Guest Lecture, Friday noon
Expressive and therapeutic writing
A reflective way of personal development
Led by: Juhani Ihanus (Finland)
Different levels of writing have been depicted, for example ‘‘literary’’ (product orientation), ‘‘writerly’’ (process orientation) and ‘‘therapeutic’’ (health orientation). These levels of writing have sometimes been set into a cultural value hierarchy, the first of them being often at the top. However, when seen as non-hierarchical and supplementary, they together form the innovative, expressive and explorative interlocutory field of writing.
The reflective and transformative developmental process of expressive and therapeutic writing is presented in this speech. Expressive and therapeutic writing is modeled as a way of co-constructing, as well as demonstrating and sharing, knowledge and meaning, and therefore as central to both the learning process and the therapeutic process. A playful approach to knowledge and writing posits also the “facts” of science as possessing rhetoric and metaphors. Expressive and therapeutic writing can be even added to the student-centered learning while it encourages students to be attentive to their academic writing through discussion, peer work and individual and reciprocal reflection.
For example, autobiographical writing may be a prelude to interactive therapeutic sharing of one’s personal record of experiences. Journal therapy uses expressive and reflective writing to facilitate the identification of areas of unexpressed emotions and thoughts, and the recognition and expression of emotions and thoughts in a ‘‘holding framework’’. Writing is an intense solitary-social and affective-cognitive process. It makes possible to learn from evaluations attached to emotions (pleasure/displeasure) and to cognitions (beliefs about truth and falseness, right and wrong).
Language and mind/brain are not predetermined; they do not constitute a ready-made constellation in humans but go through multifaceted developments in different interactions and environmental contexts. Stories – like reveries, dreams and poetic expressions – form the potential space, the playful developmental state of mind, the trial ground where we probe our strategies, resources, alternatives, challenges, dangers, hopes and fears, gains and losses, likes and dislikes. We can attend to our well-being by reminding ourselves of positive values, by reordering dysfunctional priorities and above all by infusing our daily environments with poetic enjoyment. This is not a call for any nostalgic past but perhaps for dialogical and polylogical attunement to expanding cultural therapy and to combining expressive arts and health/well-being – so that everybody is given free space to speak the unspeakable, and to approach the vistas of surprise and wonder.
Juhani Ihanus, PhD, is currently Adjunct Professor of Cultural Psychology (at the University of Helsinki), of Art Education and Art Psychology (at Aalto University) and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the Open University of the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is a chief of several continuing education training programs in biblio-poetry therapy since 1989. He is a founder, the first president and an honorary member of the Finnish Association for Biblio-Poetry Therapy, the first such organization in Europe.He is a member of the Editorial Board of The Arts in Psychotherapy,Journal of Poetry Therapy, Journal of Psychohistory and Scriptum: Creative Writing Studies, a Co-Editor-in-Chief of Psykoterapia, and a reviewer of several journals. Ihanus is an author for over 430 publications (in Finnish, English, Swedish and German), including refereed articles in scientific journals, refereed book articles, 12 books, 11 edited books, as well as essays, reviews, popular articles and schoolbooks. Besides scientific publications,Ihanus has written three books of poetry (one of them in English called On the Road to Narva the Kabbalist, 2013), two books of aphorisms (the other in English, called On the Edge, 2015), a book of short prose, literary essays, critiques and separate poems published in different forums. He is also a member of the transartistic and -disciplinary Sjählö 9 group and has taken part in its exhibitions and activities.