scholarly journals A cinema for the unborn: moving pictures, mental pictures and Electra Sparks's New Thought film theory

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATRICK ELLIS
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Motion Picture ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Elephant Man

AbstractIn the 1910s, New York suffragette Electra Sparks wrote a series of essays in theMoving Picture Newsthat advocated for cine-therapy treatments for pregnant women. Film was, in her view, the great democratizer of beautiful images, providing high-cultural access to the city's poor. These positive ‘mental pictures’ were important for her because, she claimed, in order to produce an attractive, healthy child, the mother must be exposed to quality cultural material. Sparks's championing of cinema during its ‘second birth’ was founded upon the premise of New Thought. This metaphysical Christian doctrine existed alongside the self-help and esoteric publishing domains and testified, above all, to the possibility of the ‘mind-cure’ of the body through the positive application of ‘mental pictures’. Physiologically, their method began best in the womb, where the thoughts of the mother were of utmost importance: the eventual difference between birthing an Elephant Man or an Adonis. This positive maternal impression was commonplace in New Thought literature; it was Sparks's innovation to apply it to cinema. Investigating Sparks's film theory, practice and programming reveals her to be a harbinger of the abiding analogy between mind and motion picture that occupies film theorists to this day.

The Influence of Exercise and Rehabilitation on the Mind and Body

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Wallace ◽  
Janice Brock Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Stress Reduction ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Lower Back ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Base Of Support ◽  
Breathing Meditation

Let’s continue on the self-help road to improving fibromyalgia symptoms. Suppose we are eating healthy, well-balanced meals, are no longer smoking, have learned to pace ourselves, cope with changes in the weather, are sleeping well, and have reconfigured the house. At this point, how can the body be trained to reduce pain, stiffness, and fatigue? This chapter will explore how physical, mental, and complementary modalities allow fibromyalgia patients to feel better about their bodies and minds. Therapeutic regimens that help the body and mind, whether physical therapy, yoga, acupuncture, or chiropractic methods, are all based on similar tenets of body mechanics: 1. Fibromyalgia patients will never improve unless they have good posture. Bad posture aggravates musculoskeletal pain and creates tight, stiff, sore muscles. Therefore, stretch, change positions, and have a good workstation that does not require too much leaning or reaching. 2. The way we get around is a demonstration of body mechanics. The fundamental principles of good body mechanics in fibromyalgia include using a broad base of support by distributing loads to stronger joints with a greater surface area, keeping things close to the body to provide leverage, minimizing reaching, and not putting too much pressure on the lower back. Also, don’t stay in the same position for a prolonged period of time. 3. Exercise is necessary. It improves our sense of well-being, strengthens muscles and bones, allows restful sleep, relieves stress, releases serotonin and endorphins, which decreases pain, and burns calories. 4. Don’t be shy about using supports. Whether it be an armrest, special chair, brace, wall, railing, pillow, furniture, slings, pockets, or even another person’s body, supports allow fibromyalgia patients to decrease the amount of weight or stress that would otherwise be applied to the body, producing discomfort or pain. 5. All activities should be conducive to relaxation and stress reduction, whether they be deep breathing, meditation, biofeedback, or guided imagery. There are a surprisingly large number of ways these activities can be carried out. They are discussed in the next few sections.

scholarly journals On The Verge of the Hybrid Mind

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-43
Author(s):  
Surjo Soekadar ◽  
Jennifer Chandler ◽  
Marcello Ienca ◽  
Christoph Bublitz
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
Privacy And Security ◽  
Technological Artifacts ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Recent advances in neurotechnology allow for an increasingly tight integration of the human brain and mind with artificial cognitive systems, blending persons with technologies and creating an assemblage that we call a hybrid mind. In some ways the mind has always been a hybrid, emerging from the interaction of biology, culture (including technological artifacts) and the natural environment. However, with the emergence of neurotechnologies enabling bidirectional flows of information between the brain and AI-enabled devices, integrated into mutually adaptive assemblages, we have arrived at a point where the specific examination of this new instantiation of the hybrid mind is essential. Among the critical questions raised by this development are the effects of these devices on the user’s perception of the self, and on the user’s experience of their own mental contents. Questions arise related to the boundaries of the mind and body and whether the hardware and software that are functionally integrated with the body and mind are to be viewed as parts of the person or separate artifacts subject to different legal treatment. Other questions relate to how to attribute responsibility for actions taken as a result of the operations of a hybrid mind, as well as how to settle questions of the privacy and security of information generated and retained within a hybrid mind.

Louise Bourgeois’s Melancholy Objects to be Used

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-164
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenal Experience ◽  
Mental Process ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Louise Bourgeois ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual

Over a decade before the French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis in New York (1952–1985), her work mined territories of psyche, body, home, and exile. Bourgeois’s papers from 1940 onward reveal that she shared Freud’s description of neurotics, hysterics, and artists as suffering from reminiscences. Scottish psychoanalyst W. R. D. Fairbairn identified the last of these in 1943 as “war neuroses,” just six years before Bourgeois debuted her first mature sculptures. These abstract “personages” served as melancholy surrogates for lost objects, the friends and family Bourgeois left in 1938 in Occupied France. In the 1960s, she further reduced the body to ambivalent amalgams of part-objects made from plaster and latex, suggesting swollen nodes, skin, and sex organs. Of particular interest are two papers published by Fairbairn in 1938 that extend the inner world of the individual to the field of object relations via the transposition of the symbolically “restored object.” Fairbairn conceived the radical notion of restitution, the mental process of repairing damage in the artist’s inner object world. These principles resonate with Bourgeois’s métier and a postwar sculptural aesthetic that probed the phenomenal experience of anxiety, exile, and psychoanalysis on the Self and others.

scholarly journals Therapeutic Solutions, Disciplinary Ethics and Medical Truth on Self-Help TV

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 837-855
Author(s):  
Maryam El-Shall
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Television Program ◽  
The Self ◽  
Talk Shows ◽  
Pedagogical Model ◽  
Talk Show ◽  
Self Help

This article will consider the use of therapy television – specifically the self-help television program The Dr. Phil Show – as a locus of government. Specifically, I will examine the ways in which ethics are addressed as biopolitical problems of the self through the often disciplinary instruction of the therapist. In this respect The Dr. Phil Show is representative of a shift in the talk show genre away from the tabloid model to a pedagogical model. Self-help talk shows are increasingly concerned with the cultivation of the soul, the production of truth and the discipline of the body. I demonstrate this by analyzing a series of Dr. Phil Show episodes centered on the confession and obesity, respectively. I emphasize the connection between TV expertise – here embodied in the discourse of the expert/therapist Dr. Phil McGraw – and neo-liberal goals requiring subjects to both care, and take responsibility, for themselves.

scholarly journals A Biosemiotic Modeling of the Body-“Self” Synechism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Asuncion L. Magsino
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Recent Theory ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Semiotic System ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
Body Self ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

As a counterargument to the Cartesian split that has impacted both speculative and practical fields of knowledge and culture, we propose Peirce’s doctrine of synechism to show the continuity in the semiotic activity that moves from the body as an Interpretant to the emergence of another Interpretant called the “self.” Biosemiotics, a nascent field of interdisciplinary research that tackles inquiries about signs, communication, and information involving living organisms is used as the framework in the discussion. The main question of whether a non-material “self” can emerge from a material body is tackled in many stages. First, the biosemiotic continuum is established in the natural biological processes that takes place in the body. These processes can be taken as an autonomous semiotic system generating the “language” of the body or the Primary Modeling System (PMS). Second, synechism is also observed in the relationship between the mind and the body and this is evident in any physician’s clinical practice. The patient creates a Secondary Modeling System (SMS) of how she perceives what the body communicates to her regarding its state or condition. Finally, the question about whether the emergence of “self” is synechistic as well is tackled. There is one organ from which emerges an Interpretant that is capable of generating a dialog between a Subject, that is the “self,” with its Object, and that is the brain. It is the primordial seat of specifically human activities like thought and language. The recent theory on quantum consciousness supports the doctrine synechism between the body as Interpretant to the “self” as Interpretant. This synechism is crucial for the creation of Secondary Models of “reality” that will, in turn, determine the creation of Tertiary Models more familiarly called culture.

The Feeling of Being a Body: Resurrection and Habitus in Vaughan’s Medical Writings

2021 ◽  
pp. 124-147
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Social Connectedness ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Eternal Life ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Devotional Writings

Chapter 4 articulates more explicitly than the previous chapter the way resurrection beliefs in Vaughan’s poetry function as “critical theory” about selfhood, identity, and the social world. The chapter examines Vaughan’s devotional and religious “self-help” literature and Vaughan’s translation and expansion of a hermetic medical treatise. Vaughan’s immanent corporeal resurrectionist commitment to finding the “seeds” of resurrection leads him to posit an essential core of bodily life—the radical balsam—that seeks eternal life but that is sickened when it is penetrated and rewired by the social and historical world. The goal of Vaughan’s devotional writings and medicine alike is to rewire the self so that it reduces its investment in the historical and social world by having its life directed by the essential core, a move that is analogous to his poetic search for the seeds and signs of resurrection within himself his poetry (the subject of chapter 3). This vision anticipates Heidegger’s phenomenology and Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. Vaughan also describes a form of sexuality that anticipates Leo Bersani in imagining the body as socialized and yet as potentially unhinged from that social connectedness.

When silence is “yeelen” (light): Exploring the corporeality of the mind in a nocturnal solo zikr practice (Odienné, Ivory Coast)

2021 ◽  
pp. 205030322098698
Author(s):  
André Chappatte
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Ivory Coast ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Town

In the town of Odienné (Ivory Coast), Madou forges his faith in God by performing long sessions of solo zikr (recollection of God) after midnight. This article ethnographically explores the theme of light in this Sufi practice of concentration as an experiential form of being. It first describes how the light and darkness of the penumbra of the night co-initiate what I call “the devotional place” of zikr. Following a phenomenological writing, it then describes how, as hours go by, Madou’s concentration navigates towards “ yeelen” (spiritual light) through the silence of the deep night. In doing so, this article elaborates the “corporeal mind” as synesthetic instants in this journey when the body becomes the mind and the mind faith, as the penumbra becomes silence and silence light. In other words, it explores the sensuous unboundedness of the self that happens in regular and long practice of nocturnal solo zikr. This article therefore offers a corporeal understanding of the light of God among practitioners of prolonged nocturnal solo zikr in West Africa.

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