Emotional dances Therapeutic dialogues as embodied systems

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Emotional dancesTherapeutic dialogues as
embodied systems

• Paolo Bertrando
• Director, Episteme Centre
• Turin, Italy

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• Labour is blossoming or dancing where
• The body is not bruised to please the soul
• William Butler Yeats, 1927

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• (Keith Haring)

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• The mind/body problem (dualism) is a sharp
  theoretical divide

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• but its not a problem for systemic therapy
  practice.

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the dualism

• (Alberto Giacometti)

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• Here is a remarkable fact. When atoms and
  molecules are organized in a suitably complicated
  way, the result is something that perceives,
  knows, believes, desires, fears, feels pain, and
  so onin other words, an organism with a
  psychology.
• Alex Byrne, 2006

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• how do mind and body interact so as to
  produce in a person a mind able to have effects
  on their body (as when the person wills the body
  to perform some act), whilst also their body can
  affect their mind (as in the experience of pain)?
  Although the problem is simple it has as yet no
  satisfactory solution.
• John Taylor, 2007

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the problem

• (Nam June Paik)

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• parallel dualism
• trascendental idealism
• reductionist materialism

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• Without consciousness, the mindbody problem
  would be much less interesting. With
  consciousness it seems hopeless.
• Thomas Nagel, 1974

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• There is also the question of what exactly is the
  mind? It is certainly composed of conscious
  components, but it would also seem to contain
  non-conscious ones that are more readily
  accepted as components of the body.
• John Taylor, 2007

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• experience

• description of experience

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narratives of the body

• (Man Ray)

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• The textuality of the body implies that any
  account of bodily experience is mediated it
  cannot serve, as many modernists suggest, as a
  source of a primitive reality.
• Tim Armstrong, 1996

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• The body as an object of investigation conflates
  any ready distinction between a philosophy of
  experience and a philosophy of knowledge. We
  act, as we write, with the body.
• Bryan Turner, 1992

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the body text

• (Alberto Giacometti)

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• It is (usually) the female body which comes to
  act as a text, uttering its meanings in a
  material way, well known from instances of
  hysteria, because other channels do not
  necessarily exist for it.
• Sue Vice, 1996

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solid bodies

• (Botero)

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• Between 1880 and 1920, gluttony would be bound
  to fatness, fatness to inefficiency, inefficiency
  to lack of energy and loss of balance, and
  imbalance to overweight. This knot of
  relationships would hold as well for housewives
  as for dancers, and in the home as in the
  heavens.
• Hillel Schwartz, 1987

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body as object

• (Man Ray)

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• Bodies become things for moving, possessing,
  using, enjoying, adjusting, disposing of,
  bartering with, abusing, ignoring, exploiting,
  controlling, and so on. This often leads to
  self-manipulation as well as to the manipulation
  of others.
• Vincent Kenny, 1998

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anorectic bodies

• (Alberto Giacometti)

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• Anorexia is necessarily parodic, as it at once
  exemplifies the feminine stereotype of perfect
  slimness and repudiates it by making a mockery of
  it.
• Marilyn Lawrence, 1989

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family therapy

• (David Hockney)

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• O body swayed to music, O brightening glance
• How can we know the dancer from the dance?
• William Butler Yeats, 1927

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• In family therapy, Yeatss question is considered
  rhetoric we cannot know the dancer from the
  dance. The person is his dance.
• Minuchin and Fishman, 1981

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• What am I doing? I am accessing the right brain
  when I ask somebody how they feel and when I help
  them to connect with parts of their body.
• Virginia Satir, 1985

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new dualisms

• (René Magritte)

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• disembodied dialogues

• mindless bodies

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• When ideas become radically separated from
  embodied practices, the sensuous activities of
  everyday life tend to be subordinated to
  disembodied abstract differences.
• John Lannamann, 1998

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• Schizophrenia is a disease of the brain in which
  various psychopathological processes result in
  highly variable clinical manifestations. However,
  despite a century of study, what is wrong in the
  brain (and where) is not known with exactitude.
• Robert W. Buchanan et al., 1997

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• The issue was not whether a lesion was present,
  but which of all those reported were significant.
  
• John Casanova, 1997

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• Despite the wide array of histopathological
  lesions none have thus far 1997 proved
  diagnostic.
• John Casanova, 1997

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• The delineation of the neuroanatomy of the
  symptom complexes of schizophrenia is a major
  goal of schizophrenia research
• Robert W. Buchanan et al., 1997

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new solutions

• (Marcel Duchamp)

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• There is the temptation to see a profound
  philosophical problem in a place where there is
  really none. As the philosopher Ludwig
  Wittgenstein emphasised, such philosophical
  mirages are often produced by an apparently
  inevitable but erroneous picture of the
  phenomenon under investigation
• Alex Byrne, 2006

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• I do not know what to do except to make
  abundantly clear what opinions I hold regarding
  the supernatural on the one hand and the
  mechanical on the other.

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• Very simply, let me say that I despise and fear
  both of these extremes of opinion and that I
  believe both extremes to be epistemologically
  naive, epistemologically wrong, and politically
  dangerous. They are also dangerous to something
  which we may loosely call mental health.
• Gregory Bateson, 1967

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beyond dualism

• (Man Ray)

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• The old compromises between supernatural
  religion and materialist science are artefacts
  of a false division and by-products of the
  meeting between unsophisticated theology and
  equally unsophisticated science.
• Gregory Bateson, 1976

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person and self

• (Alexander Calder)

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• The person is not a bounded entity separated
  off from the world in which he or she exists, but
  an interaction of body with world, consisting
  partially of both.
• David Smails, 1993

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embodied interactions

• (Henry Moore)

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• The history of our embodied interactions
  generates over time the range of possible actions
  in which we can viably engage. The body is the
  repository of the repertoire of viable
  anticipations which we can make about ourselves
  with others.
• Vincent Kenny, 1998

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new neuroscience

• (Alberto Giacometti)

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• its in these acts, as acts rather than mere
  movements, that our experience of the surrounding
  environment is embodied, that things get for us
  an immediate meaning. the acting brain is also,
  and first of all, an understanding brain.
• Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, 2006

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• To discover that a certain feeling depends on the
  activity of a number of specific brain systems,
  interacting with a number of body organs doesnt
  diminish the status of that feeling.
• Antonio R. Damasio, 1994

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embodied dialogues

• (Marcel Duchamp)

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• There is nothing more in the utterance than the
  utterance there is nothing more said than what
  it is said there is nothing more shown than what
  is shown. Nothing more.
• Tom Andersen, 1995

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• Not all words for just anyone submit equally
  easy. Forcing language to submit to ones own
  intentions and accents, is a difficult and
  complicated process.
• Mikhail Bakhtin, 1935

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• Verbal communication can never be understood and
  explained outside of a concrete situation.
• Voloshinov/Bakhtin, 1929

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body positioning

• (René Magritte)

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• The person suffering does not experience the
  fullness of his own outward expressedness in
  being He does not see the agonizing tension of
  his own muscles, does not see the entire,
  plastically consummated posture of his own body,
  or the expression of suffering on his own face.

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• He does not see the clear blue sky against the
  background of which his suffering outward image
  is delineated for me.
• Mikhail Bakhtin, 1923

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emotions

• (Alberto Giacometti)

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• Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of
  all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but
  it would require an overwhelming amount of
  evidence to make us believe that animals could
  blush.
• Charles Darwin, 1872

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• It is not the simple art of reflecting on our own
  appearance, but the thinking what others think of
  us, which excites a blush. In absolute solitude
  the most sensitive person would be quite
  indifferent about his appearance.
• Charles Darwin, 1872

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• Although the evidence to support the order of
  events that James postulated is somewhat
  equivocal, most modern theorists accept that
  emotions involve both mind and body.
• Keith Oatley, 2004

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• Emotion can point to goals and concerns.
  Sometimes they are clear to us. Sometimes,
  however, we might not know we have these goals,
  so the emotions associated with them emerge only
  slowly.
• Keith Oatley, 2004

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hugs

• (Henry Moore)

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• Shiva Nataraja