Emotional dancesTherapeutic dialogues as embodied

systems

Paolo BertrandoDirector, Episteme Centre

Turin, Italy

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to please the soul

William Butler Yeats, 1927

(Keith Haring)

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

…but it’s not a problem for systemic therapy practice.

the dualism

(Alberto Giacometti)

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

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

the problem

(Nam June Paik)

parallel dualism

trascendental idealism

reductionist materialism

Without consciousness, the mind–body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness With consciousness it seems hopeless. Thomas Nagel, 1974

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

experiencedescription of

experience

narratives of the body

(Man Ray)

The textuality of the body implies that any account of bodily experience is mediated; it cannot servecannot serve, as many modernists suggest, as a source of a primitive “reality”.

Tim Armstrong, 1996

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

Bryan Turner, 1992

the body text

(Alberto Giacometti)

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

Sue Vice, 1996

solid bodies

(Botero)

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

body as object

(Man Ray)

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

Vincent Kenny, 1998

anorectic bodies

(Alberto Giacometti)

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

family therapy

(David Hockney)

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

William Butler Yeats, 1927

In family therapy, Yeats’s question is considered rhetoricrhetoric: we cannot know the dancer from the dance. The person is his dance. Minuchin and Fishman, 1981

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

new dualisms

(René Magritte)

disembodied dialogues

mindless bodies

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

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

Robert W. Buchanan et al., 1997

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

Despite the wide array of histopathological lesions nonenone have thus far [1997] proved diagnostic. John Casanova, 1997

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

new solutions

(Marcel Duchamp)

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

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

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

Gregory Bateson, 1967

beyond dualism

(Man Ray)

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

person and self

(Alexander Calder)

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

embodied interactions

(Henry Moore)

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

new neuroscience

(Alberto Giacometti)

… it’s in these acts, as actsacts rather than mere mere movementsmovements, that our experience of the surrounding environment is embodied, that things get for us an immediate meaning. … the acting brainacting brain is also, and first of all, an understanding brainunderstanding brain. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, 2006

To discover that a certain feeling depends on the activity of a number of specific brain systems, interacting with a number of body organs doesn’t doesn’t diminish diminish the status of that feeling. Antonio R. Damasio, 1994

embodied dialogues

(Marcel Duchamp)

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

Not all words for just anyone submit equally easy. … Forcing [language] to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated difficult and complicated process. Mikhail Bakhtin, 1935

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

body positioning

(René Magritte)

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

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

emotions

(Alberto Giacometti)

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

Charles Darwin, 1872

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

Charles Darwin, 1872

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

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

hugs

(Henry Moore)

Shiva Nataraja