PSYCHOSOCIAL REHABILITATION

"Creativity and Solitude"

By Giovanni Curcio * and Enrico Conti **

Address to the Convention "Festa della Creatività"

September 25, 26, 27, 2002

Melfi (Italy)

* Psychologist, supervisor of Coo.S.S.E.L Cooperative.

** Neuro - psychiatrist, Coo.S.S.E.L. Cooperative.

If we were able to individuate social cultural factors in favour, as well as those inhibitory, perhaps we would be capable of suggesting those changes that could promote creativity and foster a process that acts on the individual (Arieti). A righteous society based on righteous laws surely would facilitate and sustain an environment that favours creativity. On the other hand, it is also possible that a society is unable to spontaneously sustain the social, cultural and practical conditions that favour the development of creativity. Therefore, the social, intellectual, emotional and cultural processes, at times, need a hand to reach important objectives. Gray (1966), sustains that creativity cannot develop without support from society. It would be difficult to imagine, says Arieti, people writing symphonies or poetry in the face of grave danger or in need of food or seriously ill.

The event that involves the ex-Psychiatric Hospital of the city of Reggio Calabria, closed in 1990, has made clear, how much "non creativity" can be sustained at long by a society incapable of producing voluntarily changes. Nevertheless, from that closing, from that deep solitude and laceration personified by the ex-psychiatric hospital, was born an availability of cultural means prompt to rise above and promote those stimuli in favour of a creativogenic culture.

In this scenario, the Social Cooperative Coo.S.S.E.L. was founded many years before the closing, precisely in 1985, through the efforts of a group of professionals that firmly believe in the relationship between a creativogenic culture and the person that becomes creative. As workers of the cooperative, we believe in the concept of reciprocal feedback, where culture and the individual are involved in a dynamic and circular mechanism in support of the creativity of each single individual and his/her environment, and, whereby the system encourages and nurtures a process of continuous interchange and complex growth.

Reintegrating in society people with long standing history of hospitalization in psychiatric wards is certainly a very difficult path to follow and requires a great deal of time to realize. The pathways to change begin, according to our belief, through psychosocial rehabilitation, without which every attempt to solicit or to stimulate a process of creative rehabilitation surely would conclude with an in success.

To support this complex project, the Coo.S.S.E.L. Cooperative has realized through careful drafting and planning some interventions that involve management of innovating services directed to needy social users; and, which are in our territory, features, typically Mediterranean in expression.

The theoretical approach of the rehabilitation model follows a systems and relations orientation. Therefore, the creative potential of each single individual is solicited through an acting on in equal measure on the relationships, initiate adequate emotional distances, influence not only the behaviour of the patient but also that of others in his/her regard. Intervention is not only circumscribed to the patient but also regards his/her entire environment and life space and penetrates the entire rehabilitation itinerary. In this manner, a new light is shed on the interpersonal and relational dynamics through dual, group and community relationships which permits more significant engravement into rigid role transactions.

In this way, according to our belief, an environment favourable to creativity is supported, in which being content and happy with ones own environment, but above all, with one self, will tend to solicit the human spirit and encourage a sense of security towards the highest search of personal, social and emotional invention and expression.

In this last year, stimulated by a strong need to discover new and exciting forms of communication that can sustain and support our clinical and therapeutic work, the Coo.S.S.E.L. Cooperative with increasing frequency is utilizing expressive activities (painting, musical and theatrical exhibitions, photography, etc.) within its psychosocial rehabilitation program. We are obliged however to clarify that such activities are utilized fundamentally as instruments through which pass the emotional and relational involvement of the patients, and whereby, nonetheless, definite and precise rehabilitation objectives are established to better the patients globally in their climb towards social, emotional and personal growth.

References:

Arieti S.: "The loss of reality", Psychoanalytic and the Psychoanalytic Review, 48: 3-24, 1961.

Arieti S.: "Creativity and its Cultivation: Relation to Psychopathology and Mental Health", In Arieti Silvano American Handbook of Psychiatry, Vol. 3, pp. 722-724,  Basic Books, New York, 1966.

Gray C. E.: "A Measurement of Creativity" in Western Civilization, American Anthropologist, 68, 1384-1417, 1966.