The Carnival of Emotions at the Wonder Street Fair

Today and tomorrow, the Carnival of Emotions visits the Wonder Street Fair at the Barbican. The Street Fair is part of the Wonder Season, a Wellcome Trust event dedicated to exploring art and science on the brain. The Barbican foyer will spring to life in this free event, where visitors can learn about cutting-edge neuroscience, participate in cognitive experiments and create your own brain-inspired artwork. From cave painting to motion sensors, eye-trackers to body illusions, you can knit a neuron, test your reactions, and pit your wits against brain scientists.

The Carnival of Emotions is a historical event, run by the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions. In March, researchers performed at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Museum, using the dramatic idea of the Lost Emotions Machine (pictured below) to explore the way in which our feelings differ depending on historical period and culture. At the Street Fair, visitors have a chance to try out the machine, with the help of historians in period costume, and travel back in time to explore emotions long since obsolete.

It is often easy for us to assume that the feelings we experience today are universal and unchanging. Depression, for example, might seem to have always been experienced by human beings. However, the machine shows us that melancholy in the 1600s had many features that we would not necessarily associate with modern depression. Primarily characterised by fear, melancholy was also connected with fixed beliefs, such as the commonly described ‘Glass Man’. This was a person’s strong belief that he was made entirely of glass, leading to the associated fear that any movement might cause the body to shatter. Thus, not only might the words used to classify emotions, and the way in which particular features are associated with each other, change over time: the very experience of emotional states can be just as historically specific.

The Wonder Street Fair will be held in the foyer of the Barbican Centre from 12 – 7.30pm on the 8 and 9 April. Entry is free, and there is no need to book. The Carnival of Emotions will be open throughout.

Photograph: The Wellcome Trust / Katie Garner

Seventeenth Century Self Help: The Anatomy of Melancholy

With thanks to Dr Erin Sullivan of the Shakespeare Institute for writing this guest blog post.

The writer Samuel Johnson once said that Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy ‘was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise’. For those who have ever had a look at a copy of Burton’s tome, this might come as a bit of a surprise – a recent modern edition of the book clocks in at an impressive 1,424 pages, each one filled with dense references to classical philosophy, theological doctrine and now-obscure medical beliefs. Say what you like about the book, but few people we know would call it a page turner.

And yet, those who have persevered with the Anatomy have discovered within its pages an intellectual feast of both witty and moving reflections about the nature of happiness, the workings of the mind, the relationship between the body and soul, and the bizarre delights of being human. From the terror of loneliness to the frustrations of unemployment to the difficulty of finding love and keeping it, the Anatomy has a surprising amount of wisdom and relevance to offer to the modern reader.

Or indeed the modern audience member. This month, Stan’s Cafe, a Birmingham-based theatre company, is premiering its theatrical adaptation of the Anatomy at the Warwick Arts Centre (University of Warwick). For the first time ever (as far as we know!) audiences will have the chance to see and share Burton’s masterpiece on the stage, journeying through all three of its partitions in a single evening. Helped by a grant from the Wellcome Trust, Stan’s Cafe has teamed up with historians and doctors interested in mental illness to produce a show that remains faithful to Burton’s original text while also presenting audiences with a host of ideas of pressing concern to our modern age. The production runs from 12-15 March, with tickets available on the Warwick Arts Centre website.

If you’d like to learn more about Burton and his Anatomy, you can also listen to a range of audio podcasts produced during a ‘mini-conference’ hosted by Stan’s Cafe at the Warwick Arts Centre in November. Eight talks from the event, including introductions to Burton’s medical knowledge, the relationship between melancholy and utopian politics, and the connections between Burton’s advice and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy are available under Anatomy of Melancholy on itunes.

Photograph: Stan’s Cafe Theatre Company

Psychical Research and the UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines

A recent international conference indicated the growing profile of the UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines. The Centre aims to foster a historical approach to the psychological disciplines, as well as providing opportunities for dialogue between historians and psychologists. The conference certainly offered such an occasion, with speakers including historians, psychologists, neuroscientists and parapsychologists. As the conference organisers recognised, researchers in the field of nineteenth and twentieth-century parapsychology are often met with hostility, captured in terms such as “pseudoscience”, “irrational” and “quackery”. Yet this refusal to engage with a particular field of ideas may lead to sterility within both history and science, whereby research only confirms what we already think we know. As keynote speaker historian of science Ivor Grattan-Guinness pointed out, it is well to remain sceptical of scepticism!

Indeed, the papers indicated the diversity of the field of psychical research. Dr Richard Noakes, of the University of Exeter, highlighted the ways in which the state of experimental physics at the turn of the twentieth century predisposed scientists to take an interest in the so-called paranormal. As with psychical research, physics could be viewed as unstable, uncertain and often controversial. The results of experiments were often faint and highly open to interpretation. On the other hand, physicists were generally well-respected, and their status encouraged broader support for psychical research: indeed, in the 1920s, membership of the Society for Psychical Research reached its peak of around 12,000.

Renaud Evrard, of the University of Rouen, gave a historical talk on Pierre Janet’s experiments on mental suggestion and experimental psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a topic that fascinated him due to his own research on exceptional states. A clinical psychologist by profession, Evrard co-founded the Centre for Information, Research and Counselling on Exceptional Experiences in 2009. He worked on this topic for his doctoral dissertation, and discovered that the relationship between mystical or paranormal experiences and mental health was far more complex than is often allowed. CIRCEE offers French speakers an opportunity to discuss their experiences: perhaps for the purpose of advice, perhaps simply to become a part of future research.

The relationship between studying history and psychology was brought into sharp relief by this fascinating conference, and we hope that future events at the Centre will prove just as rich.

From: http://ahp.apps01.yorku.ca/?p

Events: Anti-Psychiatry and Psychical Research

It’s already shaping up to be a good year for events and exhibitions in the history of psychiatry and psychology. First up is a conference at UCL at the end of this month, on the topic of Psychical Research and Parapsychology in the History of Medicine and the Sciences. As we have previously mentioned in this blog, physicians at Bethlem in the late nineteenth century were optimistic about the possibilities for hypnosis and suggestion in the treatment of mental illness, and many of them experimented in this field. Daniel Hack Tuke, a long-term governor of the hospital, was particularly interested in the connections between mind and body, and how the physician might make use of these in the cure of physical (as well as mental) illness. Tuke appears to have coined the term ‘psycho-therapeutics’ to describe these effects in his 1872 Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind and Body in Health and Disease (expanded in 1884). As this conference will demonstrate, research in experimental psychology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has often been closely associated with the investigation of phenomena perceived to be supernatural (many, but not all, of which were explained in psychological terms by members of organisations devoted to the study of the paranormal). The conference costs just £90 (£60 for students) for three days. The full conference programme is available online here, and tickets can be booked in the UCL Online Shop.

Meanwhile, a series of events at Nottingham Contemporary on 12-13 February explores Anti-Psychiatry and its legacies. Those who visited the recent Turner Prize Exhibition at the Tate will already be familiar with the work of Luke Fowler, whose film exploring the life of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing was nominated for the prize. All Divided Selves combined archive footage with new material, to create an evocative portrait of the doctor whose The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1960) was influential in the anti-psychiatry movement. Another of Fowler’s films, Bogman Palmjaguar, will be screened on the second evening, following the legal battle of a trained conservationist and certified paranoid schizophrenic against this diagnosis. As with the previous evening’s film (Dora Garcia’s The Deviant Majority, From Basaglia to Brazil), the screening will be followed by a panel discussion with clinicians, philosophers and historians. The events are free, and can be booked online at the Nottingham Contemporary website.

Rhythm is a Dancer: Psychology and Physiology of Dance

As we prepare to celebrate the New Year, we might wonder about the different uses of dance in modern and historical healthcare. In November, our Friends Secretary participated in an event at the Wellcome Collection, which explored the relation of dance to mental health and illness. The evening was part of the Rhythm is a Dancer event series, in which dance performances and discussions take place side by side, offering new perspectives on the physiology and psychology of dance. Two events are yet to take place, in January 2013 – keep an eye on the website for tickets, as they book out rapidly!

November’s event explored the way in which dance has been characterised as both illness and cure in the realm of mental health. From a historical perspective, both ideas often emerged side by side: asylum balls, thought to improve the quality of life and the self-control of the individual, existed alongside widespread concern over the wild movements and fits exhibited in diagnoses like hysteria. Art historian Nancy Ireson, for example, told the audience all about the life of Jane Avril, the French Can Can dancer made famous in the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec. Jane was admitted to the famous Salpêtrière Hospital as a teenager, under the care of the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Suffering from a movement disorder, she claimed that the hospital dances contributed to her cure: an idea picked up in contemporary healthcare by Sara Houston, a dance lecturer (and former dancer), researching the use of dance in Parkinson’s Disease.

Dance was certainly an important part of Victorian asylum life, as described in Charles Dickens’ article on the Christmas Ball at St Luke’s Hospital: A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree. Yet conditions such as hysteria might also incorporate an element of performance within the symptoms exhibited by patients. Charcot claimed the disease had four distinct stages, which his star patients could produce on cue in weekly lectures. Thus, within nineteenth-century mental healthcare, dance could be represented as both curative (restoring the self-control thought to have been lost during madness) and pathological (representative of a neurological condition resulting in a failure to control impulses). Thus, throughout the event, it was made apparent that dance can function both as a form of freedom and a means of control: sometimes, perhaps, both at the same time.

Image copyright: Mike Massaro