viz.

Image Credit: Prometheus (2012)

Hollywood, you are going about action movies all wrong, then, because you have taken for granted what is the opposite of the actual case. You believe we viewers take pleasure from grandiosity of visual effect, but in fact your viewers are suffering from a spiritual condition of nullity brought on by over-exposure to the visually incomprehensible. How to make us feel anything: that is your challenge! Two recent treatments of the action movie hero provide a neat case in point and will serve for a conclusion to these remarks on the importance of psychological realism to compelling action cinema.

Lucas Cranach's Melancholia Image Credit: Art Tattler

Last week, I examined how painters of the nineteenth century revised the image of Phillipe Pinel, the famous mental health physician, to contribute to an evolving national mythology and edify the physician's archetypal (as well as vocational) role in fostering mental health. While the representation (as well as the specific job description) of the mental health practitioner has changed drastically over the past five centuries, one cannot help but notice that there are striking continuities to be found in representations of people said to be afflicted with maladies of the mind. Today, we will take a look at some remarkable consistencies to be found linking 16th and 21st century visual representations of one of Western society's most frequently visualized maladies: melancholia.  

According to this New York Times article, office décor and location can be very important if you are a psychologist.

Apparently everything, including furniture, wall hangings, books, and office location, both reflects the philosophical underpinnings of a psychologist’s practices and can impact a patient’s response to those practices. A recent article in the journal Psychoanalytic Psychology argued that complications in the therapist/patient relationship may be caused by holding therapy sessions in the therapists’ homes, where too much information about the therapist’s private life may be brought into the therapy session via the more personal office environment. However, other psychologists argue that there’s also a danger in creating too clinical of a setting--one that’s entirely devoid of all personal effects.

The article discusses some very interesting examples of this phenomenon: one very strictly Freudian therapist placed nude watercolors of herself in her waiting room, another offered patients a place to sit on a dirty couch with cheap stuffed animals on it, and a child psychologist placed a book of Robert Mapplethorpe nudes on the coffee table of the waiting room.

If your style choices are statements about who you are, then it only makes sense that in a field where identification between patient and therapist are critical personal style could have some pretty serious repercussions.