Rebecca Russo introduced a selection of contemporary Artworks (paintings, drawings, installations, videos, photos) in Psychodiagnosis and Psychotherapy methodologies in application of her concept of Videoinsight®. She has tested these selected Artworks for many years in the clinical setting reaching very important and significative results.
Contemporary Art can contribute to Diagnostic and Therapy. It can heal, promote change and solve individual and relational psychological distress. Some Contemporary Artworks are provocative, ambivalent, mysterious, and deep; they speak about the basic, and universal human needs; they offer an opportunity for personal development, progress, identification and Psychological Emancipation. Artworks stimulate an experience of freedom and “intellectual lightness”; they are emotional, affective, perceptual and mnemonic. They oblige us to think, to feel, to change; they transform us. Artworks create potentialities and open the door to future Change; they break the rigid schemes, and therefore they can heal, promote wellness.
Videoinsight® means to have an Insight: a simple and essential intuition, a discovery, an awareness that involves mind and emotions at conscious and unconscious levels. Videoinsight® can cause the evolution of personality, and offers new solutions to psychological problems, and promote psycho-physical Well-being.
“Art is a wonderful Adventure. It is a mirror, that reflects, like a Rorschach card, the innermost part of the observer“. To talk about the artwork means to reveal oneself. Some visuals from Contemporary Art promote change: they touch and move the most hidden, rigid, obscure parts of our personality.
We deal with images continuously. We are capable of producing mental images. The unconscious reveals itself to us through images in dreams.
Authentic artworks are Universal, Immortal, Essential, Primary, Relational. Thanks to their ambivalence and ambiguities, their symbolism and their mysteries, Artworks perturb the Unconscious, overcoming the barriers of defence and resistance, and modify distances, overturn meanings, interrogate multiplicity, and stimulate the emergence of new resources. Artworks stimulate feelings, perceptions, and Psychosomatic Effects. They activate Imagination, Fantasy, and Creativity through Projections and Reflection. Artworks promote knowledge through new interpretation processes, thoughts, Learning, Attitudinal Orientations, Communications. They causes Actions, Decisions, and better Socialization.
“Artworks can be a disruptive force because they are elusive, inexhaustible, infinitely challenging. They penetrate into the Unconscious with greater strength and speed than words: drive and transmit energy, revitalize, affect the personality in its operation and structure. They make Identity no longer be ‘identical’, placing it in suspension between many possibilities, pushing her towards the frontiers of creative change and towards new horizons of well-being.”
The Videoinsight® Method can be applied to everyone because it proposes a simple and natural experience that is independent of age, gender, social status, religious beliefs, or Language. The Videoinsight® Method integrates Culture and Health in a novel, holistic and interdisciplinary way. Its efficacy has been demonstrated through objective Medical studies, and recognized by the international scientific community.
The Videoinsight® Method is a realistic, and easily applicable scientific method. It is focused on the person and it represents a privileged way for Cultural Welfare because it targets social and individual Health and Wellness that is in relation to the quality of the psychological experience with the existing programs of care and prevention. It prolongs Existential Expectations, improves quality of life, increases social welfare, reduces the time and the costs of the care.
In the Videoinsight® Method, Art Videos are selected with competence, responsibility and professional ethics on the basis of the psychological needs of the viewer. Sometimes they contain sounds, but never words. “They immediately engage the mind and the heart, break the defences of the intellectual judgment and bias, stimulate the narrative interpretation, activate the insights by pressing on the personalities potentials”. The ability to select the appropriate video is the result of a several years of research carried out on the basis of a specific and integrated skill, in the psycho-therapeutic and artistic fields.
The Videoinsight Method® has been tested in clinical, psychological and medical settings for:
– Diagnosis of the Personality Structure and Functionality: the video of the artist proves to be similar to the projective Rorschach Test;
– Analysis of the Request of Psychological Support and for the Discovery of the Capacities of Reliance, Collaboration, Motivation within the relations with the others;
– Prevention of the psychological distress related to the evolutionary crisis (in the adolescence, in the disengaging in adult age, in the post-traumatic stress, in the psychosomatic problems and in the physical and senile illness);
– Orientation and the Qualification of Attitudes and Talents, functional for the Support of the personality’s healthy resources. They are fundamental for the containment of the weak and dysfunctional parties and for the creative and harmonious realization of the psycho-physical development of the person;
– Rehabilitation of the psychological resources as a result of impairment due to a physical illness, a trauma, a stress that transforms the vulnerability into a crisis or into an evolution stall;
– Psychological Support of Personalities in Crisis and for the Psychotherapy dedicated to the solution of the problems, of the complexes, of the evolutionary difficulties, of the constraints, of the psychological and psychosomatic symptoms.
Significant results were obtained in cases of Neuroses: Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Separation Anxiety, Obsessing, Compulsion, Panic Attacks, Anxiety, Hysteria, Phobia, Agoraphobia, Social Phobia; Post – Traumatic Stress Disorder; Sado-masochistic Disorders; Character Disorders, Narcissistic Disorders of the Personality, Disorders with Paranoid Traits, Border-line Disorders; Avoidance Disorders, Passive Aggressive Disorders of the Personality; Disorders from Dependances (from Substance Use: Food, Alcohol, Tobacco, Opiates, Cannabis, Sedatives, Hypnotics, Barbiturates; from the Game, from Internet, from the Couple of symbiotic type, from the failure of leaving the family); Psychosomatic Disorders, Somatoforms, from Conversion, Psychogenic; Hypochondria: Psychosexual Disorders, Adaptation Disorder, Affective Disorder, Depressions.