Why make art while doing Focused Listening?
The art produced by a person recovering from schizophrenia not only provides an occupation to while away the listening time. It promotes co-ordination between the ears, the eyes, and the hands. It provides a timeline of the person’s progress. And it can be a diagnostic tool to help us understand how slow speeds of cerebral integration affect the eyes and thought processes, as well as providing a gauge for the increasing tonic state of the stapedius muscle.
Daniel was acutely schizophrenic in January of 2008 and too manic to sit still. He began focused listening music therapy in February. By March he was able to produce graphic expressions of his interior world.By April he could color the geometric patterns called “mandalas.” He had been asked to color them symmetrically. Before he began a Focused Listening session on April 2, he made the coloring on the left. He began listening and made the coloring in the middle. After 20 minutes of listening to Bach violin music he made the coloring on the right, which was not finished when his session ended but shows a greatly improved ear-eye-hand co-ordination. His ear’s ability to co-ordinate what he sees and how his right hand manipulates his markers is much more controlled while high-frequency music is moving through his right ear. At this stage, his ear cannot sustain that level of dominance unless music is stimulating the stapedius muscle. Later, when the stapedius muscle has become strong enough to respond to ambient sound without the aid of the headphones, Daniel’s coloring is as controlled at the beginning of the Focused Listening session as it was at the end of this session.
In February of 2008, Daniel’s figure drawing was identical to the figures typically drawn by a four-year-old child, the drawing on the left. By April, Daniel would spend many hours each day trying to sort out the confusion thrust upon his left-brain by his right-brained intervals of consciousness. As in the middle drawing, he used numbers, dividing lines, colors used as codes, and primitive people shapes to create cosmic, geographic, and personal order in his chaotic consciousness. By October 31, the drawing on the right, he could draw recognizable human figures and objects, which in this case illustrate his recently integrated self-concept not yet separated from the “Hell” of his addictions.
As Daniel’s integration speeds approached normal in October 2008, his drawings became realistic and “psychologically significant.” His drawing of the the “box with Chris in it upside down birthday cake” suggests that his brain was not able to complete the inversion of the retinal image that normally occurs. Also, the cake for his brother contains his brother. Daniel’s brain is coming close to integrating the spatial organization in the right-brain that enables conceptual organization by the left-brain. The circular drawings he made early in his illness have become entirely abstract near the end of his illness and resemble Christmas tree ornaments and candies.
Daniel’s body of work during 2008 demonstrated increasing cerebral integration: from the level of a four-year-old, through the maturation stages of childhood, to a mature teen’s self-concept, cosmology, and dexterity with art materials. As other parents share their observations of their recovering schizophrenic children with me, I see parallels with Daniel’s work in their art, in their dreams, and in their social relationships.
