Posted on by Lisa

Play with words and metaphors

2008-0129planesphere-400×190.jpg

.

Meeting with John Hughes this afternoon (by phone) he offered some good suggestions:

Play with the animated alphabet.

Something I’d thought to do, but he’s given me ideas that seem possible to do on the main website.. play with words, and images, in different contexts.

Play with sequencing material in different ways (as in film editing)

Find ways to animate the database.
Simon had suggested this but I have still not found a way.

Choose a metaphor as the focus for the thesis.
I have already chosen layers – of ice and sediments – as different memories and perspectives.
He suggested the idea of things frozen in time – and to use the freezing of ice as a metaphor – how water moves around freely, and connects to things, and then when it freezes, things are locked up – contained – as ideas get contained within a thesis.

.

We discussed Freud and Jung, and how Cognitive Behaviour Therapy has superseded psycho-analysis as a framework for understanding the unconscious.

.

He understood my planesphere – an object for animating symbols, representing connections we have made with Antarctic landscape.

.

Perceptions of the Arctic have been shaped by unconscious imaginings of Gothic fiction writers, and Freud.

Perceptions of Antarctica were once shaped by self-conscious heroism.

Perceptions of both Poles are now shaped more by conscious open questioning of art and science.

CategoriesUncategorised

4 Replies to “Play with words and metaphors”

  1. Re: my comments Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I wasn’t saying it has changed our view of the unconscious. It has superseded the treatment of mental illness. Also it has further altered our conception of how treatment operates and that will eventually have a flow on effect our notion of consciousness. This is a profound shift which has not as yet been fully accommodated into cultural metaphors.

  2. Good point.

    As you often are quick to say, all angles of perception are of interest.

    I am interested to find out more about what cultural metaphors can and do reflect the shift.

  3. From:

    http://www.answers.com/topic/cognitive-therapy?cat=health

    I find:

    Cognitive Therapy (CT) is a type of psychotherapy developed by psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck in the 1960s.

    Becoming disillusioned with long-term psychodynamic approaches based on gaining insight into unconscious emotions and drives, Beck came to the conclusion that the way in which his clients perceived and interpreted and attributed meaning—a process known scientifically as cognition—in their daily lives was a key to therapy.[1]

    Albert Ellis was working on similar ideas from a different perspective, in developing his rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT).

    Beck initially focused on depression and developed a list of “errors” in thinking that he proposed could cause or maintain depression, including arbitrary inference, selective abstraction, over-generalization, and magnification (of negatives) and minimization (of positives).

    Cognitive therapy seeks to identify and change “distorted” or “unrealistic” ways of thinking, and therefore to influence emotion and behaviour.

    Beck outlined his approach in Depression: Causes and Treatment in 1967. He later expanded his focus to include anxiety disorders, in Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders in 1976, and other disorders and problems.[2] He also introduced a focus on the underlying “schema”—the fundamental underlying ways in which people process information—whether about the self, the world or the future.

    Treatment is based on collaboration between client and therapist and on testing beliefs.

    The new cognitive approach came into conflict with the behaviourism ascendant at the time, which denied that talk of mental causes was scientific or meaningful, rather than simply assessing stimuli and behavioural responses.

    However, the 1970s saw a general “cognitive revolution” in psychology.

    Behavioural modification techniques and cognitive therapy techniques became joined together, giving rise to cognitive behavioural therapy.

    The term is sometimes used interchangeably with cognitive therapy, since cognitive therapy has always included some behavioural components, but advocates of Beck’s particular approach seeks to maintain and establish its integrity as a distinct clearly-standardized kind of cognitive behavioural therapy.[3]

  4. Appreciation of how differently we make meaning of the world, and the world as it is interpreted through the works of artists and writers, has shaped education, and the arts, very much since the 1970s. This is Post-modernism for you.

    How to take an individual stand within this cultural climate?

    Perhaps we just do it, without apology.

Leave a Reply

Posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008