Be included in the first Ph.D. on art and healing

Join Mary on the spiral of art and healing

Mary Rockwood Lane, R.N., M.S.N., Ph.D.(c). co-director of the Arts In Medicine Program at The University of Florida, Gainesville, is doing a Ph.D. in nursing with a minor in studio art painting, at the University Of Florida, that will examine the process of art and healing, to more deeply understand what is happening when art heals. Her Ph. D. will be on art and healing, not art therapy. Her work will concentrate on the lived experience of art itself, not of an art therapist working with a patient.

COMMENT BY BOB ALLSTON: This statement brings out the contradictions in her position. She seeks to more deeply understand what is happening when art heals. Yet she intentionally ignores at least two disciplines-- psychology and medicine-- that have the best chance of yielding answers. She says her work will concentrate on the lived experience of art itself, not of an art therapist working with a patient. However I would expect most art therapists would say that's what they are there for. She is straining to justify her view of a discipline that may in fact have little justification for its existence, compared to all of the therapy disciplines-- art therapy, dance therapy, music therapy, physical therapy, recreational therapy, occupational therapy, etc.

She is interviewing artists, healers, patients, anyone who has a lived experience of art and healing. She asks two questions:

1. What is your lived experience of how art has healed you? What happened? What was your story?, What did it feel like in your body? What was it like?. Tell me in your own words, your thoughts, your feelings, your sensations. Tell me what actuallly happened.

2: What is your lived experience of how you heal others (or the earth) with art? What happens to you? What is your story?, What does it feel like in your body? What is it like? Again, tell me what actually happens.

She welcomes you to be included in her research and to help all of us understand more deeply what this is that we are doing.

COMMENT BY BOB ALLSTON: All of this is of course the province of established social science, such as psychology, which I assume her book ignores.

Some of the stories, with permission of course, will also be included in her book Art As A Healing Force.

Send your stories to her at EMAIL as1owl@earthlink.net or to Mary Lane, Arts in Medicine, P.O. box 90301, Gainesville. Fl. 32605.

From Mary's dissertation:

"What are the stories and lived experiences of art as a way of healing? My intention is to explore and describe stories and their meanings. It is a search that will spiral into the inner world of individuals sharing their sacred journeys of art as a new way of healing.

Art gives us the ability to journey inward into a place of our own creativity, a mind-body state that is deeply healing. In our imagination, we can glimpse images that heal us. We take these images outward and make art. As art forms emerge they are healing expressions of a lived experience. As I go deep into the sacred spiral, as I fall deeply into the center of the spiral of art and healing, through my love and through my dreams of creation itself, as I fall into the center of the spiral nebula this is what I see: There is a moment where the artist and healer are one, it may simply be the moment when they are one with their own inner artist or with the artist in the room with them. In that moment magic happens. The creative process, the same process that fuels the universe, that makes stars born, spiral nebula come, babies born, changes a person forever. The release of the inner imagery from the creative source changes the person's life and body, it heals them.

But what actually happens in this moment of magic, what is the actual process by which prayer or mind-body healing or creativity heals? I believe it is the same process that the universe is formed from the dream, that matter is formed from thought. This dissertation will deeply examine the moment of magic by looking carefully at that moment through the stories of artists and healers and finding threads of similarity that show us what is really happening.

For no one actually knows this, and this examination is the first detailed look at what is actually going on. As a scholar and the co-founder of a major program in art and healing, I will examine the moment of healing by falling in love with the storyteller, merging with them and just listening. It is so beautiful through their eyes we will see it."


COMMENT BY BOB ALLSTON:

She has of course the right to poetic license.

However viewed as an academic research project at the Ph.D level in the University of Florida School of Nursing on the subject of using art to heal by AIM's top research person, this page abounds with hype and new age or pop culture rhetoric that is counterproductive and discrediting.

She seeks responses in a way that would suggest to the person responding that she wants more of the same rhetoric, thus biasing and discrediting her results.

I have not read her book but I assume she is ignoring the discipline of psychology and possibly all of the social and medical sciences as research tools as well as ignoring established research standards.

If so, she deprives anyone examining her study of anything approaching a common denominator for comparing her results with those of other researchers in the field.

I am not aware of any more credible research material from her on the Web. If she has any, hopefully she will place it on the Web.

In short this is clearly out of the bounds of academic or scientific objectivity and I suspect most research people reading this material would probably consider her research as sub-standard and reject the book out of hand as a source of reliable information on the subject.

This is a page in the Web site entitled Mainstreaming Arts in Medicine.