Looking at a blue sky?

Ciel bleu traversé de trainées aériennes
by Floratrek

I’m starting this blog in order to share some ideas that I have been tentatively formulating since last summer on classical mythology and its possible therapeutic uses. When I show my writing to others it has usually undergone many reworkings, which makes starting a blog with all its first-draft rawness daunting: closer to the process of writing lectures than academic papers. This first posting will set out how I came to the topic and what my preliminary plans are at this early stage. From the outset it has looked as though I have a topic here and over the past few months, several aspects of my work have become relevant to the project including in ways that I did not initially envisage. I value opportunities to carry out research-led teaching; there may even be some mileage in trying out research-led admin but more on that later. One advantage of starting this blog will be the opportunities it will provide for putting down ideas as and when I have the time as I currently have a pressing delivery deadline for another project – a book on myth and religion using the vehicle of Athena. Editing another book, on ancient Greek women/femininity/desire, is currently taking up a lot of my time as well, as are teaching and admin duties even though I can see opportunities for linking teaching and admin to my project as I'll explain soon.

The journey towards this topic started by chance in a meeting with a special needs teacher who mentioned in passing that she had heard that children with Asperger Syndrome often respond positively to learning about mythology. I began to wonder what it might be about mythology that seems to be able to reach autistic children – or at least children with high functioning autism. I shared initial ideas with my Classical Civilisation colleagues at Roehampton, all of whom thought the topic to be worth pursuing, and one of them who, I discovered, had worked in therapy after completing her first degree, suggested that I approach practitioners in dramatherapy.
Some brief comments on how different academic roles might feed into the topic:
Teaching: I bought Phil Jones' The Arts Therapies: A Revolution in Healthcare (Brunner-Routledge 2005) from the University bookshop in December to begin reading on dramatherapy. I thought I would be lapping up new knowledge which I was: I was taken into a world beyond my experiences to date but I also found myself thinking from a fresh perspective on material that I’d been teaching for some years. I discovered that the approach taken to drama in dramatherapy, not least the application of the Aristotelian model of catharsis, intersected with the approach currently being advocated in classics. In fact, I had earlier that week finished off a review of a book that included a chapter that argued for a therapeutic function of Greek drama for its intended, fifth-century BCE audience that I now see was broadly consonant with the approach taken in dramatherapy.
Research: One of the things that attracted me to Classics as an undergraduate student in the late 1980s was its interdisciplinarity, although I doubt I knew that term then – or should that be multidisciplinarity? I’ve never really stepped outside the confines of the discipline, broad though these boundaries are. Where I have thought 'big', through applying gender theory say, or comparative anthropology, it has been with a view to enhancing classical research. Now I might be able to think about how classical research can do the opposite, for which I may have unwittingly laid a groundwork while on research sabbatical a year ago, when I did some research that took me beyond the confines of classical mythology into folktale and cross-cultural mythological phenomena. One way of developing this research might be through considering how storytelling has therapeutic value across cultures.
Admin: I have recently become Learning and Teaching representative for my subject area as well as SENDA academic representative for the School of Arts, a role which will involve liaising on disability issues including arranging a session for the University's Learning and Teaching conference at Easter.
In my next posting, I intend to outline where initial reading on dramatherapy is taking me. Soon I also want to set out what I am gaining from research into autism.