Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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New Contexts: what art psychotherapy theory can bring to an understanding of using images to communicate the experience of pain in medical pain consultations
Get PDFThis paper looks at whether we can bring art psychotherapy theory to understanding the role of art in a new context; the medical pain consultation, as part of an experimental arts in health research project. The project studied the introduction of a set of art images into chronic pain consultations, to help patients and doctors communicate complex experiences of pain. The paper draws on different theoretical approaches from art psychotherapy, to provide ways to understand the meanings of an art object introduced between two people. Triangular relating, symbolisation and transactional uses of the image are explored (Isserow 2008, 2013, Schaverien 1991,1995, 2000). The image is also considered within a social frame and from an intersubjective viewpoint (Tipple 2003, 2011, Skaife 2008).
The images were artistic depictions of pain, previously co-created by other pain patients with an artist as a communication resource. Videos of consultations where doctors and patients used these images were studied. The paper takes case examples of features observed in a thematic analysis and uses art psychotherapy theories to explore them further. Suggested implications are that using images in this setting may allow negotiation of unconscious dynamics between clinician and patient and have potential to aid communication and empower patients, suggesting avenues for future research. The potentials and limitations of bringing theory to this context are considered. The research took place within a multidisciplinary team.
Keywords: chronic pain; triangular relationship; transactional objects; multidisciplinary research; art psychotherapy theory; arts in health
Wrestling with Decadence: The Touchables (1968) and Swinging London Cinema of the 1960s
Get PDFThe primary touchstones when considering the relationship between decadence and cinema are probably those films in closest chronological proximity to the emergence of the decadent tradition in literature and the visual arts in the fin-de-siècle period of the late nineteenth century – the same historical moment in which cinema itself was born. Hollywood cinema of the pre-sound era spanning the 1890s to the 1920s certainly offers no shortage of figures whose work is amenable to being categorized as decadent, including directors such as Cecil B. DeMille or Erich Von Stroheim, or stars such as Theda Bara or Louise Brooks (figures whose vampishness would eventually transmogrify into the spider women and femmes fatales of 40s film noir). Alternately, one might turn to representations of particular historical moments seen as decadent, such as the fall of Babylon or the decline of Rome, or in the twentieth century, the Weimar era and its tragic aftermath: the ‘divine decadence’ Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles attributes to her green nail polish in Cabaret (1972) that was also on dark display in films like Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Liliana Caviani’s The Night Porter (1974), both decried by Susan Sontag for espousing a sense of perverse decadent glamour. Or perhaps the relationship between cinema and decadence might be most effectively conceptualized through the aesthetic and narrative obsessions of particular filmmakers, possible examples including the likes of Visconti, Josef von Sternberg, Federico Fellini, or David Lynch, whose respective oeuvres are coloured by different kinds of engagement with decadent images and ideas.
 
Book Review. CBT: The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami – Managerialism, Politics, and the Corruptions of Science. Farhad Dalal
Get PDFThis book offers a critical response to the relentless and rapid growth of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) in the UK. Dalal’s comprehensive analysis aims at critiquing the suspect practices and fetishism of measurement in CBT research. Looking at the broad intellectual and economic underpinnings of CBT, he also highlights the forms of neoliberal governance that maintain the whole edifice (or should we say artifice?). Overall, he does a great job of providing a long overdue retort to CBT’s insistent claims. The book is pertinent reading for art psychotherapists who have been left relatively marginalised by the cognitive behavioural tsunami and the dynamics and developments described
Exhibition Review. New Art Studio – “Barriers”
No full textThis exhibition review takes the form of a recorded conversation between two art therapists and an artist while sitting in the café of the Islington Arts Factory where the exhibition was held (duration: 15 mins). The show, titled “Barriers”, celebrates the 5th year of the New Art Studio: a therapeutic art studio for refugees and asylum seekers and ran from 26th April to 10th May 2019
Nigel Atter, In the Shadow of Bois Hugo: The 8th Lincolns at the Battle of Loos
Get PDFNigel Atter, In the Shadow of Bois Hugo: The 8th Lincolns at the Battle of Loos. Helion & Co., 2017. 144pp. ISBN: 9781911512776 (paperback). Price £16.95
Arran Johnston, On Gladsmuir Shall the Battle Be! The Battle of Prestonpans 1745
Get PDFArran Johnston, On Gladsmuir Shall the Battle Be! The Battle of Prestonpans 1745. Solihull: Helion & Company Ltd, 2017. Xviii+226pp. ISBN 978-1-911512-83-7 (hardback). Price £25
Introduction: Transforming War, 1914-1918
Get PDFThis introduction to five case studies of military adaptation between 1914 and 1918 reviews how warfare was transformed in the First World War. It examines the experience of the three major western front protagonists – France, Germany and Britain – positing that, having different military cultures, each army adapted differently but that for all the pace of change was rapid and the outcomes appropriate to meet the tactical and operational challenges of the modern industrialised battlefield. It links the historical study of military adaptation between 1914 and 1918 to more recent theoretical explanations of how armed forces innovate in response to changes in warfare. It suggests that these theories have only limited applicability to the circumstances of intensive combat that defined the First World War battlefield
Exhibition Review. A Personal History of Art Therapy in Less than 100 Objects
No full textThere are few words publicising the exhibition but enough to raise interest in ‘A Personal History of Art Therapy in Less than 100 Objects.’ The image of a notebook, its spine strained by its contents, is secured from prying eyes by a single band of rubber. The contrast of the natural tan of rubber and the dark book cover, enhances the mundane.
Review: David Weir, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)
Get PDFThere are as many definitional models of decadence as there are applications. The history of scholarship fixed upon defining and describing the term is long and rich, indicative of the term’s elusive and convoluted nature. David Weir’s book is a roadmap of decadence along historical and geographical coordinates. It offers a bird’s-eye view of what the term represents in its multifaceted aspect, while zooming in on its milestone documents and pivotal moments
Decadence on the Silent Screen: Stannard, Coward, Hitchcock, and Wilde
Get PDFIn the final pages of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming Pool Library (1988), the figure of Ronald Firbank appears flickeringly in an early home movie: this master of decadent-camp style presents himself, by turns, as a flamboyant entertainer and a Chaplinesque mime, playing up to the camera. It is a fitting tribute because, though Firbank was never really captured on film, cinema defined his own writing, just as his writing would later help to define the aesthetics of filmmakers in Great Britain, Europe, and the US. He was after all a connoisseur of all degenerate and transgressive art forms. This, combined with his love of cinema and a desire to profit from his self-funded novels made him ‘very elated at a letter sent to him by some transatlantic cinema magnate, asking for the film rights of Caprice’. Sadly, the film was never made. But of course it couldn’t have been; as Christopher Fowler reflects, ‘you can’t build a national cinema industry on people hermetically sealed in heavily draped drawing rooms, having peculiar conversations’. Those we recognize as aesthetes and decadents in the mould of the 1890s would not be the ones to bring the principles of their tradition to the big screen. Although a few of these, including Arthur Symons, would recognize the potential of cinema, more would reject any claim it might have to cultural significance – let alone any claim to be a form of art. The decadent tradition reached the screen through figures of the next generation who could make decadence new, restyling it into forms to befit the mass-market appeal of motion pictures.