The Salutogenic Imagination
Dr. Anita Klujber
University of Essex
Main argument:
The imagination has a salutogenic
(health-promoting) potential because it
strengthens sense of coherence, a
mental function responsible for
promoting well-being and health.
The imagination as
relational apprehension
• “unifying intelligence”
(Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World)
• “esemplastic power”
(S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria)
• “the principle of synthesis”
(P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry)
Sense of Coherence and Salutogenesis
Aaron Antonovsky
(1923-1994)
Health, Stress and Coping (1979);
Unravelling the Mystery of Health:
How People Manage Stress and Stay Well (1987)
https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQN3V-kh1uvB4brJAHa6YrkBmbbrWi1NewpDvPAmNmN5Z5mlXOvgQ
Salutogenesis:
The Origin of Health
• Salus (Latin):
1. wellbeing, welfare, health,
2. safety, security
3. salvation
4. salutation, greeting
5. The Roman goddess of health and prosperity
(Greek goddess Hygieia)
• Genesis (Greek): origin, birth
Salus:
Roman Goddess of Health, Welfare, and Prosperity
http://www.forumancientcoins.com/moonmoth/salus_pics/faustina_jr_022rf.jpg
Salutogenesis vs. Pathogenesis
Salutogenesis:
origin of health
Pathogenesis:
origin of disease
• How to maintain and
improve health?
• Heterostasis is the
fundamental condition of
life.
• Stressors are normal and
inevitable.
• We have to develop active
adaptive responses.
• Negative entropy
•
•
•
•
What causes disease?
How to cure disease?
Homeostasis is fundamental.
Stressors are pathogenic; they
disturb homeostasis
Generalized Resistance Resources
Internal
• self-confidence
• optimism
• self-esteem
• belief in a universal
cohering principle(God,
etc.) or its internalsied form
External
• social connectedness
• stable financial situation
• education
• health care organisations
Sense of Coherence
Sense of Coherence (SOC)
“a global orientation that expresses the extent to
which one has a pervasive, enduring though
dynamic feeling of confidence that
(1) the stimuli deriving from one’s internal and
external environments in the course of living are
structured, predictable and explicable;
(2) the resources are available to meet the
demands posed by the stimuli; and
(3) these demands are challenges worthy of
investment and engagement.”
(Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health, 1987, 19)
Components of SOC:
(1) Comprehensibility: the ability to make
sense of experiences
(2) Manageability: confidence in one’s
ability to cope
(3) Meaningfulness: trusting the mind that
it can construct meaning and see purpose
in life.
(Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health, 16-19)
Sense of Coherence
• Degrees of SOC: weak, intermediate, strong.
• Strong SOC: the ability to meet the challenges
of life by resolving tension, interpreting
cognitive dissonance creatively, without
generating health-damaging stress, etc.
• Key words: structure, order, adaptability,
flexibility, resilience, restorability of balance.
• How can SOC be strengthened?
• Is there a critical period for increasing SOC?
“If I have been motivated by one purpose to
write this volume, it is […] to spark ideas in
the minds of those colleagues who share
with me the enchantment with the mystery
of health”.
(Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health, 1987, xvii)
“When one searches for effective adaptation
of the organism, one can move beyond postCartesian dualism and look to imagination,
love, play, meaning, will, and social
structures that foster them. Or, as I would
prefer to put it, to theories of successful
coping.”
(Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health, 1987, 9.)
• How can the imagination be utilised to boost
SOC?
• Is there a critical period for enhancing SOC
with the help of the imagination?
• Why can the imagination function as a
salutogenic mental act?
A salutogenic learning cycle
the imagination
salutogenesis
sense of coherence
Imaginative thinking: synthetic apprehension
• “The imagination is […] the principle of synthesis.”
(P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry)
• “Only connect”; “unifying intelligence”
(Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World)
• “the impulse to search resemblance, affinity, identity”
(Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)
• “The poet knows the missing link by the joy it gives.”
(Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)
• Poetry [is] musical Thought […]. “A musical thought is one spoken by a
mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected
the inmost mystery of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the
inward harmony of coherence which is its soul. [enchantment]
(Thomas Carlyle, The Hero as Poet)
Salutogenesis
• “Salus” (Latin):
The polysemy of the word itself implies that
well-being converges with the act of making a
connection:
Salus
well-being, health
greeting, salutation=establishing a connection
“The imagination is not a talent
of some men but is the health
of every men.”
(R. W. Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)
Cf. conference motto:
“Enchantment is as necessary for the
health and complete functioning of the
Human as is sunlight for physical life”
(Tolkien, Smith of Wootton Major, 2005,101, quoted in
P. Curry, Enchantment and Modernity, 2012, 82.)
The imagination as a
transferable mental act
• “Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing
we learn, we are doing and learning all
things.” (Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)
• “The imagination is not a state: it is the
human existence itself.” (William Blake)
• “the imagination pervades life” (Wallace
Stevens)
• “When words penetrate deep into us they
change the chemistry of the soul, of the
imagination.” (Denise Levertov)
SOC and the Imagination
Domains of the imagination:
• mythic thinking
“mythological thought is […] the highest and most complete form of symbolic
imagination” (Kathleen Raine, Yeats the Initiate, 97.);
“Thinking mythically and thinking imaginatively [are] indistinguishable.”
(Ford Russell, Northrop Frye on Myth, xvi);
• art (the creative act as a re-enactment of mythic cosmogony);
• divination (establishing connections between patterns of nature and
movements of human energy);
• science (“The imagination is more important than knowledge”, Einstein;
“Science does not know its debt to imagination”, Emerson’; )
• life (“the imagination pervades life” W. Stevens;
“the imagination is not a state: it is human existence itself”, W. Blake)
“Every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the
imagination” (C. G. Jung)
Sense of Coherence as an act of creation:
“order out of chaos”
• “The first issue is how to locate the fundamental meaning of
the SOC concept in the context of what is emerging as a most
crucial problem throughout the sciences, the problem of
“order out of chaos”.
(Antonovsky, Unraveling the Mystery of Health, xvii.)
• “The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the
normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos. ”
(Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value”, in
Collected Poetry and Prose, The Library of
America, New York, 1977,737. )
Order out of chaos
in salutogenesis and in mythic thinking
• Mythic thinking and salutogenic orientation share the premise of
the primacy of disorder, chaos, heterostasis. Order and balance
are achieved, created, not given.
• Mythic thinking: a natural form of the imagination, a coherencegenerating mental orientation. Creating order by synchronising
the processes of nature with human life through ritual. An intuitive
understanding that multiplicity and constant change are governed
by permanent and all-pervasive cosmic principles that are
embodied in matter and psyche alike. Myth is an act of creation, a
transformative experience.
• T. S. Eliot: Mythical method: “It is simply a way of controlling, of
ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”
(T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses: Order and Myth”, in Selected Prose, ed. F.
Kermode, London, Faber & Faber, 1975, 177-8).
Salutogenesis in the classroom
Training the imagination
with the help of literature and myth
in order to strengthen
• sense of coherence (A. Antonovsky)
• self-efficacy (A. Bandura)
• psychological hardiness (S. Kobasa)
• mindfulness (J. Kabat-Zinn)
• emotional/psychosocial resilience (Emmy Werner)
• positive interpretation bias (H. Standage)
• empathy, compassion, tolerance, non-judgemental attitude
• altruism
• the ability to compromise
• the ability to balance on the creative edge of chaos
• the ability to process cognitive dissonance in a healthy way,
etc.
Teaching philosophy
• The aim of teaching literature is “the transfer of
imaginative energy from literature to the reader.”
(Northrop Frye)
• “The artist’s aim is not to be appreciated or
admired but to transfer to others the imaginative
habit and energy of his mind”
(Northrop Frye)
• “The constructs of the imagination tell us things
about human life that we don’t get in any other
way.” (Northrop Frye)
• “The imagination is at once the centre and
circumference of knowledge.” (P. B. Shelley)
Cultivation of the imagination as
a form of transformative learning
• Mindfulness-based, self-reflective exploration of the imaginative act
• Text-centred interpretation of selected myths and literary texts (mainly selfreflective poems)
• Guided interactive interpretations
• Developing meta-cognitive awareness and reflective attitude:
“Poetry is the expression of the Imagination” (P. B. Shelley)
• Transformative experience: shaping an initially inchoate semantic experience
into a network of dynamic semantic interconnections (sense of coherence).
• Further improving SOC by extending synthetic apprehension beyond the
boundaries of individual texts: reader-established intertextuality, free semantic
convergence
• Participatory reading as a ritual re-enactment of creation
• Watching the mind in the act of creating interrelated semantic webs
• Direct experience of the imagination followed by conceptualisation: theories of
the imagination (W. Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, P. B. Shelley, J. Keats, W. Blake,
R. W. Emerson, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, W. Stevens, N. Frye, D. Levertov, etc.)
Reflective/Experiential Learning as Process
(combination of Kolb’s and Gibbs’ learning cycles)
Concrete experience
Action plan
Conceptualisation
Group-discussion
TRANSFORMATION
Reflective evaluation
Reflective/Experiential Learning as Mental Experience
Action plan
Conceptualisation
Reflective evaluation
Group discussion
Outcome
• Through a systematic cultivation of the
imagination, the mind is conditioned to
believe in its own power to transform itself, its
perceptions, and the ways in which it
constructs reality.
• The imagination enhances all domains of
learning and it has a lasting positive effect on
wellbeing.
The health-generating potential of the
imagination
sense of coherence
imagination
musical thought
enchantment
Enchantment
• Latin incantare: cantare = to sing
• Old English galan = to sing;
galdor = “song”, “spell, enchantment”
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=enchantment
Music
• vibration
• tension and resolution (enactment of the
nature of life)
• melody and harmony
• resonance (overtones)
• reflection (counterpoint)
• recurrence (rhythm, melody)
Vibration
Order
• Ernst Chladni (1756-1827), “father of acoustics”
• Hans Jenny (1904-1972): cymatics
• Sound waves create patterns (coherence) in
matter and mind
http://gbotowxik.com/chladni-patterns-for-violin-plates/
Musical Thought as Sense of Coherence:
Thomas Carlyle (1)
“A musical thought is one spoken by a mind
that has penetrated into the inmost heart of
the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it,
namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the
inward harmony of coherence which is its
soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be
here, here in this world. All inmost things, we
may say, are melodious; naturally utter
themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes
deep.”
Musical Thought as SOC:
Thomas Carlyle (2)
“All deep things
are Song. It seems somehow the very
central essence of us, Song; as if all the rest were but
wrappages and hulls! The primal element of us; of us,
and of all things. The Greeks fabled of SphereHarmonies: it was the feeling they had of the innerstructure of Nature that the soul of all her voices and
utterances was perfect music. Poetry, therefore, we
will call musical Thought. The poet is he who thinks in
that manner. At bottom, it turns still on the power of
intellect; it is man's sincerity and depth of vision that
makes him Poet. See deep enough, and you see
musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere
music, if you can only reach it.
(Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Poet” in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and
the Heroic in History. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press,
1966, 83-84.)
Musical Thought as SOC: W. B. Yeats
“[W]hen sound, and colour, and form are in a
musical relation, a beautiful relation to one
another, they become, as it were, one sound, one
colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is
made out of their distinct evocations and yet is
one emotion. The same relation exists between
all portions of every work of art. […] [T]he laws of
art, which are the hidden laws of the world, can
alone bind the imagination.”
(W. B. Yeats, “The Symbolism of Poetry”, in Essays
and Introductions, Macmillan & Co Ltd., London,
1961, 157, 163.)
The imagination as SOC:
S. T. Coleridge
“[T]he imagination [is] the power by which one
image or feeling is made to modify many others
and by a sort of fusion to force many into one.
[…] Various are the workings of this greatest
faculty of the human mind […]. [I]t acts chiefly by
producing out of many things […] a oneness.”
(S. T. Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare)
“The mind of man […] represents the laws of
nature.”
(S. T. Coleridge, The Stateman’s Manual)
Relational apprehension as “harmony in thoughts”:
P. B. Shelley
”Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each
other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of
the order of those relations has always been found connected with
a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the
language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform and
harmonious recurrence of sound […]. An observation of the
regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in the language of
poetical minds, together with its relation to music, produced
metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony and
language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should
accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the
harmony, which is its spirit, be observed. […] Plato was essentially
a poet—the truth and splendor of his imagery, and the melody of
his language, are the most intense that it is possible to conceive.
He rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms,
because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts.”
(P. B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry)
Musical Thought as Act of Creation:
F. Schlegel
“[t]he highest beauty, indeed the highest order
is yet only that of chaos, namely of such a one
that waits only for the touch of love to unfold
as a harmonious world. […]Everything
interpenetrates everything else and
everywhere there is one and the same spirit,
only expressed differently. ”
(F. Schlegel, “Talk on Mythology”, in Burton Feldman and
Robert D. Richardson eds., The Rise of Modern Mythology 16801860, Indiana University Press, 1972, 310.)
Musical Thought as “nonaural rhyme”:
Denise Levertov
•
•
•
•
“Corresponding images are a kind of nonaural rhyme. (10)
“constellation of experiences” (7)
“intuition of an order” (7)
“The lack of a unifying intelligence, of the implicit presence
of an interpreting spirit behind the notation, is associated –
and not accidentally – with a lack of music”. (91)
• “When words penetrate deep into us they change the
chemistry of the soul, of the imagination.” (114)
• “Only connect.” (116)
(Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World. New Directions, New
York, 1973.)
Musical Thought as the rhyme-structure
of the cosmos: R.W. Emerson
• “Poetry which finds its rhymes and cadences in the rhymes
and iterations of Nature.”
• “[R]hyme soars and refines with the growth of the mind:
[…] to transfer […] rhyme to life, and to detect a melody as
prompt and perfect in […] daily affairs. Omen and
coincidence show the rhythmical structure of man; hence
the taste for signs, sortilege, prophecy and fulfilment,
anniversaries, etc. [To] apprehend real rhymes, the
correspondence of parts in Nature. (16)
• “The best thoughts run into the best words: imaginative
and affectionate thoughts into music and metre. […] speech
refines into order and harmony.” (17)
(R. W. Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)
The imaginative act as SOC: Emerson
• “Suppose there were in the ocean certain strong currents which drove a ship,
caught in them, with a force that no skill of sailing with the best wind, and no
strength of oars, or sails, or steam, could make any head against, any more than
against the current of Niagara. Such currents, so tyrannical, exist in thoughts,
those finest and subtlest of all waters, that as soon as once thought begins, it
refuses to remember whose brain it belongs to; what country, tradition or
religion; and goes whirling off—swim we merrily —in a direction self-chosen,
by law of thought and not by law of kitchen clock or country committee. It has
its own polarity. One of these vortices or self-directions of thought is the
impulse to search resemblance, affinity, identity, in all its objects, and hence
our science, from its rudest to its most refined theories.”
• “All multiplicity rushes to be resolved into unity.”
• ”There is one animal, one plant, one matter and one force.”
• “Identity of law, perfect order in physics, perfect parallelism between the laws
of Nature and the laws of thought exist. Natural objects, if individually
described and out of connection, are not yet known, since they are really parts
of a symmetrical universe, like words of a sentence;”
• “Every correspondence we observe in mind and matter suggests a substance
older and deeper than either of these old nobilities.”
(Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)
SOC as Mythic Thinking: Emerson
“While the student ponders this immense
unity, he observes that all things in Nature,
the animals, the mountain, the river, the
seasons, wood, iron, stone, vapor, have a
mysterious relation to his thoughts and his
life; their growths, decays, quality and use so
curiously resemble himself, in parts and in
wholes, that he is compelled to speak by
means of them. His words and his thoughts
are framed by their help.”
(Emerson, Poetry and Imagination)
Musical Thought as Relational Apprehension
• “It rings a bell.”
• “It strikes a chord in me.”
Resonance of thoughts:
• perceiving/constructing connections and
networks of interrelations
• synthetic apprehension
• systems thinking
• creating order out of chaos
Sample exercise: Building up SOC
with the help of a poem
”This is already the season of bare trees,
The season without poems, without leaves.
At the roots of words there is a rattling of lies.
The sight begins to dance in front of the open eyes.”
(from Zsuzsa Beney, On Two Banks of a River)
Key points of discussion
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Main impression created by the poem: ambivalence, paradox.
Lamenting the decay of creative power while performing a profoundly complex creative
act.
Weaving and unweaving thoughts simultaneously.
Decay or growth or both?
From cognitive dissonance to the beauty of dynamic wholeness. From chaos to dance.
Human and natural cycles are synchronised. Latent sense of order, coherence.
Metaphor: tree.
“Negative capability” (Keats)
“Beauty is truth” (Keats)
“Doublethink” (G. Orwell)
“Compound vision” (Emily Dickinson)
A kaleidoscopic poem.
A self-reflective poem. The reader is drawn into the text: “the sight begins to dance ….”
The reader’s transformation is reflected in the mirror of the text as a dynamic semantic
entity.
The poem captures the act of building up sense of coherence in the acts of creation and
interpretation.
“The poem appears as a microcosm of all literature, an individual manifestation of the
total order of words” (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism)
“[I]n the world there is no such strong tower as
this wherein I am confined; and it is neither of
wood, nor of iron, nor of stone, but of air,
without anything else; and made by
enchantment so strong that it can never be
demolished while the world lasts.”
(from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur,
quoted by Emerson in Poetry and Imagination.)
Enchantment:
building musical thought (1)
“Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!”
(from Coleridge, Kubla Khan)
Intertextual resonance:
Enchantment: building musical thought (2)
“Words fade before the ineffable…
And music, ever new, with tremulous stones
can feel
and build her godly temple in a wasted space.”
(Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, Part 2. X, trans.
Willis Barnstone)
Weaving musical thoughts
“I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests ad the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.”
“He dreamed a veiled maid
Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought; its music long,
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held
His inmost sense suspended in its web
Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.”
(from P. B. Shelley, Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude)
Emily Dickinson, 539.
I think I was enchanted
When first a sombre Girl—
I read that Foreign Lady—
The Dark—felt beautiful—
The Days—to Mighty Metres stept—
The Homeliest—adorned
As if unto a Jubilee
'Twere suddenly confirmed—
And whether it was noon at night—
Or only Heaven—at Noon—
For very Lunacy of Light
I had not power to tell—
I could not have defined the change—
Conversion of the Mind
Like Sanctifying in the Soul—
Is witnessed—not explained—
The Bees—became as Butterflies—
The Butterflies—as Swans—
Approached—and spurned the narrow Grass—
And just the meanest Tunes
'Twas a Divine Insanity—
The Danger to be Sane
Should I again experience—
'Tis Antidote to turn—
That Nature murmured to herself
To keep herself in Cheer—
I took for Giants—practising
Titanic Opera—
To Tomes of solid Witchcraft—
Magicians be asleep—
But Magic—hath an Element
Like Deity—to keep—