Excerpts from An Artist's Thought Book: Intriguing Thoughts about the Artistic Process

An Artist's Thought Book: Intriguing Thoughts About the Artistic Process is a series of aphorisms by Dr. Richard Bargdill, associate professor of psychology at St. Francis University. These original aphorisms are 1- or 2-sentence thoughts that are roughly categorized into 5 book chapters concerning: what it means to be an artist, a poet, a singer, and a painter, as well as thoughts on the nature of creativity. The purpose of an aphorism is to say enough to provoke thoughts in the reader without completely spelling out what the author specifically means. The beauty of writing in the aphoristic style is that different people can interpret the same sentence in many ways. Here, the author has picked a few of his favorite aphorisms from each of the chapters. Bargdill is an award-winning poet and artist who was most recently recognized for his first place sculpture at the prestigious 2009 Pennsylvania State art show: Art of the State. To learn more about the artist, please visit his Web site at www.poetryartandsong.com. The book is available at Amazon.com.     

Seeking The Real

A critical discussion of Barry Stroud's claim, in his book The Quest for Reality, that we could never rationally arrive at the conclusion that, for example, the world is not really colored.     

The Mother Relationship and Artistic Inhibition in the Lives of Leonardo da Vinci and Erik H. Erikson

In four earlier articles, I focused on the theme of the relationship of melancholia and the mother, and suggested that the melancholic self may experience humor (Capps, 2007a), play (Capps, 2008a), dreams (Capps, 2007c), and art (Capps, 2008b) as restorative resources. I argued that Erik H. Erikson found these resources to be valuable remedies for his own melancholic condition, which had its origins in the fact that he was illegitimate and was raised solely by his mother until he was three years old, when she remarried. In this article, I focus on two themes in Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood (1964): Leonardo’s relationship with his mother in early childhood and his inhibitions as an artist. I relate these two themes to Erikson’s own early childhood and his failure to achieve his goal as an aspiring artist in his early twenties. The article concludes with a discussion of Erikson’s frustrated aspirations to become an artist and his emphasis, in his psychoanalytic work, on children’s play. Donald Capps is Professor of Pastoral Psychology at Princeton Theological Seminary. His books include Men, Religion, and Melancholia (1997), Freud and Freudians on Religion (2001), and Men and Their Religion: Honor, Hope, and Humor     

Painting Is Thinking on the Threshold of Being

With permission of the Finnish artist Juhana Blomstedt, a selection of his thoughts on art collected in the book ''Muodon Arvo'' (The Value of Form) and from an interview with the psychoanalyst Veikko Talvitie, have been translated and reproduced in this issue. Aphoristic sentences, reflecting his views on the value of form, on time and memory, art as communication, abstract painting, or on the artist and his role in society, build up some of the chapters of his book, but the same sentences can also be found time and again in longer and more coherent texts. They seem to contain the essence of the artist's reflections on art and on ''the enigma of being in the world''.     

Embodied Imagination: Robert Bosnak,at 57

Robert Bosnak is a Dutch Jungian psychoanalyst and cofounder of http://www.cyberdreamwork.com, the first global interactive dream site using real-time voice and video. He is past president of the Association for the Study of Dreams and author of A Little Course in Dreams, Christopher's Dreams: Dreaming and Living with AIDS, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming, and his new book Embodied Imagination: In Medicine, Art, and Travel. In this interview Robert Bosnak shares his perspectives and experiences as a Jungian analyst and in his studies of healing, shamanism, dreams, and alchemy. We also discuss his unique embodied approach to dream work.     

Mutual Humanization: A Visual Exploration of Relationships in Medical Care

In this article, I explore the work of the artist Robert Pope (b.1957- d.1992) who published a series of paintings and drawings which documented his decade-long experience with Hodgkin's lymphoma. More widely, Pope was interested in 'the culture' of cancer within hospitals and the relationships embedded in experiences of illness and care. Pope published a book that contains much of this work--Illness and Healing: Images of Cancer (1991). Many of the original artworks have been toured throughout Canada and the United Kingdom at cancer centres and medical schools. Using a visual methodology, I present three of Pope's images to examine and understand the experiences of patients within acute care settings. I conclude that Pope's work can be efficacious in exploring relationships in acute care settings.     

My Art by the Numbers

The author explains his affinity for numbers as it relates to his work as an artist spanning his long career. This affinity helped him invent one of the first systems for making four-color digital prints. Having been only recently introduced to the book Number and Time, by Marie-Louise von Franz, the author finds that he is in full agreement with her depth psychology theories on number. Recounting a synchronicity that he experienced while writing this paper helped the author to understand Jung’s concept of the unus mundus, as explained by von Franz in Number and Time. He speculates that number archetypes must have evolved in human consciousness over very long periods of time and writes about the number zero as a “recent” example. The author also describes his experience of a spontaneous mathematical vision that led him to create an algorithm, which in turn led him to realize that crystals having fivefold symmetry could exist in nature, which was considered impossible at the time. The author discusses his new inventions of quasi-periodic and random tile patterns, which were inspired by 15th-century Islamic tile patterns, as they related to the aperiodic patterns invented by Roger Penrose in the 20th century. He speculates about the ability of artificially intelligent computer software to be able to generate random quasi-periodic patterns. Lastly, the author recounts a synchronistic experience that occurred during the month of his 72nd birthday, in which his work with numbers is seemingly reciprocated by nature.     

Resistance in treatment as a means of avoiding inner conflict

It is not commonly known that, in his eighties, Michael Fordham sought the help of Donald Meltzer in what Dr Meltzer described as ‘more a weekly supervision of dreams than an analysis’. Dr Fordham is said to have commented that it was ‘a weekly supervision of my inner world - and you can't get closer to psychoanalysis than that’ He was greatly helped by these ‘supervisions’ and at the end of their work together, Meltzer suggested that Fordham wrote his memoirs. This resulted in The Making of an Analyst: Michael Fordham, published in 1993.

This fascinating account of Fordham's life and work contains much of interest about his personal development. He talks with candour about his confusions and passions in what is at times a surprisingly revealing manner. In particular Fordham talks openly about his closest relationships and how they affected him. The book was published, as he wanted it to be, after careful discussion with James Astor and Karl Figlio.

We are pleased to be able to publish the following contribution from Dr Meltzer about the book which he prompted. It is a mixture of personal responses on reading the book and memories of the man.     

Habit as resistance: Bergson's philosophy of second nature

Henri Bergson is one of the few philosophers who both explicitly and extensively discusses the phenomenon of habit. In view of his engagement with habit, does Bergson develop a philosophically robust account of the phenomenon? Most commentary on his account of habit refers to his early work, Matter and Memory. In this paper, I begin by arguing that Bergson's treatment of habit in Matter and Memory is problematic because it does not adequately differentiate between habit and material nature. Despite its neglect in secondary literature, Bergson also discusses habit in the first part of his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. With respect to this book, I subsequently show how Bergson deploys Ravaisson's distinction between instinct and habit to reconceptualize habit as the second of our two natures, our social nature. Lastly, I reconstruct Bergson's late contribution to the philosophy of habit: rather than a tendency that is hard to resist, habit is a resistance to which we tend to submit. By shedding light on the effort that we expend to adhere to them, Bergson's resistance account of habit advances an original and productive perspective on our social habits.     

Seven Paths of the Hero in Lord of the Rings: The Path of Love

Sam's is the simplest yet the most touching of all paths: His simple loyalty and love for Frodo make him the single person who never wavers in his task throughout the book. Though all members of the Fellowship are engaged in momentous events, Sam always remembers that the sun coming up in the morning is a glorious sight, and that hobbits have to eat. When Frodo can no longer even walk, and will not let Sam carry the Ring, Sam carries Frodo. Then, when Gollum joins them, Frodo's kindness has to be balanced by Sam's stern limits. Ultimately Sam's outcome is the happiest of all those on the Quest: He has been able to see the Elves who so fascinate him, able to serve as Frodo's companion on the greatest of all Quests, and now able to return to his blessed Shire, to marry his loving Rosie, have many children and live happily ever after.     

REALIZING PLEASANT GROVE: THE REAL PRESENCE OF THE ESCHATON IN THE LIFE OF STANLEY HAUERWAS

Taking my cue from Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir, I discuss the struggles Stanley Hauerwas experiences in trying to identify a place he can call home. The memoir suggests that his academic endeavours have taken Hauerwas far from his hometown, Pleasant Grove, Texas. The book shows, however, that places such as Pleasant Grove function for Hauerwas as anticipations of the heavenly eschaton. To suggest that Christians have no home here on earth does not take into account sufficiently the “real presence” of the heavenly future in everyday realities, such as Stanley's love of Paula Gilbert and a person's appropriate affection of his country.     

The Hands of Egon Schiele

Through an exploration of Egon Schiele's life and enigmatic ?mannerisms?, which recall those of autistic children and schizophrenic patients, the author explores the impact his outstanding and disturbing paintings can have. The approach is biographical, revealing Schiele the artist as an already gifted though disturbed child. Some material refers to Schiele's way of expressing painful yet creative fantasies, in which different parts of his body (in particular his hands), projected into his paintings, form part of an intimate, creative, disturbed language. From childhood to his early death, Schiele used a coherent figurative language which was both realistic and oneiric; the author develops some ideas on art and psychoanalysis, particularly as to the creative process within a complex and disturbed personality. Working as he did between the psychotic and non-psychotic elements of his personality (Bion), Schiele is an appropriate artist for our time. His drama, his feelings of disintegration and ?dismemberment? are nourished by the creative, sane parts of his personality. The true psychotic artist is not entirely psychotic, for creation requires aesthetic taste and harmony.     

You Must Have Thought This Book Was About You1: Reply to Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett's review 2 of my book, Human Nature and the Limits of Science, 3 was apparently conceived as part of a multiple review, anticipating an author's response, so I am grateful for the opportunity to satisfy this expectation. Indeed, Dennett uses this excuse to justify devoting his own contribution to responding to those parts of the book directed explicitly at his own work, leaving other imagined reviewers to take care of other issues. Since he has things to say about most of the topics in the book he evidently interpreted this remit widely, in fact taking the book as “presented as an antidote of sorts to [his] own world view” (p. 482). Let me begin, therefore, by reassuring Dennett that, while I certainly had some critical things to say about some of his views, the book most certainly was not intended as an ad hominem attack. The nine pages (out of 187) on which his work is cited fairly accurately reflects the extent to which his views figured in my thinking. Curiously, his ire seems most strongly aroused by my assault on his views on free will in which, apparently, I agree with nearly everything he says and, worse still, fail to cite him at all.     

Ethics of Immigration: The Issue of Convicted Criminals

In this paper, I explore and probe Joseph Carens’ remarks, in his recent book The Ethics of Immigration, on the immigration status of foreign convicted criminals who have served their sentence, and who wish either to immigrate into our country or who are already here. Carens rejects deportation when it is not called for by considerations of national security, and agrees that considerations of public order can justify barring convicted foreign criminals from entering the country. I broadly agree with his arguments against deportation: my remarks in this respect are clarificatory and exploratory as much as anything else. But (I argue) both his argument for open borders and his scepticism with respect to radical cosmopolitanism are in tension with his claim that past criminal convictions can act as a bar to entry.     

Fire,Light, Sound,and Music: Elements of Emotions in the Work of Mechthild of Magdeburg and in a Text from an Unknown Provençal Troubadour

In her book The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Mechthild of Magdeburg, a 13th-century German mystic, describes the inner experiences that have occurred over her lifespan. She thereby gives insight into an extraordinary process of individuation in a woman who lived in the so-called dark times of the Middle Ages. Her writing is full of emotion, fire, and love. For her “the Godhead is a burning fire” and the human soul is “a living spark in the great fire of the exalted majesty.” A second and much shorter text written by an unknown Provençal troubadour shows a bewildering experience of love and the effort of this man to connect the experience with his traditional Christian God-image. Not unlike the alchemists, he strongly includes the sensual world as part of his encounter with the divine. Both texts give insight into aspects of eros in medieval mysticism.