Sacred Disorder | Cliff Bostock's blog – 'Finally, I came to regard as sacred the disorder of my mind' (Rimbaud)

Posts Tagged "images"

My mother’s death, a mysterious painting, a call to create

Saturday was the eighth anniversary of my mother’s death on June 28, 2006.  Much about my mother remains mysterious to me, and this painting is an example. I grew up seeing it in the attic of every home we owned. Finally, maybe 30 years ago , I stole it.  A day later, mama called and […]

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How I avoided the cosmetic surgery called tattooing

When I was a kid, I received almost weekly instruction from my mother never to get a tattoo.  It was one of  many things she deemed “hideous.”  She most often issued the edict as we passed a trailer park on the way to her sister’s cabin on the Catawba River, not far from our home […]

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Policing cyberspace, policing the psyche

I was recently referred by a client to a year-old New York Times article about images and the Internet. The article, “Policing the Web’s Lurid Precincts” by Brad Stone, specifically deals with how “depraved” images affect the people that sites like Facebook hire to constantly review their content. Patricia Laperal, a psychologist, interviewed members of […]

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How images make it get better

I’ve received a handful of mail and comments (via Facebook) on my last post about the way images can help us confront the contents of the unconscious, so that repressed material can emerge. Although this is sometimes painful, it almost always produces positive gains. Most of the people who wrote asked me to write more […]

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Holiday pain, a crying cat, a broken heart

“Habentibus symbolum facile est transitus.” (“To those who have a symbol, the transition is easy.”) The day after Thanksgiving, I stopped at a service station on Hill Street in Grant Park. Between this station and I-20 is some wooded land in which homeless people live. It is also home to many feral cats. As I […]

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The power of images and beauty

Here are two poems I like very much. I frequently refer clients to them because they express what I’m often trying to communicate about the value of images and beauty in my work. It is not ultimately analysis that moves us out of our psychological blocks. It’s the image, the aesthetic, itself. Both of these […]

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