Moons and Junes and Ferris Wheels

As a trained counselor and experienced human rights activist, my attitudes and background probably place me in the far reaches of knowledge-gathering and -processing paradigms. While I can appreciate the clarity of objectivist perspectives, I find myself lost in negotiations and collaborations, in my mind, in personal relationship, in community, in culture, in humanity. Rather than hierarchy, I see spiderwebs.
I am one of those people that attach emotion and intention to inanimate objects. I have no problem naming my potholders, or petting the computer when it misbehaves. (It just needs a little attention!) I believe in my dog’s desire, like Pinocchio, to be “a real boy,” and I know that the mountains have stood witness to extraordinary change in their eons of existence. It’s a pantheistic thought process, really – I see life in everything. Just because presence is not quantifiable doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Much of the world we live in, tangible and intangible, remains unseen and unthought by human minds and hearts. My approach begins with this fact: I believe in fairytales.
Of course, fairytales and research don’t often go hand-in-hand. The stereotypical social scientist, I would guess, wants the facts, and nothing but the facts. Trust only goes to numerical data and statistical processing, not internal emotion and artistic expression. Do they read their children fantasy stories at bedtime? I grew up in a household full of art, art-making, music and instruments. My parents worked in the arts at a professional theatre during my early childhood, and I spent my afternoons trying on hats in the costume shop, or collecting sequins and feathers off the floor of the mainstage. I watched the actors in rehearsal and witnessed the creation of alternate realities -- constructed, painted, and upholstered right there in the scene shop.
Along with the arts, I also developed activist tendencies – joining Amnesty International at an early age, and becoming a national volunteer leader by my college years. I learned that social empowerment often rises from the bottom up – it is not a stranger’s gift to give. And people generally don’t end up poor and oppressed of their own accord. They are beaten down by a system only they have the perspective to understand. The social ills we face today – poverty, hunger, lack of health care, child abuse, prejudice, illiteracy, mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse – all of these feed into the cycle of violence that keeps us from achieving balance. How might we combat this cycle and these social problems without talking to those it affects most?
All of this background, I think, puts me, according to Burrell and Morgan, in the radical humanist camp. I could see myself straying into the interpretive or radical structuralist quadrants occasionally, though both might be a stretch. I’ve just never been one to go with the status quo. However, I do think that regulation, solidarity, and consensus could sometimes be appropriate goals. Similarly, objectivist research working towards radical change might go hand-in-hand with the subjectivist work. The only area I would feel completely out of place in is probably the functionalist category. To me, hard facts do not always reveal the truth.
The field of counseling, and particularly the incorporation of arts into the therapeutic process, is focused on internal worlds, soul-searching, relationship exploration, and sometimes just pure presence. Both counseling and the arts involve emotional, intellectual, and spiritual journeys that end in an intuitive conclusion of sorts. We discover, experience, and expand our awareness of the world.
In expressive arts therapy, and in many counseling approaches, the emphasis is placed on the process, rather than the product. We trust that the therapeutic process will effect positive, though not specific results. Instead of intending to change a behavior or cognition, or to represent a particular meaning with our expression, we allow deep emotion to surface, and to tell us what it is that we need to know. The meaning is constructed between the artist and the art itself. Having a dialogue with the art is even a therapeutic technique! This seems to be squarely opposite of the positivist perspective. There are no numbers to crunch, no statistical analysis, validity scores, ratios or percentages. It is not a straightforward approach to problem-solving, nor is it in keeping with current social practices of structure and control. But it relates back to our most ancient paradigms, of the times when life was still interdisciplinary – before there was a need for the word interdisciplinary. It brings back the sense of interrelatedness that we have forgotten. We did not always have science and statistics and objectivity. Once upon a time….all the isms were integrated and lived together in harmony.
While I certainly recognize the need for objectivist research in such a subjective and constructionist field, it seems that many of us who are drawn to this field are also drawn to the subjectivist and constructionist approaches. I am more intrigued by Jung’s acausal relationships than by any cause-and-effect, correlational data. Replicability may not always be an option – you just have to be there at a synchronistic moment. Are intuition and objectivism mutually exclusive? How will I conduct quality (and qualitative) research that earns the respect of the academic world without compromising my own relationships with knowledge and meaning? I can’t be the only one who believes in fairytales…

“Seeing with a reverential eye, the painter’s eye, can guide our planet into an innovative and compassionate future.” -- M.C. Richards