2009 My best paintings or musical improvisations (or writing) may seem the most obscure of my work.

C.D.Freudenberg, www.plusiarts.co.uk

When I am looking at a painting or listening to a musical composition/improvision or reading,  it is that which can draw me in to enquire and to look/listen/read more which can lead me to find more avenues of exploration. Such avenues maybe endless or I might find myself put off eg by too little or much confrontation with reality or painful clarity, though I can be quite patient in/as audience of artistic work.


I have been in London for many years since landing in 1980 in shared housing of a special needs Housing Association with a policy not to be a guetto of people with special needs, a housing association (which was an employment scheme too) started by a Quaker in 1968 who (in 1978) proposed an idea of something, a style of living in which anyone at any one time may be more able to help or need.  The proposal was an idea for something which became called "The William Allen Society" which a number of people (including me) got involved with/took up following the sudden death of the person whose idea it was but died

(see http://homepage.mac.com/mountpleasantry/WAS/Menu150.html ).  


For some years, I led a studio which was also my own workshop/pottery etc at this housing association,  leading it working with people in an inclusive non labelling way, carefully not calling myself an art therapist. I already had some awareness of psychiatry as a child growing up on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital where my parents worked and some awareness of histories of art therapy.   In 1990 (ten years later) I moved my art making to my home where I aquired studio workspace.  I closed the space that I had been using previously with a concessionary rent, applied to do a Diploma Art Therapy course and completed it the Diploma (awarded 1994).   Some of my friendships (eg participating in courses on C G Jung, psychotherapy and the arts) which began after my pursuing to learn about current art therapy practise were a regular active thing I did for a long time (in several ways & not just as personal therapy & with an analyst who encouraged me whilst art therapy practise became more regulated also). 


I have participated & worked with people in various ways and professional roles and learned of various ways of working & thinking, in learning, study I did and experience as a younger & now older man in working with people and as artist.


The following is written after attending conferences in 2008 [work progress, prepared after conferences that I attended in 2008 namely the Leeds MIND 2008 conference "Changing the Face of Mental Health" & the July 1st 2008 conference of the “International Society for Psychological Treatment of Schizophrenia”)] and stands as incomplete comments not only on institutionalisation of Community Care (& limitations there of & in professional helping roles) but such as psychological help for people trying to recover from a psychotic illness likely never can be complete (?!):


The Leeds MIND 2008 conference "Changing the Face of Mental Health" was more good, of similar to what I heard at a Voice Hearers / Asylum  Associates conference in Manchester a year or two before (Marius Romme /  Jacqui Dillon /  Rufus May).  It is always interesting to experience the energy of anyone finding better / more helpful circumstances than can be experienced of medicine & psychiatry (which for me is a life work that I say with care as a son of the social psychiatrist Dr R K Freudenberg; obituary at http://pb.rcpsych.org/cgi/reprint/7/11/215.pdf ).  Dr R K Freudenberg was involved with changing psychiatric practice from the 1930s to '70s i.e. from times when 'custodial' psychiatric treatment in the former large psychiatric hospitals became more humane caring than previously...his view (?!) maybe still correct & clear enough (eg in the mid 1960s when he Dr R K Freudenberg was seconded from his job as Medical Superintendant of a large psychiatric hospital to the Ministry of Health where he worked with the government Ministers of Health)  that (?!) closing of the large psychiatric hospitals & practise of good Community Care would be more difficult & more expensive than the previous (old large psychiatric hospitals etc) [Re pharmaceutical companies & critical social psychiatry, long ago there used to be an annual lecture in Surrey in memory of the psychiatrist Dr.R.K.Freudenberg & his work (he also was my father).  I have not heard that there has been another such lecture since one I attended that I discovered had funding by the makers of Prozac, after which I wrote that I did not think such funding was in the spirit of my fathers' work]. 


I myself participated & learned of other ways of working & thinking, in study I did and experience as a younger & now older man.


 Rufus May film "The Doctor Who Hears Voices"  (& strong mixed reaction: see 

http://rufusmay.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7&Itemid=9

& 

 http://www.psychminded.co.uk/news/news2008/may08/psychologist001.htm  )

as facilitator of engagement with an old problem, of a normalness in those who work with people (who can do good work in the course of their pleasure of working with people) but are not perfect (& have quite a hard time when they run into trouble themselves) must surely be a good thing.  It is not a surprise (nor new) when one hears reference to  the 'wounded healer' concept but the work of the psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, writer and artist Dr C G Jung (amongst others) can be difficult to engage with.  One can hear much about people who manage to overcome problems; people in pain of one sort or another (& their experiences of turning to  professional helpers who can be critical (or insufficiently so of their own profession when psychiatry much limited eg to a kind of industrialized psychiatry. This can be understandably rather a lot for many (any !) professional helpers (not just overburdoned psychiatrists who work hard with very disturbed people) and the public to engage with. 


This is not to mention comments such as:

- about national clinical guideline on depression eg:  "Comment...The wrong advice...January 10, 2008...The national clinical guideline on depression is flawed, acts as a mouthpiece for pharmaceutical firms and pays lip service to the views of service users. We must challenge it, says Malcolm Learmonth" )

(see http://www.psychminded.co.uk/news/news2008/jan08/wrongadvice001.htm

see also

http://www.insiderart.org.uk/default.aspx?contentid=36 ).

or

- " Do we explain or understand art? (quoting some interesting paragraphs from: Henzell, John. "Do we explain or understand art?" in "Arts - Therapies - Communication: On a Way to a Communicative Arts Therapy. Volume 1." Kossolapow, Scoble, Waller (eds). European Consortium for Arts Therapies Education. Lit Verlag. 2001. 

Münster- Hamburg-Berlin-London (From: I : Region Northwest-Europe. Great Britain & Ireland. Chapter 4 Arts Therapies & the Arts (Art, Music, Dance Movement in Clinical Contexts)). p 169):


"In clinical practise, in publications, and at conferences, we use the words 'art' and 'therapy' as if we understood their meaning well enough. 

If there is debate about what they refer to it is usually about what is meant by `therapy' rather than by `art' - or the 'arts'. Within such discussions different and often rival versions of therapy will be invoked by adherents of its various forms: psychoanalytic schools (Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Winnicottian, etc.), Rogerian, gestalt, projective, behavioural, cognitive, humanistic, alternative, new age, and so on. Or, also within the cluster of meanings deriving from therapy, we might refer to fields of medicine, psychopathology, neurology or disablement, together with their associated discourses of scientific description, diagnosis, and treatment. Following in the train of such talk is the question of proof; to what extent do these competing therapies 'cure' the ailments to which they are applied and what is their relative cost to the institutions that employ them? Furthermore, viewing the arts therapies as primarily clinical and paramedical practises, these institutions increasingly insist that such matters as proof and cost be, to use the current phrase, 'evidence based', in line with disciplines from an entirely different cultural background. 

In all of this the distinctive claims of art as a social practise, which by changing human perception alters people's lives, have become neglected. It is as if the idea that gave rise to the use of art in therapy - that in a crucial sense the value of being alive is aesthetic in the stongest possible sense of that word, originally so daring and full of interest in the first six or seven decades of the twentieth century, has become, like a dazzling but wayward comet captured in a large and ponderous gravitational field. So, as you will have gathered from these first remarks, I want here to speak for an approach to human meaning, value and suffering - or pathos, from which we derive the word pathology - that originates in art rather than the more instrumental forms of science, which, materially useful as they may be to us, medicine for example, hold us in such a trance. My argument is grounded in the images of the visual arts, a natural consequence of my personal and professional experience, but by implication extends to images that abound in other forms of artistic expression, literature, drama, film, music and dance..." .


My comments derive from various quarters of learning & experience.    It can be difficult to comment at any time.   Following my early time as a student  (having switched from plans to study medicine to completing multidisciplinary African & Asian Studies studies & social anthropology at the University of Sussex 1965-70), I moved to working with clay, endured painful years when my parents were coming to the ends of their lives (& work in psychiatry) and my work was beginning; me exploring, mutually learning, engaging with therapeutic arts (as well as social anthropology), helping people to do art (before awarded Diploma in Art Therapy Diploma 1992-3 with course work experience in psychiatry when (long after my studies in social anthropology) I read the social anthropologist & psychiatrist Richard Warners book "Recovery from Schizophrenia".  


After leaving postgraduate work at the University of Sussex (not doing doctoral fieldwork in a Swiss mountain community but completing my 1970 MA thesis "Process in Social Boundaries: A Study of Processes in the Isolation of Selected Rural and Urban Communities" published at http://www.anthrobase.com/Txt/F/Freudenberg_C_D_01.htm ), I did a lot of art making and led an art studio in context of caring community (me carefully not calling myself an art therapist which I continue to prefer to be careful about doing), completed a diploma in art therapy with work experience in psychiatry (awarded Sheffield 1994) and continued to make art & learning/experiencing how arts (& therapies) can enable change in qualities of life 


[a selection of reading since my early studies in social anthropology & later art therapy (see link from my webpage www.plusiarts.co.uk to "SOMETHING OF OTHER PEOPLES WORK (books, lives, films, theatre, music etc read/seen/heard)" & link to "A READING LIST"):  as well as Richard Warner "Recovery from Schizophrenia: Psychiatry & Political Economy": Martina Thomson "On Art & Therapy", "Starting from Scratch"(Peter Byrne & Joyce Laing Editors), "David MacLagan "Psychological Aesthetics", C J Jung "Memories, Dreams & Reflections", Anthony Storr "Feet of Clay", Murray Cox & Alice Thielgard  "Mutative Metaphors in Psychotherapy", and "The significance of studios"by Chris Wood (International Journal of Art Therapy Formerly Inscape, Volume 5 Issue 2000

see http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a789110237~db=all~order=page )


 & (amongst other things particularly recently) a new book by a social anthropologist (quite salutary & pertinent to various current) : 


F. G. Bailey "GOD-BOTHERERS AND OTHER TRUE-BELIEVERS Gandhi, Hitler, and the Religious Right" (published recently by  Berghahn Books: http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=BaileyGod ) .

240 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-84545-512-5 Published by Berghahn Books (Subject: Anthropology, Politics & Economics): When reason fails to guide us in our everyday lives, we turn to faith, to religion; we close our minds; we reject austere reasoning. This rejection, which is a faith-based social and intellectual malignancy, has two unfortunate consequences: it blocks the way to knowledge that might enhance the quality of life and it opens the way to charlatans who exploit the faith of others. Examining two unquestionable malignancies of “the Christian Right” in present-day politics in the United States and the “secular religion” of Hitler’s National Socialism, as well as the third, more complex case of Gandhi, the author asserts that we need religion, but we also need to make sure it does no harm.

F. G. Bailey is an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, where he taught from 1972-1994. He was formerly the founding professor of anthropology at the University of Sussex, UK and has published fifteen books (two of them edited volumes). ].


 When I am looking at a painting or listening to a musical composition/improvision (or reading),  it is that which can draw me in to enquire and to look/listen more & find more avenues of exploration (which maybe endless or I might find myself put off eg by too little or much confrontation with reality or painful clarity, though I can be quite patient in/as audience of artistic work).