Phillip Romero is a writer, a psychiatrist and an artist. To the modern mind this may seem confusing but the ancient Greeks would have understood it well because they idealized the 'Golden Mean'. They expected their soldiers to also be poets, philosophers and orators. Men strove to be well rounded.
Psychiatry is a specialist medical field. Unlike psychology it focuses on specific medical conditions and uses medical science as the means of diagnosis and treatment. Both psychology and psychiatry claim to be 'sciences' but the latter concentrates more on medical practice and on solving specific conditions of the mind.
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.
Whatever their training doctors are concerned to solve problems of survival. The African 'witchdoctor' might throw bones and utter incantations but he is essentially engaged in the same end purpose as the western doctor, dressed in baggy green pajamas, with his scalpel poised. In many cases psychiatrists have to face the intractable problems of sanity and insanity. Dropping a bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people seemed sane in 1945 in the context of the social environment at that time. Some years later it seemed blatantly insane.
Like doctors, artists work at the interface between meaning and meaninglessness. The cave dweller who depicted animals and ceremonies from his world may not have appreciated quite what he was doing but he was inevitably creating metaphors. The images became symbols and carried meaning from his own world into the worlds of people who came later to scramble along isolated cave walls in wonder.
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
What happened at one end of a rock overhang was probably observed by people at the opposite end. Similarly, in the contemporary world, we watch people playing games on other continents and hear them tapping their bats on the ground. Like clansmen looking at the clouds we look for signs that will affect our survival. Climate change worries us and we are concerned that all the planet's oil and coal reserves will soon be converted into carbon emissions. The question of what to do recurs, as it always has.
Like an artist of old, Phillip Romero turns to the cave wall which is now the Internet. He writes texts and creates websites that symbolize the need to find new ways to cope with social, political and economic realities. They may be different in nature and scale from those that loomed for tribes in the past. Nevertheless, it is imperative to find fresh methods, solutions and symbols, and for those the artist and the scientist must work together.
Psychiatry is a specialist medical field. Unlike psychology it focuses on specific medical conditions and uses medical science as the means of diagnosis and treatment. Both psychology and psychiatry claim to be 'sciences' but the latter concentrates more on medical practice and on solving specific conditions of the mind.
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.
Whatever their training doctors are concerned to solve problems of survival. The African 'witchdoctor' might throw bones and utter incantations but he is essentially engaged in the same end purpose as the western doctor, dressed in baggy green pajamas, with his scalpel poised. In many cases psychiatrists have to face the intractable problems of sanity and insanity. Dropping a bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people seemed sane in 1945 in the context of the social environment at that time. Some years later it seemed blatantly insane.
Like doctors, artists work at the interface between meaning and meaninglessness. The cave dweller who depicted animals and ceremonies from his world may not have appreciated quite what he was doing but he was inevitably creating metaphors. The images became symbols and carried meaning from his own world into the worlds of people who came later to scramble along isolated cave walls in wonder.
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
What happened at one end of a rock overhang was probably observed by people at the opposite end. Similarly, in the contemporary world, we watch people playing games on other continents and hear them tapping their bats on the ground. Like clansmen looking at the clouds we look for signs that will affect our survival. Climate change worries us and we are concerned that all the planet's oil and coal reserves will soon be converted into carbon emissions. The question of what to do recurs, as it always has.
Like an artist of old, Phillip Romero turns to the cave wall which is now the Internet. He writes texts and creates websites that symbolize the need to find new ways to cope with social, political and economic realities. They may be different in nature and scale from those that loomed for tribes in the past. Nevertheless, it is imperative to find fresh methods, solutions and symbols, and for those the artist and the scientist must work together.
About the Author:
Read more about Phillip Romero Is Both A Scientist And An Artist by visiting our website.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Gimme your 2 cents!