art therapy whispers you away from all that. It shows your senses are places for mere stimulation but means of knowing the universe. Art Therapy hints that your senses are a gateway into knowledge of self. Through you eyes, your ears, your touch, your body, you can better know the world and your place in it. In spite of all this, art therapy has great difficulty affirming it’s scientific validity (”Validity” is referred to as ”Value” in ordinary civillian language…).  Surely, no one can doubt that art therapy is tied in with the creativity of human nature and no one can doubt that creativity is what saves us. I often wonder how Darwin would view the spontaneous emergence of art therapy in the mental health realm of activities. I am sure he would have quick come up with an explanation for it  but then again, Darwin can kind of get applied to just about anything can’t it…perhaps a future blog post….

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/emasculating-truth/

Global consciousness is really buzzing right now. It is stimulated by the internet like an individual in the midst of an enormous thought. This documentary is an indication of what i have just said. It is a remise en question of the nature of masculinity. Human consciousness is waking up. There is no doubt about that. Nietzsche, Socrates, Einstein would have been proud to see how we are now beginning to question ourselves.

he Marketing of Madness

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/marketing-of-madness-are-we-all-insane/

The Problem with this doc is that it is leaning too heavily against psychiatry. It make the argument that psychiatry as a knowledge field is compromised by a conflict of interest due to the fact that it is too closely allied with Big Pharmaceuticals. If the arguments they make are true, then i am really quite disgusted with the pharmaceutical industry as a whole, from the producers to the legislators to the prescribers and so forth. If it is true that psychiatrists responsible for the definition of mental disorders in the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) are on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies, as has historically been shown to be the case in this documentary, then i do not see how i can have any faith either in psychiatry of pharmacology.

Where the documentary goes too far is in suggesting that there is no reasonable basis for the existence of mental disorders. Though there is relatively little hard scientific evidence for the biological basis of mental disorders, it can not be said that there is little intersubjective validity to the claims that there are certain “observable” mental disorders which bare common features.  The intersubjective validity stems from people complaining about being unhappy on one end and psychiatrists compiling lists of symptoms which correspond to those various forms of unhappiness. It takes two to come up with the definition of a mental ailment: a psychiatrist and a patient. Of course social and moral themes in the narrative of the time also contribute to the creation and definition of mental illness. So while there is little hard science to attest to the existence of mental illness, the current definitions of mental illness still hold some value because they do encapsulate the anecdotal evidence brought in by hundreds of millions of patient- individuals.

This documentary is suggesting that the pill is made first in a laboratory and that the mental illness is defined afterwards. It’s pretty scary to look at things that way, but given that money rules the world, i have to admit that i’m intrigued by the suggestion. Where the documentary gets even more scary for me is in suggesting that pharmaceutical companies, through the intermediary of psychiatry intend to go into the prevention business. They could actually corner that mental health market as well. When I in fact, happen to know that prevention has more to do with how we live our lives than with what pills we are taking. If pharma wants to prescribe something for a condition we already have then i am willing to discuss it. If pharma wants to sell us something to prevent us from feeling, realizing, experiencing, knowing, sensing, intuiting, thinking an unpleasant emotion then I say: “do not move one step further! Step back! You are moving into the territory of the soul and you are forbidden from going there. The soul is where depression has meaning and anxiety is but an awakening to reality. The soul is where science can not easily go. It is the home of the master, the origin of the scientific mind. But science will go there. It will go everywhere eventually. It will leave nothing unexamined. So fine, science can and perhaps should examine the nature of the soul, as it currently does through an examination of consciousness in MRI’s. But business is barred from that realm.  Ah, what am i talking about? Illicit drugs are in the top 10 items in terms of economic weight. Business is already altering normal consciousness. Advertising is manipulating it too. Anyway, what disturbs me is that pills will be prescribed to keep us from getting depressed or anxious or from ever having intermittent explosive anger disorder. Maybe those things tell us something about who we are collectively and individually. Though it is  every patient must walk into a clinic and complain about unhappiness to get drug so I guess, only the people who really need them are getting them. Still, it seems like an awful lot more of us are asking for them. As we progress, the definitions of mental illness in the DSM move with us. I guess there is no helping that.  Maybe progress is killing us.

The documentary makes the a good if true argument that the definitions of mental disorders are actually arrived at through an intersubjective method. In other words, the definitions are voted on by top level psychiatrists within the American Psychiatric Association. Voting is not typically science but it is an good intersubjective method in my view.

In conclusion, this documentary seems slightly biased in favour of an all or nothing, anti-psychiatry view. The more balanced view is to suggest that psychiatry may in fact be compromised as a knowledge field due to conflicts of interest in its relationship to big pharma, yet there is still much valid and useful information within the knowledge field of psychiatry. It’s methods of classification of mental illnesses, even though somewhat lacking in hard scientific basis are based on an analysis of a huge amount of observational data.

What does all this mean? it means that the future of Art therapy is inevitably tied into the future of neurology and positive psychology. Art therapy is a branch on the knowledge tree which includes those knowledge branches. Together, these three branches are the tree branches of prevention in the field of mental health. They are our allies, our brothers in the fight for better survival.

Imagine a world in which any conversation with someone on the street revolves around the questions: ”what are you creating?” instead of ”what do you do for a living?”. In common, every citizen would have some interest in creative process. It could become the way we define ourselves. Actually, it already is. Everyone now has one common topic of conversation. That topic is creativity. Positivity. There is no longer any threat or danger because each person can talk to any other about what they create. The other will answer with passion what it is that they are involved in nurturing and bringing to life.

I had also been listening to podcasts of a Jungian dream analyst for about 2 or 3 days preceding the dream. As a result, just as Freud predicts, some of that material with which the psyche is consciously concerned surfaces in the manifest content of the dream. The manifest content refers to those aspects of the dream which take on sensory form as sights, sounds, odors (rare) touch and taste (also rare) and are able to be recalled by the dreamer.

Beneath the manifest content there is a latent content according to Freud. This is where the symbolic or unconscious meaning is.  It is the stream beneath the ice rink. Because i am not able to recall any other details about the dream it will be impossible to access any of that content. However, the notion that i should have had a dream within a dream is interesting to me. I have never had that kind of dream before and i suspect it is extremely rare. At first analysis i do not believe it would be possible to recall the dream which was being reported within the dream. The reason for this is in keeping with a Jungian look at things. If all the parts of the dream from the table to the analyst to the carpet to the walls are all aspects of the psyche of the dreamer, there can be no dream within the dream. As there is only one ego, a dream within a dream would not be possible because it would require that the dreamer first construct an entire subreality within the subreality already created for the actual dream.  Having a dream within a dream and waking to recall the nature of both would necessitate that the dreamer have two separate egos operating different narratives simultaneously. One narrative is the told as a story about a person having a dream and recalling it in Jungian Analysis while the other simultaneous story is about the dream being discussed with the analyst in the dream. Since it is not wholly possible for an individual (ego) to have two separate narratives running simultaneously  it is also not possible to do this within a dream. The psyche strives for integration of information into a consistent and coherent whole. Consequently, it does not, under normal circumstances engage in splitting of thought or sensation.

Freud gave us a number of concepts to help us understand what is going on in the dream world. Concepts that seem to really make a lot of sense. A few notions like condensation, fusion, substitution, displacement, latent and manifest content all helped me to analyse my own dreams and get a deeper meaning out of them.  But do i see those things simply because i read about them and they are supposedly there to be seen? Are they really there? Am I using my knowledge to project onto a reality something which is not real? Does my supposed knowledge make it real? Is my believing it to be true enough to make it true? Is this the ultimate placebo effect by which my belief in it is a sufficient condition to make it exist? Or, is it still nothing but an illusion no matter how much i choose to believe in it? It is not until very recently, some 20 years later that i have started to ask a fundamental and personal knowledge shattering question: did Freud’s theories structure the perceptual filter through which i see my dreams? Obviously, the answer is yes. I read Freud’s ideas and from that moment on, my thinking changed about what is going on in my dreams. In some sense it is pretty obvious really. I mean anything that we read and find interesting is bound to shape our perceptual filters and thus our experience. The more pressing question for me though is: Do i see things in my dreams only because Freud tells me they are so? Put another way: are there other, equally plausible explanations for what is going on? Well, yes there are. One is that gods are talking to us in our dreams. An0ther is that dreams foretell the future. A devout reader of the Koran might have inclinations to believe that his dreams are messages from a god. Native Indians had some interesting ideas about dreams which are not really any less likely than Freud’s. Freud’s though are analytical and any religious ideas about dreams are spiritual. One has to do more with the soul and the human narrative while Freud’s has more to do with a scientific method of examining the process of dreaming.

It sounds somewhat trivial i suppose but the thought process goes like this:

1) Freud tells me that there are certain underlying principles which shape how a dream looks to the dreamer.

2) I find his theories convincing and thereafter begin to see those principles operating in my dreams.

3) I am now, 20 years later questioning whether i have been a fool, seeing things in my dreams which are not objectively real.

Basically, knowledge of the kind Freud has imparted is such that once you find it convincing, it continues to convince you by shaping everything you see in the world into a piece of that knowledge. This sounds something like religion in a sense. Religion is very convincing conventional, oral history which claims to determine some aspects of the future. Once you are convinced by any of the big religions, everything you see around you starts to fit in with the theory.

I am not saying that Freud’s theories are a kind of religion but that the type of knowledge category which his ideas about dreams falls into is similar to the knowledge category which religious ideas fall into. In summary, i can’t say whether the theories are true or not. Nobody can and i guess that is the main complaint that cognitive behaviourists have with psychoanalysis. Though there is a huge amount of educated support for psychoanalysis along with anecdotal evidence in the form of millions of case hundreds of thousands of case studies. Not to mention the intersubjective validation of the entire Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Nonetheless, going with the majority has never been a good enough reason to believe something. World War II taught us that.

Though it seems i am critical of Freud’s ideas and somewhat mistrusting of them, i must admit, i continue to believe in their essential value and usefulness for self understanding. I have not yet rejected anything which the master has said.  This post has only been to suggest that i am for perhaps the first time ever, seriously questioning them. I am starting to wonder what has shaped the mind of the thinker and whether or not the thinker can ever really think about his own thinking without contaminating his thoughts with the ways in which he thinks.

There have historically been many parallels drawn between creative genius and madness. While most of these ideas were written about by art historians, we need not discount them all. Perhaps one of the links between the processes of creativity and psychosis is that they may on the surface resemble each other. If that is true then making art with schizophrenic populations could mean meeting the patient where he is in his thought process. As therapists, we have always heard that: ”you must meet the client where he is”. Perhaps engaging the creative process with people facing schizophrenia is a way of doing this. If you can get into the world of the client, as a therapist then you may be able to affect positive change there.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/tough-guise/

about the violent rite of passage boys must navigate in order to become men. Because violence is perceived as an integral component of being a man, nearly all of the violence on the planet is inflicted by men. Yet, I know of one R and B musical group from whom the songs bring only messages of love and loss. That r and b/ gospel groups name is “boys to men”.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/emasculating-truth/

Global consciousness is really buzzing right now. It is stimulated by the internet like an individual in the midst of an enormous thought. This documentary is an indication of what i have just said. It is a remise en question of the nature of masculinity. Human consciousness is waking up. There is no doubt about that. Nietzsche, Socrates, Einstein would have been proud to see how we are now beginning to question ourselves.

he Marketing of Madness

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/marketing-of-madness-are-we-all-insane/

The Problem with this doc is that it is leaning too heavily against psychiatry. It make the argument that psychiatry as a knowledge field is compromised by a conflict of interest due to the fact that it is too closely allied with Big Pharmaceuticals. If the arguments they make are true, then i am really quite disgusted with the pharmaceutical industry as a whole, from the producers to the legislators to the prescribers and so forth. If it is true that psychiatrists responsible for the definition of mental disorders in the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) are on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies, as has historically been shown to be the case in this documentary, then i do not see how i can have any faith either in psychiatry of pharmacology.

Where the documentary goes too far is in suggesting that there is no reasonable basis for the existence of mental disorders. Though there is relatively little hard scientific evidence for the biological basis of mental disorders, it can not be said that there is little intersubjective validity to the claims that there are certain “observable” mental disorders which bare common features.  The intersubjective validity stems from people complaining about being unhappy on one end and psychiatrists compiling lists of symptoms which correspond to those various forms of unhappiness. It takes two to come up with the definition of a mental ailment: a psychiatrist and a patient. Of course social and moral themes in the narrative of the time also contribute to the creation and definition of mental illness. So while there is little hard science to attest to the existence of mental illness, the current definitions of mental illness still hold some value because they do encapsulate the anecdotal evidence brought in by hundreds of millions of patient- individuals.

This documentary is suggesting that the pill is made first in a laboratory and that the mental illness is defined afterwards. It’s pretty scary to look at things that way, but given that money rules the world, i have to admit that i’m intrigued by the suggestion. Where the documentary gets even more scary for me is in suggesting that pharmaceutical companies, through the intermediary of psychiatry intend to go into the prevention business. They could actually corner that mental health market as well. When I in fact, happen to know that prevention has more to do with how we live our lives than with what pills we are taking. If pharma wants to prescribe something for a condition we already have then i am willing to discuss it. If pharma wants to sell us something to prevent us from feeling, realizing, experiencing, knowing, sensing, intuiting, thinking an unpleasant emotion then I say: “do not move one step further! Step back! You are moving into the territory of the soul and you are forbidden from going there. The soul is where depression has meaning and anxiety is but an awakening to reality. The soul is where science can not easily go. It is the home of the master, the origin of the scientific mind. But science will go there. It will go everywhere eventually. It will leave nothing unexamined. So fine, science can and perhaps should examine the nature of the soul, as it currently does through an examination of consciousness in MRI’s. But business is barred from that realm.  Ah, what am i talking about? Illicit drugs are in the top 10 items in terms of economic weight. Business is already altering normal consciousness. Advertising is manipulating it too. Anyway, what disturbs me is that pills will be prescribed to keep us from getting depressed or anxious or from ever having intermittent explosive anger disorder. Maybe those things tell us something about who we are collectively and individually. Though it is  every patient must walk into a clinic and complain about unhappiness to get drug so I guess, only the people who really need them are getting them. Still, it seems like an awful lot more of us are asking for them. As we progress, the definitions of mental illness in the DSM move with us. I guess there is no helping that.  Maybe progress is killing us.

The documentary makes the a good if true argument that the definitions of mental disorders are actually arrived at through an intersubjective method. In other words, the definitions are voted on by top level psychiatrists within the American Psychiatric Association. Voting is not typically science but it is an good intersubjective method in my view.

In conclusion, this documentary seems slightly biased in favour of an all or nothing, anti-psychiatry view. The more balanced view is to suggest that psychiatry may in fact be compromised as a knowledge field due to conflicts of interest in its relationship to big pharma, yet there is still much valid and useful information within the knowledge field of psychiatry. It’s methods of classification of mental illnesses, even though somewhat lacking in hard scientific basis are based on an analysis of a huge amount of observational data.

Neuroscience vs. the Believing Brain.

In this one, neuroscience reiterates the position that there is nothing in the mind but brains. Nothing in a human skull but neural networks, chain reactions, meaningless bits of activity. The speaker then goes on to suggest that science can take a quantitative approach to moral and political issues with some success. I am torn about the speaker’s views to tell you the truth. One one hand, i believe that belief is killing us in the form of cultural and religions and political wars. I recognize that one world with one culture and one science might be the answer to all that. On the other hand, i think that science must accept it’s limitations and proceed carefully when making claims about the ability of the quantitative method to find solutions to political and moral problems. I also believe that culture is important and that the recognition of each human being’s individuality is fundamental to defining us as human beings. Clearly there are thoughts and there are feelings and these two are fundamentally different experiences of the world. So far, i am stuck on the somewhat simplistic conclusion that science has does not make use of all the wonderful data that subjective feelings bring to human understanding and can therefore never yield any discovery which is fully representative of human experience. Thus at it’s best, science can only say a few things about one half of what it means to be human. For the the other half, you still need art.

http://youtu.be/YqAwfv3HYGo

Batman, symbolism, Carl Jung, Art Therapy.

This one is a great Jungian perspective on the origins of the archetypal figure known as batman. After seeing this, you can really understand how it is that a figure like batman became so huge. He speaks to our unconscious. He asks the big questions. He fights for the people like Luke Skywalker. From an art therapy perspective, he transforms a trauma into an asset.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGJXF3uJuXI&feature=player_embedded

The brain, neurology, experience, sensation, perception, dark side of psychology reasearch

if the  below video does not display all parts of this BBC series, please simply click on this

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/brain-secret-history/

The U.S vs. John Lennon

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-us-vs-john-lennon/

John Lennon, as i come to realize in my later thirties is one of my idols. He came from nothing, got everything and advocated a return to nothing which was in fact everything. He continued to live out his rebellious life even though he was paid to be quiet. He chose to follow his heart, knowing full well it was at personal risk to himself. He advocated love at a time of violence. He thought and behaved like a child. He feared for his safety and openly felt people were watching him and wished him ill. He wrote a couple of songs about his impression that the c.i.a were following him. He transliterated everything he seemed to be thinking and feeling into song. He turned his guitar into a canon and blew criminal minds to pieces without shedding a drop of blood. He was a Beatle. But being a Beatle was the least of his accomplishments. It was a condition of circumstances which all led to the Beatles coming together and being an irrevokable hit. It is about everything he did afterwards which made him great. He was eloquent when he spoke and used the least amount of words possible to express the greatest ideas. Like a true musician, he condensed a ton of information into a couple of notes. He would have loved the internet. He would have despised Hollywood. Actually he already detested Hollywood in the 60′s shortly after he was punished for suggesting the Beatles were more popular than god. He lived his life as one long and serious performance peace. His existence is possibly the greatest work of Shock Art in human history. He beat and bludgeoned American consciousness to a pulp at a time when Freud’s nephew was concocting plans to make us slaves to advertising. Freud’s nephew was using Freud’s ideas to develop the professional field of public relations. Actually Eddy Bernaise coined the term: “public relations” and devised schemes – based on Freuds theories – for marketing cigarettes to women and turning us all into slaves to consumerism. Bernaise said we have to replace needs with desires. What a comparison to put Bernaise next to Lennon but to show you the greatness of human flight, i must show you the depths of human stupidity. I of course situate myself somewhere in between.

The money fix

This title says it all.

http://youtu.be/TwmM5Nb6hiE

Ok, this is my new favourite. It is a doc about the ability to make people believe in faith healing. This documentary releases for the first time ever, a scientific examination of the world of faith healing. It shows how vulnerable and predisposed people can be led down a path of betrayal into handing over their money and their very free will to charlatans. At the end, the actor reveals to the believers that they have been fooled. I have never seen anything like this.

http://youtu.be/jYjgeayfYPI

Sweet lord, please view this and help me figure out what to make of it.  Quantum physics, communication, Einstein, human creativity. An argument for creative arts therapies?

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/quantum-communication/

The sexualization of childhood. Push up bras, lingerie for children? It is here, now. You made it world. We bought it. As a note, i have to say that most of the documentaries which i have seen about the nature of social sexualization have had really strong feminist bias. This means the documentaries are narrated by women who seem to believe that men are responsible for the ills which women are facing with regards to sexual identity. I think the issues around sexualization are a little more complicated than mere feminist bias can uncover.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/sexy-inc-our-children-under-influence/

Also look at the documentary below for an example of feminist bias in the examination of labiaplasty for women. The narrator of the documentary wishes to present the issue that women’s reason for labiaplasty is men’s judgement. It is not so simple. Women’s motivations for undergoing such operations do include men’s judgements but not exclusively. They are also motivated by a will to power and a desire for control over others. Hence, the very things which feminism seek to negate in gender relations.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/perfect-vagina/

The perfect vagina from heather leach on Vimeo.

Suburbia. Holy crap, this doc makes it look like a living hell. It shows suburbia as a place that kills culture, humanity, starves creativity and makes you fat. Hmmmm. Maybe i’ll hold off on that cheap suburban dream a little while longer. Plus it is ugly out there. The space you walk on belongs to private interests. There are no small businesses die, in favour of big ones. No community. People forget how to interact with each other. Ah, forget it.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/radiant-city/

War, American, Japanese, best interpretation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hx4Avy4jAPk&NR=1

Art therapy, interpretation of the image, process of art therapy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnX0jaLtNf8&feature=BF&list=PLBEF3D69BE66DE2D5&index=99&shuffle=967216

mamalian brain, cbt and Art Therapy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b6kIQRxXMw&feature=BF&list=PLBEF3D69BE66DE2D5&index=13

Art therapy and neurology, TAAP method:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPSooTH_7Cg&feature=BF&list=PLBEF3D69BE66DE2D5&index=9

woman, feminism, gender,

war, the power of the individual, kamakaze attack, belief in self.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4J7zETjc-M&feature=related

The Marketing of Madness

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/marketing-of-madness-are-we-all-insane/

The Problem with this doc is that it is leaning too heavily against psychiatry. It make the argument that psychiatry as a knowledge field is compromised by a conflict of interest due to the fact that it is too closely allied with Big Pharmaceuticals. If the arguments they make are true, then i am really quite disgusted with the pharmaceutical industry as a whole, from the producers to the legislators to the prescribers and so forth. If it is true that psychiatrists responsible for the definition of mental disorders in the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) are on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies, as has historically been shown to be the case in this documentary, then i do not see how i can have any faith either in psychiatry of pharmacology.

Where the documentary goes too far is in suggesting that there is no reasonable basis for the existence of mental disorders. Though there is relatively little hard scientific evidence for the biological basis of mental disorders, it can not be said that there is little intersubjective validity to the claims that there are certain “observable” mental disorders which bare common features.  The intersubjective validity stems from people complaining about being unhappy on one end and psychiatrists compiling lists of symptoms which correspond to those various forms of unhappiness. It takes two to come up with the definition of a mental ailment: a psychiatrist and a patient. Of course social and moral themes in the narrative of the time also contribute to the creation and definition of mental illness. So while there is little hard science to attest to the existence of mental illness, the current definitions of mental illness still hold some value because they do encapsulate the anecdotal evidence brought in by hundreds of millions of patient- individuals.

This documentary is suggesting that the pill is made first in a laboratory and that the mental illness is defined afterwards. It’s pretty scary to look at things that way, but given that money rules the world, i have to admit that i’m intrigued by the suggestion. Where the documentary gets even more scary for me is in suggesting that pharmaceutical companies, through the intermediary of psychiatry intend to go into the prevention business. They could actually corner that mental health market as well. When I in fact, happen to know that prevention has more to do with how we live our lives than with what pills we are taking. If pharma wants to prescribe something for a condition we already have then i am willing to discuss it. If pharma wants to sell us something to prevent us from feeling, realizing, experiencing, knowing, sensing, intuiting, thinking an unpleasant emotion then I say: “do not move one step further! Step back! You are moving into the territory of the soul and you are forbidden from going there. The soul is where depression has meaning and anxiety is but an awakening to reality. The soul is where science can not easily go. It is the home of the master, the origin of the scientific mind. But science will go there. It will go everywhere eventually. It will leave nothing unexamined. So fine, science can and perhaps should examine the nature of the soul, as it currently does through an examination of consciousness in MRI’s. But business is barred from that realm.  Ah, what am i talking about? Illicit drugs are in the top 10 items in terms of economic weight. Business is already altering normal consciousness. Advertising is manipulating it too. Anyway, what disturbs me is that pills will be prescribed to keep us from getting depressed or anxious or from ever having intermittent explosive anger disorder. Maybe those things tell us something about who we are collectively and individually. Though it is  every patient must walk into a clinic and complain about unhappiness to get drug so I guess, only the people who really need them are getting them. Still, it seems like an awful lot more of us are asking for them. As we progress, the definitions of mental illness in the DSM move with us. I guess there is no helping that.  Maybe progress is killing us.

The documentary makes the a good if true argument that the definitions of mental disorders are actually arrived at through an intersubjective method. In other words, the definitions are voted on by top level psychiatrists within the American Psychiatric Association. Voting is not typically science but it is an good intersubjective method in my view.

In conclusion, this documentary seems slightly biased in favour of an all or nothing, anti-psychiatry view. The more balanced view is to suggest that psychiatry may in fact be compromised as a knowledge field due to conflicts of interest in its relationship to big pharma, yet there is still much valid and useful information within the knowledge field of psychiatry. It’s methods of classification of mental illnesses, even though somewhat arbitrary and non-scientific are based on an analysis of a huge amount of data.

The brain on love

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/helen_fisher_studies_the_brain_in_love.html

Sir Kenneth

Jackson Katz: Tough Guise

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmy2IHYq_y8&feature=fvst

Ali Carr-Chellman. Gaming to reengage boys in learning. Boys in education.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ali_carr_chellman_gaming_to_re_engage_boys_in_learning.html

Michael Tsarion: architects of control.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/architects-of-control/

In the architects of control by Micheal Tsarion, the notion is put forth that mind control exists. In the first part of this youtube accessible doc, we are given a not so subtle glimpse of Tsarion’s view that Government and other powerful individuals control the masses through highly subtle, subliminal forces. At first, my intention was to stop watching because i thought i was being taken down the path of another conspiracy theory. but I decided to continue watching because interspersed with what could be labeled as paranoia, I was taken in by some of his ideas, which echoed some of my own. Ultimately, I am very happy to have continued on Tsarion’s trip because the exposé eventually comes around full circle when the narrator explains himself by talking about what he has said. He goes on to say that he is not pointing the finger at anyone but that his aim is to empower people through the process of disturbing them into awareness.  He does not stop there though. He goes on to add that he has a genuine interest in helping with solutions an not just dismantling the system. In sum, i think he shows humility in his approach and intention where many others would have developed god complexes. As he rightly points out, most of the guru’s of the 60′s now live in mansions far and away from any place where they might be of help to us lowly creatures.

My dad thought, after seeing the first 10 minutes of the documentary that the author was mostly paranoid, making huge sweeping statements with little evidence in support. But this is not a court of law. The documentary is a social investigation of what makes people think, do, say, make, what they do.  When we are asking Why type questions, there is usually little evidence to be found and what evidence can be found is highly subjective, anecdotal and hugely philosophical in nature. When one is asking “How” type questions, one can often find scientific support. You just connect the dots to find out for example how electricity works or what constitutes an atom or how babies are made etc.  The why questions take courage to ask, and even more courage to begin to answer.

Remember, the basic premise of Tsarion’s work is to demonstrate that mind control exists. Of course it exists. Mothers mind control their children so they don’t cross the street on red lights. Fathers, well, we are all aware of what the holy Father represents in terms of mind control. Those priests and bishops, all referred to as “father” what kind of control did they have on our minds? Tsarion makes the point well that religion is a form of mind control and that if you can convince a child that when he dies he will go to the afterlife, be surrounded by beautiful women and all he desires, then you can probably make him kill people to get there. You can probably make Christians and Muslims go to war if you can just get to the mind of the child before it is strong and independent enough to think it’s own thoughts.

I have no problem believing that mind control exists. Proving it is somewhat of another matter. Suggesting who is doing it, is easy enough but again, proving it is no slice.  Proof killed religion but it can not kill god. Only god can do that.  Eventually, as you get closer to the 16th and final part of this nearly 2 hour documentary, the narrator and an assistant director talk about how and why they made the movie. They also give you some tips for how to read it.

It does take a discerning mind to sift through what may be paranoia and misplaced judgement on the part of the film maker in order to find the golden nuggets in this film. However, I think the trek through to the end is worth it. By the time the show is over, I was left feeling that the narrator knows something important about the function of art and image in our society, that he is versed in the ways of power and the intentions of the primates that we are. Sure, he is trying to sell us something but as he fairly points out, everyone is trying to sell you something, the question is: “what are you buying?”

My heart contracts and releases, contracts and releases and I can feel the life force within me waking, moving to every cell in my body. The blood that was was in my toes is now in my head, the air that was around me is now within me. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale…

As my heart pumps, my veins pulse, the water within me begins to move as through a broken aquarium. To the surface, out the sides, to the floor, the water follows the path of least resistance: drip, drop, drip, drop.

Where just moments before there was tension, now there is release, where i have been ailing now i’m at peace. My skin is shed.

The instructor continues to guide us on this brief leg of a long journey. In a soft voice he speaks to us as a father speaks to his children. Gently, he shows us through example what it can mean to seek balance and harmony and to be powerful champions  on the inner quest for those things.

Warriors have we been, now are tired. It is time for rest.  The father takes us down for the unwinding. Flat on the earth, we melt into the soil. Water flooding out is being reabsorbed by the sponge beneath my skin.  The spent air is coming back too. The warrior father talks us down into a quiet lullaby.

He tells us to forget our thoughts. With his words, I realize there is indeed one more battle to be won. My body is the first thing to disappear.  Before i can fully leave it behind though, it clasps for one last moment of attention. An itch. A small itch which was nowhere just moments before is now all i can feel. I will not scratch it. I will leave it behind. I am the master. My body is gone. I am in total comfort as i take a few more steps towards thoughtlessness. I grow lighter but deeper with each second and i am somehow filled with joy that I am succeeding in achieving the utmost of simplicity. I am proud, I am tall and strong yet i have no body and not a thought to speak.

Slowly, I realize the journey is not over. In the march to thoughtlessness, I have forgotten to remember. Forgotten to remember all those thoughts which are just waiting for me to be had. I can see them just on the horizon. They will not let me pass. There is a glance to tell me that I must walk through them to reach my destination. I approach what i am all to familiar with. At first i find my instincts. Sexual urges wash over me like like a warm breeze in the silence. Then anger. Yes, that is it: anger and aggression. I should have know that sex would be followed by her opposite twin: aggression.

Before anger has a chance to take hold, I release her. Ironically, above the yoga studio, i can hear the men in the gym upstairs, lifting weights and pumping iron. I hear their faint cries of sadistic pleasure which ensue the pain of lifting dead weight. I have seen some of those men. Their muscles are huge. Sometimes hugely disproportionate to their heads. They move about with shifty eyes, occupying space. No women are there. The women are mostly with me, in the yoga studio. The men are upstairs, dodging stares which they dart at each other suspiciously and conspicuously comparing the image of what is against the image of what one is. Sometimes, i am with the men but not now. In my yoga class there are but 2 or 3 men in a group of 30 people. They are slender and full of vitality though they may not be young.

The sounds of the dumbells crashing to the floor above bounce off my ears like rain drops deflected by a silver steeple.  Inside the steeple, i hear nothing but the sound of my breath, the ebb and flow of the ocean’s tide.

Then, I am there. Without realizing, i have been gone. Not only have i left my body but my mind as well. A silent gasp of wonder tells me that i can not remember the last 30 or so seconds. Where was i? I have no memory of where I was just then. No pictures to paint. But now I have peace. Today, I will hold on to that peace and contemplate the nature of a place that can yield a days worth of piece in just 30 seconds.  I think i will come back tomorrow.

Given how important our expression is. Given how our expression is the sum proof of our existence to one another, how then can we accept the present situation in which creative expression is so stifled and demeaned. Not my own expression necessarily but expression in general. How can it be that some things are considered important while others just fall by the wayside of our valuations. How did we get to this? Who took us to this place where only that which exists in concrete, measurable form has value. Religion is being tossed out like an old sock because nothing can be proven. In fairness, i understand the backlash against religions because we just aren’t thinking in those terms anymore. But what about spirituality and the notion of something bigger than us? I’ve said it throughout the blog entries. Science is the new god. But what of the other ways of knowing? What of intuition? What of impressions questions? are we only interested in knowledge, interpretations and answers? Is this it then? The end of play? Was sitting around the kitchen discussing possibilities so awful? Was it so disquieting to turn over rocks and look at the dirt that we now want only roads to drive on, to get somewhere with GPS and see something we first Google mapped. What about driving 50 clicks in any direction and looking at what happens to be there? I read somewhere that only the true voyager knows not where he goes.  I think you call this the phenomenological approach. It is a beautiful way to examine life. It is the child’s way of looking. But there, you see, in saying the child’s way, i have already condescended upon this way of looking. I have belittled it and berated it because children are but unformed and uninformed grown ups. Their way of looking can not possibly teach us anything. Even if it could, we have no time to tear ourselves away from computers long enough to look.

You can stop and ask questions about anything really. Any minute of any interaction gives way to a hundred questions. But if you do that, you are not really living in the present. Only analysing it. You can’t annalize your life, you have to live it. The analysis goes on though. Unconsciously. It is all getting recorded and registered, bagged and tagged. This data is encoded in a vast registry of knowledge which most of us have little access to. As Freud rightly pointed out though, this registry is shaping the course of our every thought and action, the same way a registry key shapes the values which govern operating systems. With computers, registry keys are hidden from most users in order to prevent inexperienced people from going in there and fatally reorganizing the operating system, rendering it nonoperational.  Yes, registry keys are to computers what unconscious motivations are to consciousness. They are the structure or the principles upon which the windows operate.

Anyway, i am losing more than a few people’s interest here perhaps and also losing the grasp of my point. My point is that there is some really important stuff going on which nobody seems to be attending to. Something like climate change, or famine in 3rd world countries. We might attend to it if we had the chance but we have set ourselves up with blinders, designed specifically to keep us from seeing what we do. In that sense, we are truly evil creatures. Capable of lying to ourselves long before we learn to do it to others.  Everytime there is something important enough to attend to, commercialization sublimates the energy required to attend to it and canalizes it towards our own desire to purchase something.  So this means that the true value of art is supplanted by the commercialization of it. What art could truly be doing for us is completely destroyed by our presentation and perception of art as an object of consumption. In buying a song off of itunes, we loose the true effect which the artist and the music could have had in a live performance type of arrangement. The artist has something to say. John Lennon did. A few others did too. Today, no artist is speaking to us. Just marketing to us. It is as though, an important person with a job is standing behind every artist and saying: “if you want the gig, keep your mouth shut and sing the song”.

There is an imbalance in the power dynamic between those living in the art world and those living in a world like say the finance sector. Until that power balance is somehow equalized, artists will always be seen as marginals who attempt to get through life doing what they love to do and refusing to compromise. The implicit view will always be: “why don’t they just get a job?”. The view of a painting will always be: “why should i pay for that?”.

Art has not objectively ascertainable value and art therapists know this well. In fact, they capitalize on that fact. The art market knows that art has no objective value and so massive theater campaigns must be set up in  order to artificially boost the value of art to the desired position. Why should Hitler’s art sell today for a mere $400,000 when he is easily the artist who taught us most about ourselves in the last 100 years?  It sells for that price because it would be morally reprehensible by many to value it any higher given the kind of man that he was.  On the other side of the valuation of art, we have dismal works from artists who have had relatively little significance in the grand scheme of things selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So my point here is that the value of art depends on a lot of different considerations but that it is by no means a precise formula for measurement.

People who work close to the pot of money tend to have more access to the money. So while a bank teller doesn’t make a whole lot, the higher up you go in the banks organization, the more money you make. At the end, a person works hard, goes home tired at the end of the day and gets a lot less financial recognition for it than someone else who happens to be higher up the ladder. Sure there are differences in education and level of responsibility but what i am saying is that the meritocracy we are supposedly living in does not flow according to the set of rules we are supposedly morally obliged to follow. There are short cuts for example. People get jobs through connections. There is racism which holds one group back while another moves more steadily forward. In this competition based economy meritocracy means competition. Where you have competition you have cheaters. Look at how much steroids can be found in the Olympics or in baseball and Hockey. When you wave hundreds of thousands of dollars in front of peoples faces, you can’t complain that they are stepping over each other to get at it.  When it comes to societal valuations of the artist versus the bank worker we can observe that the artist has been steadily loosing ground for a long time until the internet came along. In the old days, a handful of artists good good work by getting connected to bankers. Today, things have evolved more laterally as that all powerful equalizing force, known as the internet has given a greater number of artists a greater measure of exposure to the public. Ultimately, this has been good for both artists and public because artists are getting to reach people, and people are getting a greater variety of art. This situation is a typification of a general trend towards the democratization of art which art therapists currently find themselves at the center of.   If art belongs to everyone, then the art therapists says, let’s all define it and use it for what we need it to do. The only people losing art the artists who were at the very top and the millions of people who stood between them and the adoring public, greasing their palms every step of the way. I am not apathetic, but I have to say i have a very limited amount of empathy for those people complaining about copyright infringement.  I say to them, if you got credit for your work in whatever form then you got paid.

I don’t wish to be particularly unsympathetic to the music industry or to artists in general. To prove this to you, I feel the same way about the financial industry, religion, law, medicine etc.  If we the people can learn something from you, then take that knowledge to build something better then everyone wins. That means that private insurance concepts can be used to benefit all people. Knowledge of medicine can be used to put in place a system of preventative care. Current  banking models can be regulated and governmentalized in order to benefit the people. Basically, this all amounts to a redistribution of  wealth which follows the redistribution of knowledge which is currently taking place.  The current system is ineffective and the bad news is that this probably means a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. The good news is that those jobs were probably pointless anyways and that those same people can be employed towards making the system more efficient.

I realize i have gone left and right in this post but that is because talking about art is like talking about life in that the discussion rarely flows in a straight line from one point to another. I have not given up however on making some sense here and now.

This post started with the motivation of expressing the view that art has no objective value while work done in other spheres like economics is objectively remunerated. I made the point that this circumstance explains how it comes to be that art is often found on the distant poles of the valuation spectrum either near worthless (average joe artist)  or priceless (Michelangelo’s chapel).  I also made the point that there are important things going on right in front of us and that we don’t see them because we don’t want to. I made the point that this meritocracy is an illusion in which some people are paid more than others for pretty much the same level of physical and mental exertion. Nurses, social workers, teachers and cops all earn roughly the same money for similar educational sets and do very important work. High placed bank workers and private business consultants or political consultants get paid higher salaries on average for similar educational sets and work hours.

Artists have to fight to be heard and this is a parallel to the reality of the average individual who also must fight to be heard. It is ironic that the artist is the marginal player in the day to day scene of society because the artist actually represents the average individual who aspires to be free, do what he loves, obtain recognition, be one with others, create beauty, live with nature etc.  It is ultimately the artist who represents the average man on the street. Not the politician with his made up narrative, not the banker with his eye catching suit.  Ask yourself who represents you best in a global sense. Look at the values presented by all the groups of people religious, political and social who represent you and ask yourself: “who is more close to saying what i want to say?” If you ask yourself that question, you will invariably come back to either the scientist of the artist. Most of us will say that the artist reflects what we dream of becoming while the scientist reflects what can really happen. The two are integral parts of our personalities like anima and animus. So why then must we pay respect to only one?

This is just about every bit of attention i have managed to direct on my work from organized press agencies.

The work on this site comes from a place deeply concerned about the course of humanity; driven by a need to re-evaluate our accepted conceptualization of the universe as a machine rather than an organism. I paint in the most natural way possible, attempting always to return to the lowest common denominator of human being.

Though a rational mind influences my painters instincts, I have learned to silence that chattering monkey and find a place which is literally beyond words. As forms and colours combine, meaning emerges in the image. I can look at the image the way a neurologist looks at neurons to see what the “inside” is doing.

What I can see in these images are vestiges of who we could have been. Assembled in these paintings is an emergent language made up of pre-rational, pre-verbal, universal, immutable symbols. The symbols which surface tell me something at once general and specific about myself. Check out the painting below, called “General Specific” for an illustration of what I have been rambling about.

I guess we are social animals and so we pay attention to what is going on in the tribe.  It’s inevitable, especially if you are young or single. It can be dangerous to be unaware of what is going on socially, around you. There is useful information out there to be gleaned. Information that could change the situation dramatically either in your favour such as in sexual, financial or altruistic opportunities or against you such as in the form of judgment in the eyes of others or threats of aggression and disapproval. If we are not attending to those things in some capacity our social development could suffer so the chances are that most of us are attending to it. The brain is registering all kinds of information just below the level of consciousness and I am pretty sure there is a way to train ourselves to attend to it. If we can attend to it we can increase our awareness of what it is that we are attending to regularly. In knowing that, we know our patterns of thought, our areas of interest and ultimately our motivations. It becomes possible for us to see some distance into the future, to predict how we are going to react given a certain situation.

You may be thinking that this is a rather analytical stance on one’s own experience. This could resemble what Freud called intellectualization. That a person who sees their experience in the way i have just described is someone who is not living in the present moment. To a degree that is true but one might also say that one who lives their experience in that way is very present, attuned and in tune.

Whatever one’s opinion, I would advance the point that we are monkeys in suits doing a whole lot of pretending and playing along. Our words help us shape our realities into pretty bits of fiction. We are drowning in fiction actually. A form of mass hallucination which requires no drug to be had.  What if the drug were society and the effect was what we see around us. How would we know we are intoxicated?

Anyway, there we are babbling about at a party. Each person seems concerned with being able to say the craziest most innapropriate thing. This game goes on for a while and i start to suspect that the goal is to say something off the wall in order to try to break social order. We are driven to follow convention and not be embarrassed but we are also driven to show each other that we are willing to go against the grain to break social order, that we are not so conformist as to be completely mindless. Still, this is a game much of the time where we are attempting to show the group: “I can talk loudly, or I can act like an ape and get away with it, or i can swear and say chocking things without repercussion. ” We push the limits but only within reason because nobody and i mean nobody wants to run the risk of being ostracized. Ostracization is after all one of the worst punishments a group can inflict on an individual. In fact ostracisation is synonymous with isolation. Isolation from the group. Isolation has been shown to cause mental illness such as in the case of solitary confinement and shunning. Being shunned, exiled has often been synonymous with death itself. As difficult as it is to live in society, we are severely unhappy when cut off from it. Even a socio-path suffers if cut off from people. Some form of social interaction is essential to life. Facebook is more than a distraction, it exists of necessity.

Apes in the clothing of humans I tell you. a phd makes no difference to that. A super duper post doctorate makes no difference to the reality that we have lived thousands of years as savages and only just now are beginning to realize our humanity.

It’s no surprise that by the time i was 19, I was looking to go to university in another province where i could fully explore what the world was made of. I moved to montreal, did a few degrees at school, always with the intention of moving back to my nucleus. As my friends moved back, one after the next, i wondered what I was still doing. Some voice told me: “you are here for a reason”. I lived through difficult times in my twenties moving through sorted living arrangements and making huge personal sacrifices in the hopes of selling a few paintings. I walked in the swamps of society, hanging with relics, moving through social scenes a lot of people never walk out of. All the while, I told myself, this  is what an artist does. An artist goes it alone. Walks the dangerous path between isolation and consolation, nowhere in between. After all, an artist is not supposed to have it easy i told myself. At the snap of my fingers, i could have been back home in my bed at my parents house, in the heart of toronto’s bustling down town. I could have had an easier life for sure. Surrounded by family and friends, going to parties, meeting new people and the having special consideration given to me just because i was in my home town. I did not do it. I continued to ride my bicycle, looking around, left and right. Maybe in the hopes that some police cruiser would come looking for me. No one did. I think today, that i finally ended up riding my bike really fucking far. Maybe far enough that there is no way to get back to that peace and innocence and freedom or invulnerability i once knew. Did i do this? Or is this just what being an adult is?

These are the trade-offs. The compromises we seem to have to make to get where we are going. I think of a friend of mine who decided never to live more that 50 yards from their first home; the one they grew up in. Sometimes they lament to me about how they have difficulty making big decisions and about how they sometimes wish they could get more perspective and distance from their everyday lives. When i speak with one friend in particular, i look into him for glimpses of what i left behind; what my life would have been like. I am somehow comforted to hear him complain about it. It validates the decisions i made. I wonder, how many of us are there longing for something we have lost? Maybe that is being an adult. Some sense of dissatisfaction for having given something up. Children don’t like to trade, they seem to want both. I know i usually do too. Both cities, both time and money, both now and then. But there is a trade. As i write this, i get to thinking that that trade defines who we are.

I have to recognise that most white men like myself acknowledge that we have had unfaire advantage and taken unfair priviledge throughout history. If there is some backlash against us for that history then maybe it is deserved. But i would remind those who felt they were the victims of oppression that one often becomes what one rejects most. Furthermore, i am not a white man like any white man. I was raised by a feminist and took some of those principles as my own. However, because i am a man, i am naturally inclined towards feeling for and understanding my own gender. So while I have strong feminist roots, I see feminism through the eyes of a man and as someone once said: ”we don`t see the things as they are, we see things as we are.” 

Would it be o.k for me to say that a person is thinking like a black person? Acting like an Hispanic? I don`t think so. Any ethnic group would surely object to that kind of cultural harrassement. So, why is it o.k to do it to a white man. If I were a white man who had climed the corporate ladder and sat at the top of a bank, then maybe i could look a little more flippantly at the issue because anyone who would dare suggest i had a ”man`s cold” would be fired or severely disciplined. Or maybe i would be so high up the food chain that a comment like that would ricochet off me like a tiny bullet off a modern tank. The fact is, I am not a man like the man i have just described. Maybe it does not matter. Wait, it does matter because i am a man who ”crossed over” so to speak. I crossed over from engaging in traditional male activities which society had laid out on the path for me to choose. i crossed over the gender barrier. I became a nurturer. I left money and power behind for love and art. I chose to work with children in a disadvantaged setting rather than enlist in  the army. I chose to be an art therapist rather than a politician. I chose to be an artist rather than a jock. I chose to be a nurturer rather than a sub-prime lender. I crossed over the barrier, into what has so far been a women`s world.

Now that i am here, i have asked myself if women are kinder to men than men were to women who attempted to cross over. Ultimately, the answer is yes. Otherwise, i would not be writing this to you know as an art teacher, art therapist and artist. However, now that I am here, I can assure you, women are not above saying stupid, sexist things and reminding you that you are on their turf. Still, I am sure some women will say, as my program director once said to me: ”your pain is nothing compared to what we go through every month”. Ironically, in saying that, the pain of marginalisation, and isolation which i sometimes feel in a women`s field is increased to a point where I feel i can truly understand what it is to be discriminated against. Maybe that is the point. As a matter of fact, i am pretty sure that is the point some women have tried to make. Especially that women who told me I was accepted into a certain field because i was a man. Some women appear to be saying: ”how do you like it now that the tables are turned?” Well, I don`t. But then again, I never sat on the end of the table that oppressed women. I did not inherit all the priviledge that those people did. I was born to love and respect women. It is doubly hard for me to accept that women could perceive me, as a mere member of the other gender and project onto me all of the disdain and discontent meant for men living in the past.

I can almost hear you thinking: ”this guy has a serious chip on his shoulder” or ”this guy`s issues are personal”. You would be right on both counts if that is your thinking. However, one of the most important slogans of our time happens to be one set forth by feminists :”the personal is political”. Until we start taking the political personally, nothing can change. Until whites stand up for black rights, adults fight for children and children for adults and until women fight for men`s rights and vice versa, nothing can change. It will always be just individuals sitting in the corner, getting angry and pushing back with no global results. To redress the current cultural and political inequalities, people with the power will have to make the concessions. Historically, this has only happenned through revolution. If you know of any instance where people in power voluntarily shared it with others please let me know.

The other day, i was on the subway and a girl, 18 years old, maybe younger walked on the platform with a young man with whom she appeared to be comfortable. As she walked past, i became interested in her and followed her with my eyes along the platform for a couple of seconds as i sometimes do when a woman catches my eye. Quickly, i looked around the the inside of the stopped subway car and observed that just about every  man who had a direct line of site to the girl was intensely focused on her, whether they were conscious of it or not.  In the same moment, i had time to shift my gaze back to the girl and observe her sending a look back to what seemed to be every man in that subway car, including myself.  Like machine gun spray, we were hosed down by the object now person.

I thought to myself that this girl seemed to possess an extraordinary amount of power. I thought to myself: ” how does she manage that power?” “how does it affect her development, her consciousness, her actions?”  It was much easier for me to understand how it affects us men because i believe myself to be a fairly ordinary man when it comes to being curious about the opposite sex. But to understand how it affects a woman, that i can not fully do.  it seems to me there are those women who learn to be apprehensive and mistrusting about the gaze of men, others who learn to use that same gaze towards earning rewards.  Some women seem to be destroyed by it literally. Their souls wither away as  a consequence of living in a world where only the object seems to matter. When there is no use for a soul or when it is not validated, maybe it kind of dies or at least goes silent.  Still, some women seem to have integrated the reality of being sex objects in the eyes of men by accepting it and finding some type of inner balance or harmony with that reality. As though this last group says: “Well, my body is what it is, i might as well just get on with it”  These women are perhaps the most attractive because they avoid extreme narcissism or extreme defensiveness in the form of audacious hostility towards all men. Whatever the case, it seems to have been a right of passage which most if not all women go through in our culture.

Muslim cultures have found other ways of managing this astronomical force of nature which is the reality of women’s beauty in men’s eyes. I often wonder what the world is like for those cultures who have done away completely with the issues of women’s attractiveness to men as we know them.

The second thing i noticed occurred when two 20o lb men walked past each other in the stair case. One asian, one black, both men moving in opposite directions, one up, one down. The men broached each other in the passage ever so slightly and this led to an exchange of words, deathly stares and invitations to play out the rest of the psychodrama which we are all familiar with. I thought to myself, how sad that these two men, some of the most priviledged men in the world should have traveled through millenia of human evolution, cultural strife and upheaval, just to arrive here and now with violence, pride and confusion in their hearts. Rather than think myself superior to these men, i reflected back to one of the several times i have found myself in that exact situation with another male.  A few steps further away, i reminded myself that we are savages, animals wrapped in humans clothing, shaped  by civilization to just sit and wait for the first opportunity to revert to our truest nature.  I am an optimist, i have said before and I say it now, but man, you have to admit, we are shitty people sometimes.

Sons fallen slap the backsides of tombstones

As a violent caress of frosted breath blows beneath them.

In some parts, rock stands in long obelisk shapes casting shades atop remains

Obscuring the memorials but not the memories of those who rest there.

In other parts, where grass has grown

Lay dust on mire, ash in lye.

No cure is known

For the cause is ?why??

Where bones rest

Not one can speak

No sins confessed

From a stoney creek

Here lie the best with tombstoned heads

There lay the meek in solemn beds

Here stones stand tall and steal the light

There bone sands fall to no respite.

In a cemetery,

Father?s fallen fill the field

In rows of plots their bodies yield

Torn and tattered, shattered shields.

Night descends making fair

The dark aspersion of a nameless dread

The hope is now in a lonely prayer

To raise our status among the dead.

Oil on Canvas, 24 ” X 36″

Tom

2010