Sunday, September 2, 2012

Phillip Romero Demonstrates The Compatibility Between Art And Science

By Martina Garrett


Phillip Romero is a psychiatrist, an artist and a writer. The ancient Greeks would have been proud of him as a representative of what they called, the 'golden mean'. They respected people who could function well across many fields of endeavor. Their poets were ideally good soldiers, politicians and philosophers. They believed in the well rounded man and in bringing things together.

Psychiatry is a demanding field of medical specialization. It is the study of human behavior in a medical context. Where psychology is the general science of human behavior psychiatry requires a medical background upon which specialist scientific insights and treatments are built.

Western medicine typically relies heavily upon scientific method. Medical practitioners tend to to be trained to think convergently rather than divergently. They work on the assumption that things are not true until they have been proved to be. For that reason western doctors do not easily understand Chinese traditional medicine which does not start from the same premise.

Both western and eastern medical practitioners are concerned with survival. They treat diseases that threaten lives and react to emergencies that threaten the lives of individuals. In the case of psychiatric medicine they may have to treat conditions that upset normal functioning of the mind. The distinction between mental normality and abnormality impinges on the notion of sanity. In the physical and mental environment that existed in the First World War seemed sane to the protagonists whilst it was happening. In hindsight, killing thousands of your own men appears insane.

Like the psychiatrist the artist works at the interface between sanity and insanity. Experts tend to agree that cave dwellers who depicted animals and ceremonies on the walls of their caves were doing more than idly recording activities and experiences. Even if they might have been unaware of the significance of the actions they were creating symbols and metaphors addressing the questions of why and how they came to exist in particular circumstances.

The lives of hunter gatherer clans must have been precarious. They must have been threatened by animals, disease and accidents on a daily basis. In some cases the entire clan was wiped out by unforeseen eventualities or by enemy clans. Reality was not rational but it was re

Modern people proceed on a different scale. Connected electronically we hear tine sound and see images of occurrences taking place across continents. Ironically, such advances in communication have enabled us to apprehend threats to our survival quite as catastrophic as some of the threats that confronted Stone Age clans. Our survival is threatened by environmental degradation. The natural resources upon which we depend are depleted. We must move but we don't know where to go.

As an artist and as a writer Phillip Romero turns to a new canvas. The Internet is the wall upon which he writes. It is the wall upon which new symbols and metaphors must be publicized so that creative ways of survival are communicated. Old economic, social and political concepts are evidently obsolete at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is imperative that new ways be found. For this the scientist must turn to the artist.




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