The Salutogenic Imagination Dr. Anita Klujber University of Essex.

The Salutogenic Imagination

Dr. Anita KlujberUniversity of Essex

Main argument:

The imagination has a salutogenic (health-promoting) potential because it strengthens sense of coherence, a mental function responsible for promoting well-being and health.

The imagination as relational apprehension

• “unifying intelligence” (Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World)

• “esemplastic power” (S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria)

• “the principle of synthesis” (P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry)

Sense of Coherence and Salutogenesis

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQN3V-kh1uvB4brJAHa6YrkBmbbrWi1NewpDvPAmNmN5Z5mlXOvgQ

Aaron Antonovsky (1923-1994)

Health, Stress and Coping (1979);

Unravelling the Mystery of Health: How People Manage Stress and Stay Well (1987)

Salutogenesis: The Origin of Health

• Salus (Latin):1. wellbeing, welfare, health, 2. safety, security 3. salvation 4. salutation, greeting5. The Roman goddess of health and prosperity

(Greek goddess Hygieia)• Genesis (Greek): origin, birth

http://www.forumancientcoins.com/moonmoth/salus_pics/faustina_jr_022rf.jpg

Salus: Roman Goddess of Health, Welfare, and Prosperity

Salutogenesis vs. Pathogenesis

Salutogenesis: origin of health

• How to maintain and improve health?

• Heterostasis is the fundamental condition of life.

• Stressors are normal and inevitable.

• We have to develop active adaptive responses.

• Negative entropy

Pathogenesis: origin of disease

• What causes disease?• How to cure disease?• Homeostasis is fundamental.• Stressors are pathogenic; they

disturb homeostasis

Generalized Resistance Resources

Internal • self-confidence• optimism• self-esteem• belief in a universal

cohering principle(God, etc.) or its internalsied form

External • social connectedness• stable financial situation• education• health care organisations

Sense of Coherence

Sense of Coherence (SOC)

“a global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that

(1) the stimuli deriving from one’s internal and external environments in the course of living are structured, predictable and explicable;

(2) the resources are available to meet the demands posed by the stimuli; and

(3) these demands are challenges worthy of investment and engagement.”

(Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health, 1987, 19)

Components of SOC:

(1) Comprehensibility: the ability to make sense of experiences

(2) Manageability: confidence in one’s ability to cope

(3) Meaningfulness: trusting the mind that it can construct meaning and see purpose in life.

(Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health, 16-19)

Sense of Coherence

• Degrees of SOC: weak, intermediate, strong. • Strong SOC: the ability to meet the challenges of

life by resolving tension, interpreting cognitive dissonance creatively, without generating health-damaging stress, etc.

• Key words: structure, order, adaptability, flexibility, resilience, restorability of balance.

• How can SOC be strengthened? • Is there a critical period for increasing SOC?

“If I have been motivated by one purpose to write this volume, it is […] to spark ideas in the minds of those colleagues who share with me the enchantment with the mystery of health”.

(Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health, 1987, xvii)

“When one searches for effective adaptation of the organism, one can move beyond post-Cartesian dualism and look to imagination, love, play, meaning, will, and social structures that foster them. Or, as I would prefer to put it, to theories of successful coping.”

(Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health, 1987, 9.)

• How can the imagination be utilised to boost SOC?

• Is there a critical period for enhancing SOC with the help of the imagination?

• Why can the imagination function as a salutogenic mental act?

A salutogenic learning cycle

the imagination

sense of

salutogenesis

coherence

Imaginative thinking: synthetic apprehension

• “The imagination is […] the principle of synthesis.” (P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry)• “Only connect”; “unifying intelligence” (Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World)• “the impulse to search resemblance, affinity, identity” (Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)• “The poet knows the missing link by the joy it gives.” (Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)• Poetry [is] musical Thought […]. “A musical thought is one spoken by a

mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul. [enchantment]

(Thomas Carlyle, The Hero as Poet)

Salutogenesis

• “Salus” (Latin): The polysemy of the word itself implies that well-being converges with the act of making a

connection: Salus well-being, health greeting, salutation=establishing a connection

“The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every men.” (R. W. Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)

Cf. conference motto:

“Enchantment is as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life”

(Tolkien, Smith of Wootton Major, 2005,101, quoted in P. Curry, Enchantment and Modernity, 2012, 82.)

The imagination as atransferable mental act

• “Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all things.” (Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)

• “The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.” (William Blake)

• “the imagination pervades life” (Wallace Stevens)

• “When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination.” (Denise Levertov)

SOC and the Imagination

Domains of the imagination:

• mythic thinking “mythological thought is […] the highest and most complete form of symbolic

imagination” (Kathleen Raine, Yeats the Initiate, 97.); “Thinking mythically and thinking imaginatively [are] indistinguishable.” (Ford Russell, Northrop Frye on Myth, xvi);• art (the creative act as a re-enactment of mythic cosmogony);• divination (establishing connections between patterns of nature and movements of

human energy); • science (“The imagination is more important than knowledge”, Einstein; “Science does not know its debt to imagination”, Emerson’; )• life (“the imagination pervades life” W. Stevens; “the imagination is not a state: it is human existence itself”, W. Blake)

“Every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the imagination” (C. G. Jung)

Sense of Coherence as an act of creation: “order out of chaos”

• “The first issue is how to locate the fundamental meaning of the SOC concept in the context of what is emerging as a most crucial problem throughout the sciences, the problem of “order out of chaos”.

(Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health, xvii.)

• “The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos. ”

(Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value”, in Collected Poetry and Prose, The Library of America, New York, 1977,737. )

Order out of chaos in salutogenesis and in mythic thinking

• Mythic thinking and salutogenic orientation share the premise of the primacy of disorder, chaos, heterostasis. Order and balance are achieved, created, not given.

• Mythic thinking: a natural form of the imagination, a coherence-generating mental orientation. Creating order by synchronising the processes of nature with human life through ritual. An intuitive understanding that multiplicity and constant change are governed by permanent and all-pervasive cosmic principles that are embodied in matter and psyche alike. Myth is an act of creation, a transformative experience.

• T. S. Eliot: Mythical method: “It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” (T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses: Order and Myth”, in Selected Prose, ed. F. Kermode, London, Faber & Faber, 1975, 177-8).

Salutogenesis in the classroomTraining the imagination with the help of literature and myth in order to strengthen • sense of coherence (A. Antonovsky)• self-efficacy (A. Bandura)• psychological hardiness (S. Kobasa)• mindfulness (J. Kabat-Zinn)• emotional/psychosocial resilience (Emmy Werner)• positive interpretation bias (H. Standage)• empathy, compassion, tolerance, non-judgemental attitude• altruism • the ability to compromise• the ability to balance on the creative edge of chaos • the ability to process cognitive dissonance in a healthy way, etc.

Teaching philosophy

• The aim of teaching literature is “the transfer of imaginative energy from literature to the reader.” (Northrop Frye)

• “The artist’s aim is not to be appreciated or admired but to transfer to others the imaginative habit and energy of his mind”

(Northrop Frye)• “The constructs of the imagination tell us things about

human life that we don’t get in any other way.” (Northrop Frye)

• “The imagination is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge.” (P. B. Shelley)

Cultivation of the imagination as a form of transformative learning

• Mindfulness-based, self-reflective exploration of the imaginative act• Text-centred interpretation of selected myths and literary texts (mainly self-

reflective poems) • Guided interactive interpretations• Developing meta-cognitive awareness and reflective attitude: “Poetry is the expression of the Imagination” (P. B. Shelley)• Transformative experience: shaping an initially inchoate semantic experience

into a network of dynamic semantic interconnections (sense of coherence). • Further improving SOC by extending synthetic apprehension beyond the

boundaries of individual texts: reader-established intertextuality, free semantic convergence

• Participatory reading as a ritual re-enactment of creation • Watching the mind in the act of creating interrelated semantic webs • Direct experience of the imagination followed by conceptualisation: theories of

the imagination (W. Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, J. Keats, W. Blake, R. W. Emerson, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, W. Stevens, N. Frye, D. Levertov, etc.)

Concrete experience

Group-discussion

Reflective evaluation Conceptualisation

Action plan TRANSFORMATION

Reflective/Experiential Learning as Process(combination of Kolb’s and Gibbs’ learning cycles)

Group discussion

Reflective evaluation

Conceptualisation

Action plan

Reflective/Experiential Learning as Mental Experience

Outcome

• Through a systematic cultivation of the imagination, the mind is conditioned to believe in its own power to transform itself, its perceptions, and the ways in which it constructs reality.

• The imagination enhances all domains of learning and it has a lasting positive effect on wellbeing.

The health-generating potential of the imagination

enchantment

musical thought

imagination

sense of coherence

Enchantment

• Latin incantare: cantare = to sing

• Old English galan = to sing; galdor = “song”, “spell, enchantment”

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=enchantment

Music

• vibration • tension and resolution (enactment of the

nature of life) • melody and harmony• resonance (overtones)• reflection (counterpoint)• recurrence (rhythm, melody)

Vibration Order• Ernst Chladni (1756-1827), “father of acoustics”• Hans Jenny (1904-1972): cymatics• Sound waves create patterns (coherence) in

matter and mind

http://gbotowxik.com/chladni-patterns-for-violin-plates/

Musical Thought as Sense of Coherence: Thomas Carlyle (1)

“A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be here, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep.”

Musical Thought as SOC: Thomas Carlyle (2)

“All deep things are Song. It seems somehow the very central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us, and of all things. The Greeks fabled of Sphere-Harmonies: it was the feeling they had of the inner-structure of Nature that the soul of all her voices and utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we will call musical Thought. The poet is he who thinks in that manner. At bottom, it turns still on the power of intellect; it is man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.

(Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Poet” in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1966, 83-84.)

Musical Thought as SOC: W. B. Yeats

“[W]hen sound, and colour, and form are in a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become, as it were, one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion. The same relation exists between all portions of every work of art. […] [T]he laws of art, which are the hidden laws of the world, can alone bind the imagination.”

(W. B. Yeats, “The Symbolism of Poetry”, in Essays and Introductions, Macmillan & Co Ltd., London, 1961, 157, 163.)

The imagination as SOC: S. T. Coleridge

“[T]he imagination [is] the power by which one image or feeling is made to modify many others and by a sort of fusion to force many into one. […] Various are the workings of this greatest faculty of the human mind […]. [I]t acts chiefly by producing out of many things […] a oneness.”

(S. T. Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare) “The mind of man […] represents the laws of

nature.” (S. T. Coleridge, The Stateman’s Manual)

Relational apprehension as “harmony in thoughts”: P. B. Shelley

”Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound […]. An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. […] Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts.”

(P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry)

Musical Thought as Act of Creation:F. Schlegel

“[t]he highest beauty, indeed the highest order is yet only that of chaos, namely of such a one that waits only for the touch of love to unfold as a harmonious world. […]Everything interpenetrates everything else and everywhere there is one and the same spirit, only expressed differently. ”

(F. Schlegel, “Talk on Mythology”, in Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson eds., The Rise of Modern Mythology 1680-1860, Indiana University Press, 1972, 310.)

Musical Thought as “nonaural rhyme”:Denise Levertov

• “Corresponding images are a kind of nonaural rhyme. (10)• “constellation of experiences” (7)• “intuition of an order” (7)• “The lack of a unifying intelligence, of the implicit presence of an

interpreting spirit behind the notation, is associated – and not accidentally – with a lack of music”. (91)

• “When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination.” (114)

• “Only connect.” (116)(Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World. New Directions, New York,

1973.)

Musical Thought as the rhyme-structure of the cosmos: R.W. Emerson

• “Poetry which finds its rhymes and cadences in the rhymes and iterations of Nature.”

• “[R]hyme soars and refines with the growth of the mind: […] to transfer […] rhyme to life, and to detect a melody as prompt and perfect in […] daily affairs. Omen and coincidence show the rhythmical structure of man; hence the taste for signs, sortilege, prophecy and fulfilment, anniversaries, etc. [To] apprehend real rhymes, the correspondence of parts in Nature. (16)

• “The best thoughts run into the best words: imaginative and affectionate thoughts into music and metre. […] speech refines into order and harmony.” (17)

(R. W. Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)

The imaginative act as SOC: Emerson• “Suppose there were in the ocean certain strong currents which drove a ship, caught

in them, with a force that no skill of sailing with the best wind, and no strength of oars, or sails, or steam, could make any head against, any more than against the current of Niagara. Such currents, so tyrannical, exist in thoughts, those finest and subtlest of all waters, that as soon as once thought begins, it refuses to remember whose brain it belongs to; what country, tradition or religion; and goes whirling off—swim we merrily —in a direction self-chosen, by law of thought and not by law of kitchen clock or country committee. It has its own polarity. One of these vortices or self-directions of thought is the impulse to search resemblance, affinity, identity, in all its objects, and hence our science, from its rudest to its most refined theories.”

• “All multiplicity rushes to be resolved into unity.”• ”There is one animal, one plant, one matter and one force.” • “Identity of law, perfect order in physics, perfect parallelism between the laws of

Nature and the laws of thought exist. Natural objects, if individually described and out of connection, are not yet known, since they are really parts of a symmetrical universe, like words of a sentence;”

• “Every correspondence we observe in mind and matter suggests a substance older and deeper than either of these old nobilities.”

(Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)

SOC as Mythic Thinking: Emerson

“While the student ponders this immense unity, he observes that all things in Nature, the animals, the mountain, the river, the seasons, wood, iron, stone, vapor, have a mysterious relation to his thoughts and his life; their growths, decays, quality and use so curiously resemble himself, in parts and in wholes, that he is compelled to speak by means of them. His words and his thoughts are framed by their help.”

(Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)

Musical Thought as Relational Apprehension

• “It rings a bell.”• “It strikes a chord in me.”Resonance of thoughts: • perceiving/constructing connections and

networks of interrelations• synthetic apprehension• systems thinking• creating order out of chaos

Sample exercise: Building up SOC with the help of a poem

”This is already the season of bare trees, The season without poems, without leaves. At the roots of words there is a rattling of lies. The sight begins to dance in front of the open eyes.”

(from Zsuzsa Beney, On Two Banks of a River)

Key points of discussion• Main impression created by the poem: ambivalence, paradox. • Lamenting the decay of creative power while performing a profoundly complex creative act. • Weaving and unweaving thoughts simultaneously.• Decay or growth or both? • From cognitive dissonance to the beauty of dynamic wholeness. From chaos to dance. • Human and natural cycles are synchronised. Latent sense of order, coherence. • Metaphor: tree. • “Negative capability” (Keats)• “Beauty is truth” (Keats)• “Doublethink” (G. Orwell)• “Compound vision” (Emily Dickinson)• A kaleidoscopic poem.• A self-reflective poem. The reader is drawn into the text: “the sight begins to dance ….” • The reader’s transformation is reflected in the mirror of the text as a dynamic semantic

entity. • The poem captures the act of building up sense of coherence in the acts of creation and

interpretation. • “The poem appears as a microcosm of all literature, an individual manifestation of the total

order of words” (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism)

“[I]n the world there is no such strong tower as this wherein I am confined; and it is neither of wood, nor of iron, nor of stone, but of air, without anything else; and made by enchantment so strong that it can never be demolished while the world lasts.”

(from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, quoted by Emerson in Poetry and Imagination.)

Enchantment: building musical thought (1)

“Could I revive within meHer symphony and song, To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,That with music loud and long,I would build that dome in air,That sunny dome! those caves of ice!” (from Coleridge, Kubla Khan)

Intertextual resonance: Enchantment: building musical thought (2)

“Words fade before the ineffable… And music, ever new, with tremulous stones can feel and build her godly temple in a wasted space.”

(Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, Part 2. X, trans. Willis Barnstone)

Weaving musical thoughts“I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain May modulate with murmurs of the air,And motions of the forests ad the sea,And voice of living beings, and woven hymnsOf night and day, and the deep heart of man.” “He dreamed a veiled maidSate near him, talking in low solemn tones.Her voice was like the voice of his own soulHeard in the calm of thought; its music long,Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, heldHis inmost sense suspended in its webOf many-coloured woof and shifting hues.”

(from P. B. Shelley, Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude)

I think I was enchantedWhen first a sombre Girl—I read that Foreign Lady—The Dark—felt beautiful—

And whether it was noon at night—Or only Heaven—at Noon—For very Lunacy of LightI had not power to tell—

The Bees—became as Butterflies—The Butterflies—as Swans—Approached—and spurned the narrow Grass—And just the meanest Tunes

That Nature murmured to herselfTo keep herself in Cheer—I took for Giants—practisingTitanic Opera—

Emily Dickinson, 539.

The Days—to Mighty Metres stept—The Homeliest—adornedAs if unto a Jubilee'Twere suddenly confirmed—

I could not have defined the change—Conversion of the MindLike Sanctifying in the Soul—Is witnessed—not explained—

'Twas a Divine Insanity—The Danger to be SaneShould I again experience—'Tis Antidote to turn—

To Tomes of solid Witchcraft—Magicians be asleep—But Magic—hath an ElementLike Deity—to keep—