| Popis: |
Problem statement. During the last decade in Italian hospitals treatment of pain has improved, but suffering still remain an unavoidable presence in everyday life of physicians, nurses and patients who seldom find time and occasion to ponder on such an experience concerning every human being’s life. In spite of all our actions of measurement and treatment procedures, the different forms of suffering still involve all our sensibility, scare us, inquire us and challenge our possibility of comprehension. Approach Following the idea that symbolic art works can modify our attitude, enrich and wide our comprehension patterns, this paper aims to give account of an educational experience conducted according to the approach of an “imaginal pedagogy” involving nurses and physicians working at Lodi Hospital. The training concerned exploration of symbolic works of art treated as sources from which to distil knowledge using a loving and participatory mode of knowledge gathering based on contemplation, prolonged listening, loyalty to images, suspension of judgment and faithfulness to the work of art presented. Results The participants gained a particular kind of knowledge, something different than the ordinary corpus of notions, concepts or competences. They have learnt neither something more on suffering nor new techniques to treat pain, but their sensibility in regard of these experiences became deeper and even more exact in recognising their tragic and contradictory nature as it appears in the final pictures they produced. But the most important result is to be found in the acknowledgement of the imaginal world of art as a world of knowledge, a huge cultural heritage of symbols and myths coming from a tradition of centuries able do enrich their professional background. Conclusions These results suggest that the imaginal approach can be successfully employed even in the educational medical field and that the symbolic art it refers to is not just a “didactic tool”, but an important cultural spring from which draw water to revitalise our culture |
