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BRAIN ON CULTURE: Beliefs and how environment can shape mental function by Beth Azar

                                                                                                                  

When an American thinks about whether he is honest, his brain activity looks very different than when he thinks about whether another person is honest, even a close relative. That’s not true for Chinese people. When a Chinese man evaluates whether he is honest, his brain activity looks almost identical to when he is thinking about whether his mother is honest.

That finding — that American and Chinese brains function differently when considering traits of themselves versus traits of others ( Neuroimage , Vol. 34, No. 3) — supports behavioral studies that have found that people from collectivist cultures, such as China, think of themselves as deeply connected to other people in their lives, while Americans adhere to a strong sense of individuality.

The study also shows the power of cultural neuroscience, the growing field that uses brain-imaging technology to deepen the understanding of how environment and beliefs can shape mental function. Barely heard of just five years ago, the field has become a vibrant area of research, and the University of Michigan, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Emory University have created cultural neuroscience centers. In addition, in April a cultural neuroscience meeting at the University of Michigan attracted such psychology luminaries as Hazel Markus, PhD, Michael Posner, PhD, Steve Suomi, PhD, and Claude Steele, PhD, to discuss their work in the context of cultural neuroscience.

The field has made headlines that include, “Chinese, English speakers do math differently,” from MSNBC about a study by Yiyuan Tang of Dalian University of Technology in Dalian, China, which found that Chinese natives make use of different parts of the brain than Americans do to process numbers. Another headline article in  USA Today , “Eastern ‘collectivist’ culture may buffer against depression” found that people from East Asian cultures are more likely to have a gene that buffers them from depression than people from Western cultures, as discovered by Northwestern University psychologist Joan Chiao, PhD.

Findings like these demonstrate that neuroscience can measure cultural differences. But such results also corroborate the behavioral work of cultural psychology. As the field matures, it may even change the way we think about brain development.

“Cultural neuroscience gives us a window into how much the brain can be changed by the environment,” says University of Texas at Dallas psychologist Denise C. Park, PhD, who has conducted several cultural neuroscience studies. “It will deepen our understanding of how environment and beliefs can shape cognitive function.”

Culture shapes biology

Tufts University psychologist Nalini Ambady, PhD, is one of the field’s pioneers. Her work has found that even as people perceive the same stimulus, their brains may activate differently.

For example, in a study headed by her graduate student Jonathan Freeman and published last year in  Neuroimage  (Vol. 47, No. 1), the researchers used fMRI to measure brain activity in American and Japanese study participants when they viewed silhouettes of bodies in postures considered “dominant” — standing tall, arms crossed, for example — and “submissive” — head and arms hanging down, for instance.

Ambady’s group based the study on historical data showing that East-Asian cultures value submissiveness, while Western cultures value dominance. In fact, they found, they could see this cultural distinction in the way the brain responds to visual input. When Americans viewed dominant silhouettes, but not submissive ones, reward circuitry fired in the brain’s limbic system. The opposite happened among Japanese participants; their reward circuitry fired in response to submissive, but not dominant, silhouettes.

In addition, the magnitude of the brain’s response to the images correlated precisely with self-reports of how much participants valued dominance and submissiveness, says Ambady. The more a participant supported sentences stating that it’s good to be in control, the stronger the reward circuitry fired when he or she viewed a dominant posture.

“We see that what the brain finds rewarding reflects the values of the dominant culture,” says Ambady. “People can see the same stimulus but have completely different neural responses.”

Park and her colleagues find that cultures may actually see the world differently and that scientists can pick up this difference with brain imaging. In a 2010 study published in  Social Cognitive and Affective Neurosc ience, they used fMRI to examine brain activity while American and native Chinese participants processed a series of visual scenes. The scenes consisted of a central object superimposed onto either a congruent — giraffe on a savanna — or incongruent — giraffe on a football field — background.

Using an analysis of the imaging data they developed in those earlier studies, the researchers showed that Chinese participants’ perceptual areas of the brain responded more to objects superimposed on incongruent scenes than objects matching their surroundings. This was not the case for Americans, who didn’t appear to be affected by the background at all.

These findings support the idea that native Chinese, as opposed to Americans, are more sensitive to the context in which an object is embedded, and so focus greater attention on that object when it’s in an inconsistent context, says Park. Most recently, a study by Park’s group, in press in  Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience  demonstrated that Westerners process human faces more actively than East Asians, consistent with the Western focus on individuality.

In effect, she adds, East Asians and Americans literally see things differently — and that finding could have major implications for models of cross-cultural communication.

Seeing things differently may also affect how easily different cultures perform cognitive tasks, even when they use the same brain circuitry. Such research may someday shed light on why some cultures appear more skilled at certain real-life cognitive problems than others, but right now researchers are looking at very simple tasks. For example, behavioral work by University of Michigan psychologist Shinobu Kitayama, PhD, and his colleagues showed that people from Japan are far better at judging the length of a line relative to the size of a box in which it’s drawn, while Americans are far better at judging the absolute length of the same line. They attribute this difference to findings from other studies showing that Americans pay more attention to details and Asians pay more attention to context.

Last year, Stanford University postdoc Trey Hedden, PhD, and his colleagues used fMRI to re-examine these findings. Like Kitayama, they used the framed-line task: Participants see a square with a line drawn partway down the middle. They then see a larger box and either have to draw a line the same absolute length as the first line or a line the same relative length compared with the bigger size of the new box.

Again, Americans did better on the absolute test and Japanese did better on the relative test, but this time the researchers could see what was happening in their brains. It turns out that both Americans and Japanese use the same brain areas for both tests, but when they’re doing the test that is more difficult for them, they also engage an area of the brain associated with increased attention.

“This finding shows that the brain compensates for tasks that we’re not typically exposed to through our culture by turning on an attention circuit to help us,” says Kitayama. In contrast, tasks that are commonplace become automatic and don’t require extra concentration.

Biology shapes culture

While cultural neuroscience has mostly shown how culture shapes biology, researchers are also beginning to examine how biology shapes culture.

Northwestern University’s Joan Chiao, PhD, for example, has found that people who live in collectivist cultures are more likely than those in individualistic cultures to have a form of the serotonin transporter gene — the S-allele — that correlates with higher rates of negative affect, anxiety and depression.

In contrast to what you might expect from the genes alone, she also found that people from collectivist societies are less likely to be depressed. This suggests that collectivism, which tends to produce lower levels of negative affect, may have co-evolved with the S-allele, says Chiao, who published her findings in the  Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biological Science  (Vol. 277, No. 1,681). In other words, she explains, societies of people with the S-allele developed a collectivist culture that reduced stress and, therefore, risk of depression by emphasizing social harmony and social support.

“Culture may make us rethink the role of this serotonin transporter physiology,” says University of Michigan neuroscientist Israel Liberzon, MD. “If it’s very common in East Asian groups, but the prevalence of depression is not higher, it somehow interacts with their lives differently.”

Developing standards

While such neuroscience findings are great headline fodder, the field must move forward with rigor and caution, says Stanford University’s Markus, who is a pioneer of cultural psychology. It’s not enough, she says, simply to scan the brains of people from different “cultures” — defined by language, nationality or ethnicity — and make assumptions about cognitive or perceptual differences. By themselves, these are meaningless categories, she adds.

“To make progress in our understanding of how cultures shape brains and brains shape culture,” she says, “we need to know what psychological and behavioral tendencies are associated with these social categories and how these tendencies are linked to brain function.”

Chiao learned this lesson while conducting an fMRI study, published last year in  Human Brain Mapping  (Vol. 30, No. 9). The study looked at activity in the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex — an area associated with a sense of self — while people from Japan and the United States assessed whether self-descriptive phrases applied to them. The researchers sought to find a biological explanation for past research showing that people from collectivist cultures relate more strongly to contextual self-descriptions, such as “When I’m with my mother, I’m honest.” People from already defined individualistic cultures relate more strongly to general self-descriptions such as “I’m honest.”

When Chiao and her colleagues compared participants along ethnic lines, they saw no difference in brain activity. Differences appeared only after they grouped people based on how strongly they valued collectivism or individualism: Regardless of ethnicity, the medial prefrontal cortex was most active when individualists read general self-descriptions and when collectivists read contextual self-descriptions.

This work demonstrates how variable cultural values can be, even within cultural groups, as people filter information from their environment and form their own self-concepts, says Chiao.

That’s why University of California, Los Angeles, graduate student Elizabeth Losin and colleagues include the need to carefully define culture among eight guidelines for cultural neuroscience research they lay out in a paper published this year in  Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience  (Vol. 5, No. 2–3). They also suggest guidelines on the need to match study participants on how long they’ve been immersed in the culture under study; to ensure that study materials are culturally appropriate; and to consider potential genetic variation within a cultural group that might account for differences in brain development.

In the end, cultural neuroscience could usher in an era of greater understanding between people from different cultures.

“My greatest hope is that it has implications for negotiations between countries; that people on both sides understand that they might not be talking about the same thing even if they’re looking at the same thing, "says Park.

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How To Make Homemade Jack Off Toys

Photography in psychology Attilio de Angelis and Floriana Di Giorgio

The camera is for me a sketch pad, the instrument of intuition and spontaneity. To photograph is to hold your breath when our faculties converge to capture fleeting reality, at which point the captured image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy. To photograph is to recognize at the same time and in a fraction of a second event and the rigorous structure of the forms received with a look that express and signify the event. You put on the same line of the mind, eyes and heart. It is a way of life.

(by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Contrast, 2004) "

Each of us has a photo album and everyone has taken a picture , keeping it in your album or on your PC. As Marshall McLuhan argued (1967), the man sees the 900 photographs, but despite the massive presence of photography and photography in our lives, it is one of the less widely used and studied arts in psychology and in the path of self-knowledge, but it is no less potent than half of inner communication. According to psychoanalysis

the camera is an extension of the psychic or better than any of its organs of perception are established: the view. The tool-machine would, therefore, the power to connect those photographs with the outside world through a process of introjection, which would lead to set an object and the relationship with that object, the first targeted, then in step and then, after development, on a sheet of paper or on a medium through which we can always have a physical relationship with the image produced.

photographer to take pictures, must be able to get out of themselves and create a connection between his inner world, representations of the latter and its surroundings. In addition, he is the only one who will decide what to capture its reality, performing an act of re-production and re-creation. (Cacciari, 2001).

E 'therefore important to consider the dynamics of "inside-out", which makes the photographer, taking out parts of themselves and using it to communicate parts of themselves and establish their own experiences, as if the photo, in a sense was an "acting-out", through which the unconscious play of ideas into actions, rather than as memories or thoughts. Following this perspective, one realizes that each photo is subjective and, for this reason, it is interpreted differently by each observer, who, also challenged the image projecting their own feelings and emotions on the picture, too, by putting in place the same dynamic inside-out through the photographer, however, the photographic medium.

Photography, considering this perspective, appears as a metaphor and an extension of our cognitive process, since it can not return a gesture, an event, a behavior in its entirety, but it takes us back in and its symbolic meaning. In this way, through the photos is "symbolic of reality," making their own point of view of external reality.

But what happens in a person's mind when he decided to photograph? E What drives us to keep the pictures?

Continuing to refer to psychoanalysis, the act of photographing is closely linked to the processes of introjection and incorporation, obtaining satisfaction with the voracity eye to aggressive-libidinal impulses of the oral nature, linked to obsessive fantasies of conquest and incorporation of 'question. The artist would be able, through the photograph, to sublimate these infantile aggressive impulses, also inherent in the camera as a tool to "hunt" images. In English

photograph coincides with the verb shoot (shoot), so the photograph could be thought of as an extension and outsourcing I am a voracious and rapacious. Unconscious aggression but also the need to preserve our past, as our images give us the confirmation of our existence, our being "(Tinti, 2007).

The photograph also activates the mnemonic process and ensure our existence in the present.

Each photo places the individual at a time continuum that spans a past full of memories, that gives meaning to its present and allows him to project into the future. The photos make it possible to store and stop times of life, parts or aspects of the person and, as these non-verbal trigger deep feelings, sometimes, not yet processed.

Very important in this sense is the family album that gives the opportunity to tell their story within the family, giving important information on both the cultural background of belonging, on the internal dynamics of family, the visual information of photography enable us to understand the family system, their place within it and, most importantly, how do you tell the family and how, from this, there has been projected into the outside world.

Applying this exploratory power and knowledge of photography Judy Weiser (1993) and Linda Berman (1993) first used the "phototherapy," or the use of photographs within the therapeutic setting adjuvant as a tool in psychotherapy, as facilitating the exploration of their emotional world and family.

With phototherapy using personal photos and family for therapeutic communication, healing and care. Joe Spence, a pioneer of phototherapy defines literally "to use photography to take care of ourselves, always taking into account the possibility of active transformation" , that the parties understand and change themselves by exploring their own photographs.

The photographs in therapy can help patients become more aware of their physical identity and strengthen its self-esteem. According to Weiser

photos can also be used outside the setting of therapy and defines such use "photo therapy".

An example of the use of photography in this direction is the work done by Ayres Marques Pinto in different psychiatric community with his project "Photo-unconscious, through which the guests involved in a community mental health at various stages of the photographic process , pointing out that the photograph and putting then in the show, your photos have helped guests of the psychiatric community to get in touch with certain emotions and parts of themselves.

The photo and the photographer, then, allow to discover the dark side of the world, giving representability emotions, expanding the imagination and the dream and to think what is important to practice. Thinking in pictures and learn to listen photos (Riggs, 2008).

E ', indeed, important to understand the inner world and the emotions that inform those photographs through her photos, whereas all the other photos evoke different emotions that may coincide or not with the intention of the photographer and also each can perceive the same image in different ways, creating different meanings to the same photo, not listening and denaturation of its real emotional messages.

Bibliography

Berman, L. (1993), Phototherapy in clinical psychology , Edizioni Erickson.

Cacciari, M., (2001), The "Photograph" and the problem of representation in Marra, C., ideas of photography. The theoretical reflection from the sixties to the ogg, Mondadori

Cartier-Bresson, H., (2004), contrast TWO , Necklace FotoNote.

D'Elia, A., (1999), Photography as therapy. Through the pictures of Louis Ghirri , Maltemi Editions.

Marques Pinto, A., The face and voice of the time in http://voltodeltempo. altervista.org /

Marra, C., (2001), ideas of photography. The theoretical reflection from the sixties to today , Mondadori.

McLuhan, M., (1967), Understanding Media , The Assayer

Riggi, C., (2008), The exuberance of the shadow-Thoughts on photography and psychoanalysis , L and Clouds

Tinti, G., (2007) Photography as other real artificial Part I, II and II in www.exibart.com

Weiser, J., (1993), PhotoTherapy Techniques: Exploring the Secrets of Personal Snapshots and Family Albums , PhotoTherapy Press Centre

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Mattress In A Dodge Caravan?

Alexithymia PATHOLOGICAL AND EMPLOYMENT: THE MEDIATION OF EXPRESSION AS A TACTICAL ENGAGEMENT Educational psychology is a prerequisite for psychotherapy of William Champion and Paul Wells

alexithymia is defined (or alexithymia) a set of emotional competence and emotional deficits, revealed the inability of mentalizing, perceive, recognize and describe verbally their own and others' emotional states. It is currently regarded as a possible shortfall in the reflective function of the self. It literally means "no words for emotions"

Alexithymia The term was coined by John Nemiah and Peter Sifneos in the early seventies, to define a set of personality traits highlighted in the so-called psychosomatic patients. The name was disclosed to the first time in 1976 at the XIth European Conference on Psychosomatic Research [1].

The alexithymia is manifested in the difficulty of identifying and describing their feelings, and of distinguishing emotional states from physiological perceptions. The alexithymic subjects have great difficulty in identifying what are the reasons which led them to feel or express their emotions, and yet are unable to interpret the emotions of others. Their powers of imagination and dreams is reduced, sometimes non-existent, lack of capacity of introspection, and tend to engage in conduct complied with the media. The alexithymic subjects also tend to establish strong relations of dependency or, failing that, prefer the isolation. The alexithymia
was significantly related to many pathological conditions of dependence and craving as well as pathological is psychosomatic and psychological in nature, such as hypertension, dyspepsia, sexual dysfunction, and some anxiety disorders. The
alexithymia was associated with an insecure-avoidant attachment style, characterized by a sometimes obsessive need for attention and care.

mental processes common in subjects with alexithymic personality traits is the inability to symbolize mentalizing and emotion. The emotion is experienced by somatic (body directly and without mental processing), and cognitive interpretation, nor conceptualized in pictures mental or words that synthesize and contain. The excitement is for individuals to alexithymia, the mere physical perception, and dysregulated presymbolic, psychophysiological correlates of the emotional.

There are three characteristics considered the basis of the disorder:

• the difficulty in identifying feelings;
• the difficulty in describing the feelings of others;
• oriented thinking almost exclusively outdoors, and rarely to their own processes endopsychic.

From the perspective of psychodiagnostic are three specific tools to assess alexithymia:

the TAS-20 (Toronto Alexithymia Scale), a psychometric scale [2] [3] Self-evaluation at 20 questions (items), the projective test TAT (thematic nature Apperception Test) and the SAT9 (Objectively Scored Archetypal Test).

The proverbial difficulty of our patients reflection and self-awareness and reality, their tendency to concrete thinking and operating with no capacity for abstraction, representation and symbolization (base alexithymia and psychosomatic) deprives them of the ability to sublimate the instincts and to delay the satisfaction, prompting them to act impulsively and compulsively with disastrous consequences.

mental This feature is also behind the 'agonizing loneliness relational-dependent patients, often concurrent contributory cause of depression and suicide are not rare. A framework as complex and makes it extremely difficult to compromise the therapeutic work, and will require different approaches, which often preclude a direct approach to psychotherapy. There is thus moving in a gray area, (good metaphor for a halt to emotions) which requires the identification of new coordinates orientation and exploration. It 'important to do this to have specialized training resources and no more "naive", which are preparatory to a subsequent psychotherapy according to a' lens case and polyphasic.

One of these is the mediation effected through non-verbal means of expression, allowing the emergence of mental contents still no lexicon to be put into words in the first place to themselves and then communicated to others.

are often aphasic or content, so to speak, stammering: to name the emotion, your state of mind, recognize and share in a therapeutic process may be easier if, bypassing the defenses of the verbal code is choose to use (and here, in preparation and therapeutically, you choose the mode that make possible the employment), the use of alternative codes of expression, which can also be used in parallel to this is that the word will a return.

E 'where the use of techniques, materials, art practices can be useful.

The game of communicating without saying, even chaotic and raw expression of his inner world in those spaces that are the setting for mediation and support can help you become an emotional literacy and emotional and expressive codes more refined and finalized, of course, not necessarily in the aesthetic sense or not.

The concept of art therapy is established then the encounter of two distinct poles, and that the art of therapy (Rudolf Arnheim " For the sake of art "(1994). Art (Understanding phenomenologically, such as "... everything that people call art") is understood as material use, codes, procedures and techniques of their art practices, such as therapy care, support and report path structured and verified. The art therapy is based on nonverbal experience and makes use of rehabilitative and therapeutic potential inherent in the creative process. The creative act can bring out emotions, conflicts, problems, needs and can start the adventure of shaping of it, through creating objects of mediation, while using, as mentioned above, instruments and codes of artistic practice, not necessarily to be evaluated and treated according to a meter of aesthetics, but according to their emotional charge, whether latent or conscious, as a means of expression and are simultaneously subject of this expression, and are characterized as external objects, other than itself, but also as containers for elements of the self.

The objects in the path arteterapeutico are deeply embedded in the fabric the relationship between you and Art Therapist, (it brings almost), report that provides protection and containment and, while respecting the defense mechanisms, activates the perception of emotions, memories and experiences to be developed: the setting, that set sized material, relational, affective, adjustment that define the space of therapy: a frame that has a dual function, processing on the one hand, the protection and preservation of the other. By providing a reassuring container makes it possible treatment experience, and containing but sufficiently open to what the pc. door and says of himself without saying, is skin breathing, which adapts to the body of the meeting between the play areas of the patient and the therapist, without flaking or stiffening. With the passage of time and the thickening of the game which must always be therapeutic as the skin fits more to the body, rather it is a party. The stability of the setting ( intended as "good enough space" where you can " be alone even with someone") encourages independence movements, aided by the absence of a aesthetic judgments about what is being created, scale abandonment rationality and control evident in the production, is configured as the environment that makes it possible to give and take shape. In this context, the role of the therapist (traveling companion, and visitor listener, attentive to the process as the product) is to accompany you in discovering their potential, accompanying the gradual awareness: the 'art takes the user to do as a child in the game, (the work of the therapist has as its goal to bring the patient to a state where it is unable to play in a state where it is capable of. "" You two areas of overlap game, the patient and the therapist.

Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. "Winnicott) malleable making the line between fantasy and reality, between subjective and objective realities, ranging from one to another. all in a space limited by the boundaries of the sheet (the media) or by color and texture of the material, as well as the boundaries of space, time, relationship of the setting in which the therapist continues to be available and mirroring what happens in the game. Game that leads to the production of objects defined in their appearance is immediately obvious from the materials they are more or less processed and processed: the object is thus perceived outside himself while dealing with a very intimate part of himself, is a bridge between the external and internal world but also, in transparency, viewing a report "good" between patient and therapist.

Art Therapy: A BRIEF HISTORY .

The 900 is the century when the art world, configured as an open space and changing the boundaries, and often experiences dense bijective relations with psychiatry, which often , born under the sign of fascination, will evolve, especially from the forties onwards, in the therapeutic sense. spreading primarily in those countries that have had major traditions of psychiatric and psychoanalytic studies: Britain, France, Germany and the United States.

The use of non-verbal language (we are here we will consider in especially those graphic-pictorial and plastic) therefore now acquired citizenship in not only psychiatric care areas. Morgenthaler's essay on Woelffli (Ein Geisteskranker als Kunstler, 1921) to the text of Prinzhorn (Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, 1922) there are many experiences, largely historicized, using the possibility of mediation practice allowed by Art.

All is not unequivocal: for instance, was easy to reproduce the pair abused "genius and madness" under the label of the 'psychopathological art ", interpreting the expressions art as corresponding to the characteristic symptoms of the various clinical syndromes. In reality (Dubuffet) "there is an art sick", as, paradoxically, there is "an art of dyspeptic or sick of the knee," but (still Dubuffet) "... can write down the movements of an immediate ... spirit ... carry things in their body and their body is better than their name, can lend a hand to those who do not, can give an idea of \u200b\u200ba tree, an idea can make a tree ".

The first groups formed in art therapy 1942 in Britain by Adrian Hill, in a sanatorium. The introduction of art activities will spread initially in hospital who welcomed war veterans and then will be common from the middle of the century. Initially, the method is an art school, but after a few years a more consciously therapeutic is-depth Jungian analyst Champernowne.

The art therapy is also being developed in France, Germany and the United States mainly in the field of psychiatric rehabilitation.

In North America in the '40s we began to talk about Art Therapy: The pioneer in this field are Margaret Naumburg and Edith Kramer. The Naumburg , close derivation of psychotherapy, has a vision very close to that of Freud and considers the patient's artistic product as a tool to access his unconscious contents to be used in therapy as a material interpret and thereby also contributing to insight and resolution of internal conflicts. The artistic expression of the patient view and is therefore only used as a diagnostic tool. Art, therefore, as a tool for therapy, not art as therapy.
Edith Kramer (1958), however, moves from a 'completely different perspective and focuses on the creative process , considered in itself a therapeutic tool. The artistic expression of the patient is not seen only as a means for the expression of unconscious conflicts, but as an instrument for the resolution and as a resource for personal growth and development. Art, therefore, as therapy, with the shift of attention from the artistic product as a material to interpret the creative process itself, which, using symbols and metaphors, involving the person in activities that involve a commitment and kinesthetic sensory is proposed as a means to identify and express their emotions, and to understand and resolve their difficulties. The Kramer traces his interest in the value of art in times of severe stress in the late '30s, when he taught art to children of displaced refugees from Nazi Germany to Prague, a school founded by the artist Friedl Dicker- Brandeis, then deported to Terezin. Dicker-Brandeis, not surprisingly, was formed with Itten at the Bauhaus, it seems not so casual attention to the interface between the creative process of Kramer and that monument to the creative process that, in purely pedagogical and artistic context, is the "Theory the size and shape "of Paul Klee, who was also a teacher at the Bauhaus in those years.

In France in the 50s during the World Congress of Psychiatry will start to talk about research on the psychopathology of expression and open the first workshop in some hospitals of Paris. Shortly before, in 1947 - another moment of high tangency between psychiatry and art of 900 - Jean Dubuffet founded the Compagnie de l'Art Brut ", confirming the interest in artistic production by people outside the cultural conditioning and social, which dated from 1923 (remember, Prinzhorn published his text in 1922) and that, in addition to the protean artistic work of Dubuffet, gave rise to the spectacular collection of works by "irregular", now housed at the Hotel du super Beaulieu in Lausanne.

In Italy the interest for art asylum, even in the service of theoretical systems misleading, however, was cultivated by Cesare Lombroso in early 900. Pioneering work is then made between the years 50 and 60 to the asylum St. John's Tomb Verona, where he will open an art studio in 1957, and where a young Vittorino Andreoli "discover" Zinelli Carlo, now considered one of the most significant Italian exponents of art brut. Experience delll'atelier Tinaia of Florence, near the asylum of San Salvi is part of the movement that will culminate in the experience dell'antipsichiatria basagliana and the coming into force of Law 180, which marks the transition from the structures mental hospitals to a full rehabilitation in the area. The experiences in this new field can enhance the creative experience of its ability to activate processes of renewal even in the most severe psychotic forms. Gaetano Benedetti in his work with schizophrenic patients clearly expresses how creativity is to be considered a human resource of great value were able to restructure itself in the fragmented and discontinuous.

The relationship between psychoanalysis and expressive therapy .

the second half of the twentieth century art therapy or expressive therapy, is a technique of psychological treatment for mental disorders whose application is open to sensory and perceptual contexts that allow free communication words. It shares with the process of artistic communication content of the unconscious, repressed and removed at the same time, expressed in metaphorical or symbolic language, essentially by analogy. This phenomenon, beyond the possibilities of communication that acts on the sensory and perceptual level, is used in psychoanalysis to the analysis of unconscious contents whose expression is facilitated by the spontaneity and impulsiveness of the vehicle as it happens in dreams, free association, in Proceedings lost age. (Freud)

Beyond aesthetic concerns of the then art therapy is focussing on the expression of the unconscious by an impulse that fast and then extra work psychotherapeutic dynamic or psychoanalytic analysis through verbalization. The expression and representation becomes a metaphor for the symbolic analogy assumes that it may be subjected to the processes of insigth. Psychotherapy it concludes with the verbal elaboration and the realization of unconscious contents subject to removal by the release waves of repressed objects, while the Art therapy is a cathartic resolution of psychic objects repressed or removed.

's interest in psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis to art coming from far away or Sigmund Freud in 1905-1907 in the two essays "Wit and its relations with the unconscious and the imagination and the poet expressed his thoughts concerning the connection between the child's gaming experience and the process of imagination in adult life.

Ernst Kris, psychoanalyst and scholar of aesthetics and art history, in his book Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art "(1952), referring to Freud's essay on wit, consider the sublimation of an important route for the understanding of artistic, but giving it a broader function than the defensive one in which psychoanalysis Classic had relegated. His interest is mainly aimed at

grotesque distortion, which results from a kind of functional pleasure of mastery, the ability to control fear and anxiety. According to Kris, the difference between the artist and the neurotic is that the former has the ability to make a regression in the service of the ego, a regression that controlled and reversible, while the second is in the throes of uncontrollable dynamics.

E 'in the field of child psychoanalysis the game, the creativity and imagination buy specific relevance as intermediate between the conscious and unconscious processes: Anna Freud introduces the technique of drawing, while Melanie Klein explores the method of spontaneous play.

In the '60s and '70s art therapy practice is influenced by the psychoanalytic contribution of Donald W. Winnicott, in his book Playing and Reality (1971) considers the psychotherapeutic relationship as a game experience where children and adults handle things combine words. In this experience, the analyst is not a spectator, but is immersed in the game: the technique scribble child and therapist intervened to turn on the same design. E 'in its penetration of the experiences that you can see the intermediate zone that Winnicott calls "transitional space" where the boundaries of psychological processes and transitional pre-made blend, play, create and allow the imagination to break down barriers between inside and outside and between me and not me.

Another great psychoanalyst Marion Milner, has focused on artistic mediation of psychotherapy emphasizing a strong need in terms of artistic fusion with matter and a transient loss of differentiation between self and object.

Neuroscience and expressive activities: access to implicit memory.

As stated by LeDoux (1996), "emotional feelings resulting from the fact that we become aware of an emotional brain system. The states of the brain and the body's responses are the fundamental facts of emotion, and conscious feelings are just decorations, icing on the cake emotional. "

The implicit memory is an area of \u200b\u200bthe mind to nature and preverbal presymbolic, mostly dating from the first two years of life, then to a developmental stage where they are not yet mature nervous structures needed to run the explicit memory, autobiographical narrative in itself-and as such accessible to consciousness and verbalized. In fact, the explicit memory depends on the hippocampus and the temporal cortical areas and basal-frontal structures just not active enough in the early stages of life. In these phases, but other structures, especially the posterior cortex temporo-parietal-occipital - particularly the right hemisphere - and even then the amygdala, are already fully active, and determine Therefore, the almost exclusive archive of the most fundamental experiences in a "format" is not accessible to consciousness, not recorded and is characterized by intense emotional senses.

this evidence comes from the idea that mental activity later, more adult, with a strong predominance logical and thoughtful, you are unknowingly forced to rework a reservoir of experiences that will escape it, because it is stored in a size motor, sensory and emotional way that only the concomitant non-reflective, non-verbal, artistic, expressive hand can "collect". Indeed, non-reflective mode automatically tend to collect and channel this kind of experiences, offering the "translation" closer to them, namely that non-fiction, enclosed in "sets" perceptual-affective global and non-sequential.

Certainly it would then still a "translation" infidel, because the contents of implicit memory, as constitutionally inaccessible, would be almost virtual. But how would these non-reflective experiences the only outlet really suitable, because it is made of the same processes and the same "language", ie processes and languages \u200b\u200bcommingled psychophysical nature, that strong bodily-affective connotation. .

This ability to "think outside the reflective", consisting in directly nell'attingere mental areas that are home to the experiences and memories of non-thinkable, then allow to pass through these "tracks" in an attempt to "reinscrizione" in a format defined itself motor, sensory and emotional level. This would allow reinscrizione thinkability sensory-emotional, a kind of consciousness and subliminal nature of synesthesia, which - as it is, however, cognition and consciousness - may lead to the overcoming of trauma, conflict or other emotional knots. These would otherwise never be stored in a format which is not subject to the psyche and therefore tends to invade and continue to undermine it.

The organization of a workshop of expressive activities in the clinic of addictions.

funds for a clinical use of TA. constant can be traced in the attention to the dynamics of relationships and the development of freedom of expression with its share of unpredictability. The choice of a report conducted by a specific code, such as graphics-plastic allows people to do that is to saturate therapeutic value only if placed in perspective intervention integrated with other professionals.

A design, for example, as a team, is significant for understanding the inner world of a patient, as the minutes of an interview. This product is the fact that in a context that has always consciously therapeutic features or preparatory to a therapy that can go hand in hand (but not always and not necessarily!) Connotations to even play. This is not relegated to pure entertainment or to carry on drawing skills or plastics, which are not necessary and that, sometimes, where present, are only a further defense;

specific tools of analysis and evaluation of art therapy that can be made available to the team are the diary of the laboratory, the folder art therapy and the final report. The directory of art therapy
analyzes the most significant artifacts produced by each user in terms of space usage, color, stretch, contents of the report with the setting (materials, art therapy and group). The final report is drawn up at the end of art therapy treatment program and summarized what has emerged during the tour, assesses the effectiveness and, above all, means any open issues. It is clear that we need to contextualize these instruments with a view of engagement and preparatory to a more general therapeutic course, never forgetting that the main objective of the activity is to contribute to the observation and diagnosis of users: observation of creative materials can, in turn, through the development of hypotheses, fantasy, reverie, to stimulate the creativity of the team itself

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G. Champion, "Creativity and transcendence in the work of Marion Milner," paper delivered at the conference "The arts, mind, space, care", Milano, 09.17.2010, http: / / statidellamente.blogspot.com

Champion G. " L music and implicit memory " in " Why must love children: the role of maternal infant brain development " , Milan 30 October 2010, Space Oberdan .

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G Champion. " Sculpture, the art form closest to the proto-mental?" , http://statidellamente.blogspot.com

Champion G., altered states of consciousness and experience music, Wave Ahead Production Workshop at the Music Niccolo Piccinni, Bari, 2009 , http://statidellamente.blogspot.com

Graeme J. Taylor, Michael Bagby and James DA Parker, Disorders of Affect Regulation: Alexithymia in Medical and Psychiatric Illness, , 1997. 28-31  







Jones, Bruce A. (November 1984) Panic attacks with panic masked by alexithymia. Psychosomatics 25 (11): 858-859. URL consultato il 2006-12-17.  







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Jula, Antti (April 1999) Alexithymia: A Facet of Essential Hypertension. Hypertension 33 (4): 1057-1061. Retrieved on 2006-12-17.



Krystal, H. (2007). Affect, Trauma, Alexithymia. Magi Editore, Rome.



Li, Chiang-shan Ray (March 2006) Alexithymia and stress-induced brain activation in cocaine-dependent men and women. Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience 31 (2): 115-121. Retrieved on 2006-12-17.

Loatelli Simon, "The contribution of art therapy and all'osservaziome diagnosi di tossicodipendenti in comorbidità psichiatrica", tesi di Laurea in scienze e tecniche psicologiche, Universita di Pavia, 2010.







Lumley, Mark A. (1994) Alexithymia and negative affect: relationship to cigarette smoking, nicotine dependence, and smoking cessation. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 61 (3-4): 156-162.  







Michetti, Paolo M. (2006) Male sexuality and regulation of emotions: a study on the association between alexithymia and erectile dysfunction (ED). International Journal of Impotence Research 18 (2): 170–174. URL consultato il 2007-02-02.  



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Paolo Pozzi, art therapy thesis 2010

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Bucci, W. (1997b), "Symptoms and symbols: a multiple code theory of somatization," Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 17, pp. 151-172. [Ed. com. http://www.psychomedia.it/pm/answer/psychosoma/bucci.htm].







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Best Table Top Audio Systems

"Ardor" by Roberto Calasso Guido Vitiello - from "The Reform"

On the cover of the new book by Roberto Calasso, Ardor , you see the black stone sculpture of a girl in meditation. It is headless, as some Vedic scholars whose head has been handed down, exploding into a thousand pieces before sacrificial irresolvable conundrums. Western readers certainly did not come to this, but a slight headache or dizziness can catch him when he reads in Satapatha Brahmana treated ritual that dates back to the eighth century before Christ, as the gods of the beginning of time men tore the skin to cover the cows: "If you want to go to the source, this is therefore the natural state of man: the Scorticato, as in sixteenth-century atlases of anatomy."

The two images - the Renaissance anatomical table and the girl with no head - appear to agglutinate to compose a third, of course dear to Calasso: The Vitruvian Man beheaded by André Masson, which appeared on the cover of the magazine Acéphale , where in the late thirties Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Caillois and reasoning of many things, but most of Nietzsche and sacrifice. Nietzsche and sacrifice, in fact: the time and the rock from which it is carrying out the thread of Calasso His work since the beginning of Monologue fatal.

If man, as stated in the prologue of Zarathustra, is a cable stretched between the animal and the Superman, the India of the Vedas seems to be nothing but a crushed between Gods and animals, a creature terrified and vulnerable, hunted by predators, which is first removed the skin off. Ardor back, obsessively, to the original point from which radiates the whole Our historical event: the moment when the man of prey became prey by imitation, eliciting chipped flints and arrows that could reproduce the fangs and claws of his killers. On this inaugural upheaval, perceived as a huge fault, is based the ritual of sacrifice, which is a repair and recovery time.

No civilization was able to put this node in the center tragic and dark as the India of the Vedas, which lost interest of military conquests and materials but left a great deal of international treaties, hymns, formulas that seem to rotate around the pivot of all Yupa , pole axis of the sacrifice and the world. Ardor - which is perhaps, along with K. , the highest point of the 'work being "of Calasso - offers commentary and swirling erratically, philologist surrealist, these obscure texts, closing the cycle opened in 1983 with The Ruin of Kasch , which incorporates all the worries, the sacrifice as a rearrangement of the impossible 'balance of the world, the coexistence of devourer and devoured in the physiology of the same mind, the modern implementation of all the powers of the sacred in secular societies, "highest form of superstition."

But let's be serious, let's stop and cautiously at the outset : Ardor deserves better than a review. If we put together a few sentences evocative excerpt from the book and some very fine there, we would give the impression that this is one of the many new books that meet the fate alluded to Jonathan Swift: "Of the seven thousand products currently written in this renowned city, before the sun has made the next revolution, there will be an echo of some. " But this is not the case, especially since the "well-known city" of the Republic of Letters resembles today more than ever at the annual meeting of the village idiot in Love and Death Woody Allen: The player must maneuver in a Fair crowded with megalomaniacs and verbose buttonholer, each convinced of being Shakespeare, each convinced that his story deserves hours of valuable time. In this congregation of lunatics, the critic, rather than the priest as an intermediary between the Saints (the authors) and the people of the devotees, is the crafty friend who seeks to preserve and guide you from unpleasant encounters where it is worth stopping. Well, in friendship, Ardor deserves all the time who wants to extort.

It may be objected that a book of the Adelphi dominus does not run the risk of going unnoticed. His fate, however, is likely to resonate in empty, simply because the family always camped in the cultural our country have all the requirements for not understanding much of Calasso. Catholics give the gnostic and the destroyer Shiva - Avvenire he is even accused of being the instigator of the neo-pagan ritual of throwing stones from the flyover (bullies, of course, read books on Satapatha Brahmana).

The right look with suspicion on his aesthetics, like a sybaritic softness, and years ago accused him of corrupting the youth in cahoots with his teacher Elémire Zolla. Some Marxists who once affixing the stigma of irrationalism, today accused of snobbery - the implication being both charges of blackmail that while tsarist court of Adelphi delight you with the ethereal verses of Gottfried Benn, railroad workers and metal workers are crowded out of dirty grease that gives voice and conscience realist writer.

The accusation of snobbery, of course, is the weapon of the resentful, the ones who scour the books looking for mistakes that Calasso scratch his reputation as a great scholar: when he came Literature and the gods , for one thing, much talk of an unspecified date and a Latin adverb maltradotto. But nitpicking, to the fleas, behind the appearances is hostile servile practice: is the operation that makes the female baboon hamadryad the level of male dominance.

We lend ourselves to this game zealous and ungenerous, and noted that on page 436 of Ardor , about the extermination of the Jews and of human sacrifice, which is written in the language of war hesitated in front of that ' obscure event, so that in 1948 the historian Raul Hilberg found no better than to call his work the Destruction of European Jews, and that only a few years later he arrived at the designated sacrificial Holocaust. But Hilberg's book is not the 1948 and 1961, and the term Holocaust began to circulate, albeit muted, even in the late thirties.

And yet we are here to make Calasso praise, not bury him. And it is on another note we would like to conclude, all for the benefit of the reader for a walk in the Republic of Letters - that reader who, perhaps, not interested in much of the Vedas, Indian seers, cosmogony and intoxicating plants. Well, in the bottom Ardor Calasso said that the idea for the book arose "from the reckless to comment about the Satapatha Brahmana ', the treaty ritual that still exists in the only translation consists of 2366 pages divided into five volumes. The comment was thrown some light on the Vedic thought that Calasso calls "the most thoughtless and consequential attempt to order life in obedience only to the analogue mode ', ie at that pole of the mind that takes anywhere similarities, similarities, correspondences, deep links.

invite the reader to read this confession as involuntary autoallegoria, and see it Ardor remarks to a work that occupies more than 2366 pages, the catalog Adelphi, soliloquy - or monologue fatal - a fact of books and authors attempt "risky and consequential" to order the culture according to the pole analog of the mind, based on family resemblances often elusive or imperceptible. On the other hand, once wrote Calasso, art, publishing is a form of bricolage which consists of 'giving shape to a large number of books as if they were chapters in a single book. "

is precisely the case with Adelphi. The 'work in progress "of Calasso resides, so to speak, at the center of the Mandala, and gives us the key. Around, willing to corolla, his favorite authors - Nietzsche and Stirner, Kraus and Kafka, Walser and Wedekind - and those for which he wrote the back cover, collected in a small part in the Hundred Letters to a stranger : hence opens up the forest resounding with echoes, where René Girard and Julian Jaynes, Artaud and Daumal, even Wittgenstein and Kant (perhaps contraggenio) are like magnets and made to converge towards a single point magnetizing. What is this point, it reveals Ardor: is the Yupa , the pile of sacrifice

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