Mémoire de l'Avenir

Which links art has with the mind and spirit?

From the beginning of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis never seizes to question the matter: Otto Rank, a precursor of the existential psychotherapy, pose the question of the relationship between art and the soul.

How to analyze the creative process?

The unconscious of an artist works at once out of his/her inspiration, imagination, perception and senses, feelings, emotions, and as well his/her intuition, that he/she than interprets these into or through their work. In return, the work of arts will interrogate us, evoking reactions, aesthetically or emotionally.

Antonio Damasio has well identified the role of emotions and sensitivity in the construction of logical thinking. In a psychopathological perspective, art attributed to mentally sick people, poses the question about the relationship often mentioned between the genius-ness and madness.

More recently, cognitive science, particularly neuroscience, enabled a new comprehension of the arts. It was possible to demonstrate that the cognitive strategies are fully dependent on the representations of one’s perceptions of reality. The perceptions of self and of the environment depend on knowledge and on abilities. From the 60, by linking the field of art to that of the neuroscience, scientists speak of a "neuro-aesthetics", of " neuro-history of the art " or even of a "neuro-aesthetics ". Studies have highlighted the existence of mirrors-neurons (sometimes named empathy-neurons) and of the plasticity of the brain - or Synaptic .

Neuroscience has helped to bring together very different fields of research, ranging from biology to philosophy, in a trans-disciplinary way.

These discoveries have also destabilized educational conceptions and the process of learning. Not In any way that the process of learning can be passive and or imposed: the subject should be fully an actor, a creator and a free experimenter. Stanislas Dehaene (College de France) proved that a brain of a toddler is already organized in a very complex way. Here one must make an association with the concept of the Reminiscence: individual, collective and that of our species, whether it is real or imaginary.

Finally, creative practice is not reserved only to artists. Before all, creativity is the potentiality of humankind that is fundamentally an expressive being. Definitely, all creative activity has an enigmatic dimension that will always escape our psychological, scientific or artistic comprehensions. Even though it remains inexplicable, art continues to interrogate us, just as that "what is the most beautiful in a life of an artist, is what he cannot achieve. »(Otto Rank)

Aurore Nerrinck

In charge of Research and mediation at Mémoire de l'Avenir

DISCUSSION >> ART AND MIND

SATURDAY 8th OF OCTOBER AT 4:30pm

Speakers:

Evan Bellin - Artist - psychiatrist psychoanalyst

Marc Williams Debono - Art & Science department manager

for Île-De-France region, neuroscience researcher, poet

and essayist

André Jacques Martin - Psychoanalyst

Luc Foubert - Neuroscience researcher - CNRS

In the continuity of the exhibition of Evan Bellin