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JACQUES ARPIN,
M.D., PhD
Born in the middle of Europe, on theWestern
side but close to the Eastern block, I was a child aware of frontiers
(I lived on a river border which I often crossed to conquer foreign
land), migrations, exiles and cultural axes. There had been a Russian
migrant wave, a Hungarian one and later a Czech one, plus
sporadic whitecaps of other nationalities. My classmates came from all
over the world, connected with seasonal workers, political refugees and
international organizations. The waves of migration brought artisans
with their traditions and techniques, a professional population in
construction sites and hostelry, and all were concerned with cultural
adaptation.
At age eight, I contracted polio with encephalitis and was eventually
treated during rehabilitation by a woman therapist who was a dancer and
a musician. She recommended that I start playing guitar as a way to
recover the full use of my left hand - and I have never stopped. Older
cousins of mine introduced me to Mississippi Blues, an early initiation
to my interest in that unique and culturally distinctive region of the
USA. Geneva hosted the American Folk Blues Festival and during my
college years. I played in various rock bands...which led me to travel
a lot in Europe, noticing the variations in languages, set designs and
scenic strategies, body expression and social performances, including
rituals, music, dance and theatre.
My grandfather was a country doctor and a number of my uncles and
cousins were doctors too; most of them surgeons. They influenced me in
choosing medical studies, with the intention of becoming a war
traumatologist and a reconstructive surgeon. Either that career as a
surgeon or a theater director, a filmmaker, or an architect and a set
designer.
This was the Vietnam War era and many students came to Geneva from both
South Vietnam and the USA. Then came the refugees fleeing Communist
aggression in Eastern Europe, all of which created the Geneva of today,
where 45% of the population is made up of foreigners from countries all
over the world. Migration waves ensured a permanent blending and
renewal of nations, including Switzerland’s population: Turkey, the
Kurdistan territories, Angola, Zaire, Chile, Argentina, Iran and
Ethiopia...and still counting.
I made the decision to undertake a university program of studies
combining medicine and cultural anthropology. My first move was to
spend time abroad during my studies. I went to Montreal from 1972 to
1973 and worked at the McGill Children Hospital. There I encountered a
Native American family that was losing their third child to
tuberculosis, which taught me to always investigate broadly when there
are so many parameters to consider about health and illness, including,
religion, fatalism and other factors. It took me a lot of effort to
finally understand and speak the French of Québec, even though French
is my mother tongue.
I met Mônica Koechli, a third generation Brazilian from Salvador,
Bahia, the daughter of a cocoa exporter, whose own father had started
working in textiles in the Nordeste (Northeast of Brazil). This
connection facilitated my ethnological fieldwork in Bahia, focusing on
religious syncretism in relation to mental health. My academic director
was the cultural psychiatrist Álvaro Rubim de Pinho at the Universidade
Federal da Bahia. He was an academic and honorary collaborator of Opô
Afonjá candomblé terreiro (the African Brazilian Yoruba religious
tradition, organized in compounds).
Through Mônica and her family I also met the visual artist Carybé, who
has remained my main reference in drawing techniques. We traveled
through the Amazon area and the Northern states of Brazil, the Nordeste
and the East, to expand the fieldwork experience.
We then moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, where Mônica registered in
sociology and education and I in anthropology and sociology, at Tulane
University. Cultural anthropology was my option and I enjoyed the
teaching in human sciences such as that of anthropologist Arden King, a
traveler and a humanist with contagious enthusiasm for his field. I
continued training in psychiatry with Arthur Epstein and in
epidemiology with sociologist William Bertrand who was incredibly
supportive. Mônica and I became involved in the cultural and
performance life of New Orleans through the musical network, visual
arts, literature and food, from fishing and hunting
practices to
cooking. We
traveled throughout Louisiana to meet the French- speaking
Cajuns and Creoles, eventually adding more repertoire and skills in
playing bottleneck, slide and lap steel guitars.
When we returned to Geneva in 1982, Gaston Garrone, the head of the
Department of Psychiatry at Geneva University, gave me the opportunity
to pioneer cultural
psychiatry (ethnopsychiatrie) in Switzerland. The psychoanalyst Paul
Parin had already taken a step in this direction in Zurich. The
relevant option then was to launch and develop the Migration and Health
axis around which I organized clinical activities, teaching and
research. I also became a member of SSPC and WPA-TPS, so I could keep
up connections with others working in this field. I was encouraged to
take these steps after discussing my interests and activities in
cultural psychiatry with Rachid Bennegadi and Richard Rechtman, who I
met at the WPA congress in Athens, in 1988.
In 1992, following Gaston Garrone’s death, the Department of Psychiatry
at Geneva University terminated what it considered my
maverick approaches. I needed a “working family” and found it in the
form of an experimental theater group and international network of
people involved in intercultural theater and performance studies. After
having organized workshops for the Theatre in English in Geneva, I was
introduced to the work of the Odin Teatret from Denmark, whose founder
and director is Eugenio Barba. Since the 1970s, Barba has worked at
intercultural theater, designing exercises and rehearsal practices as
well as organizing a body learning system called Theater Anthropology.
Apart from the work at the Odin Theater, he has also created a network,
the International School of Theater Anthropology (ISTA), which I joined
and with which I still work regularly today.
After bridging health and culture, I now was trying to integrate those
disciplines with the fields involved in the performing arts. I then
started a research project that I called The Masters of their
Condition. Two articles were published in the journal Transcultural
Psychiatry, on “The masters of their condition I: At the crossroads of
health, culture and the performing arts”, and “The masters of their
condition II: Intercultural theater, narration and stage work with
patients and healers”. A third article is forthcoming (“The masters of
their condition III: The living treasures vs. the cosmetic mutants”). I
am currently working on a fourth article about scenic strategies,
light, sound and ethnological stage organization, with applications to
cultural psychiatry. To physically understand these systems of body
learning, I started practicing traditional codified dance forms from
Asia (Japanese nihon buyo, Indian kathak and Balinese barris).
My clinical work as a psychiatrist has also developed a focus on body
reconstruction. I am a special consultant for associations concerned
with helping victims of aggression, abuse, torture and, more generally,
post-traumatic and post-disaster clinical situations. My personal
network of performing artists has become integrated into my
consultation. They regularly come and work with my patients and me on
my special stage. We have formed a sort of
interpersonal
clinical
and research community in the
spirit of SSPC and ISTA.
I have been able to extend this personal small circle into larger ones
as I did at the SSPC meeting in Montreal in 2003, with Indian dance
master Sujatha Venkatesh, and again in Stockholm in 2007 at the
international conference jointly sponsored by WPA-TPS, SSPC and WACP.
There I was joined by New Orleans multimedia artist Jan Gilbert, and at
the WACP congress in Norcia in 2009, by Italian psychologist and
documentarist Erminia Colucci, Australian visual artist Mic Eales and
Swiss visual artist Jonathan Delachaux. The next such effort will take
place at the WPA-TPS sponsored conference in Paris, in April 2011,
where I am organizing a ‘performance symposium’ about Cajuns and
Creoles in Louisiana with New Orleans film-maker, documentarist and
writer Kevin McCaffrey, multimedia artist Jan Gilbert, Mônica Arpin
Koechli as story- teller and social theater performer, and myself as
cultural psychiatrist and performer. We will introduce our concern
about endangered communities in this post- digital era, where realities
have led to changes that are both confusing and challenging.
I had been involved in multicultural societies and in the performing
arts before I decided to become a medical doctor. It is the learning
that attracted me, i.e., the encounter with the knowledge and how it
grows on you, how you become seasoned. Early in my career as a
physician I had to introduce myself as a doctor; I don’t have to say it
anymore because I have become a healer. It is my persona, just as much
as I am also a musician and a dancer. It has taken time to weave these
strands into my persona. Accordingly, the first thing I would
advise younger
colleagues is to practicepatience, tenacity, humility,
curiosity, open-mindedness, discipline, pleasure and humor.
The human sciences broadened my horizons. They provided the research
materials and the methodology to build a cultural narrative that is
complementary with the medical, scientific history. While respecting
the conventional practice and the necessity of sometimes using drugs, I
understood that these could not always be the answer and people, as a
part of nature, could, like nature itself -a tree for example- heal
themselves, given the right context. I contribute to creating that
context with the patient; like a theater director provides the venue,
the technique and the facilities for rehearsals and performances. The
healing is a result of this co-production.
Religious syncretism as a focus for my fieldwork was a fortuitous line
of study. It involved beliefs, rituals and dramaturgy that proved more
than useful among patients from all cultures; immigrants as well as
others. The performing arts belong to what ethnologists study when
exploring the folklore, the myths and tales about traditions and about
health, illnesses and care systems. The
fieldwork
also led
to methodology in theater anthropology and performance
studies, thanks to which we can explore the body, from acting unit to
vehicle of soul.
Creativity, like healing, must be nurtured, not systematized: this is
the great conundrum
of the
field. Would-be practitioners
must not only experiment and learn their craft, but also be aware how
the arts are forming from the formless wellspring of inspiration. If it
is not necessary for the practitioner to be a Master of (any specific)
Arts, it is necessary he/she be a masterful observer of him/herself and
of his/her own mastery. Then, apply and transfer it to the patient. And
again for younger practitioners, never stop seeking out mentors who
might surprise you; dare to refuse the well-trodden paths and keep on
questioning throughout life; practice building new cultures; practice
learning connections with old cultures; seek out and facilitate
interactions by masters and patients throughout clinical practice.
Never sit anyone in a box unless it is some kind of performance.
Healing, like treating, is a creative act and therefore more natural
and complete as well as more satisfying to me. One must practice being
a practitioner and reach out to the patient and so accept the
responsibility of constantly becoming the practitioner in the same way
the patient is in a state of becoming. Fads evaporate as they have no
body; mastery is grounded and can be transmitted.
PS: I invite people interested in what I have
described in this bio-sketch to contact me.
References
Arpin, Jacques
The masters of their condition I (At the crossroads of health, culture
and the performing arts). Transcultural Psychiatry, 40(3): 299-328,
Sept. 2003.
Arpin, Jacques
The masters of their condition II (Intercultural theater, narration and
stage work with patients and healers). Transcultural Psychiatry, 45(3):
355-378, Sept. 2008.
Arpin, Jacques
The masters of their condition III (From the actor’s score to the
patient’s score: between traditional and innovative learning methods
for clinical applications with patients in cultural psychiatry).
Transcultural Psychiatry, tbp.
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