Symbolic Culture and imaginal Practices for Educational and care Professionals: an Intervention Research in the Field of Health Education

Introduction The importance of introducing mythopoetic practices in adult's and professional education is supported by many thinkers (Durand, Hillman, Zambrano, Leonard, Willis). In Italy this exigency comes from the awareness of the contamination of educational culture by imaginary, ideas that psychological, social, technical disciplines offer of its great topics and problems (Mottana). The presence of these disciplines is evident in Health Pedagogy with the great advantage to assure clear references, useful operative strategies or protocols helping who works in sanitary services. But often the trend is to abuse of technical categories, produce classifications of therapeutics, assistance and educative experience using reductive interpretations or languages, reducing sensitive and imaginative ability of professionals who seem to recognise their identity only in patterns based on competence systems or job description. What we need then is also an improvement of sensibility, an enrichment of imaginary and patterns of understanding and we can reach this goal applying to the artistic creations coming from the huge mythical basin of our tradition. Methodology: This paper aims to give account of a concrete research and educational experience conducted with the mythopoetic approach of Imaginal Pedagogy” (Mottana) involving clinical tutors in the field of Health Education at Turin's University (4 educational interventions from 2014 to 2016). Each path lasted 3 days of 7 hours in which participants (groups of 15 clinical tutors chosen for their educative experience) were asked to reflect on the figure of clinical tutor moving from their own imaginary but going beyond it through the exploration of symbolic works of art. According to the imaginal approach works were treated as sources from which to distil knowledge, as living subjects with a particular physiognomy and pregnant with meaning using a respectful hermeneutic based on contemplation, listening, loyalty to the image, suspension of judgement. In spite of the difficulty of the the exploration and the density of the works of art presented the participants appeared sensitive and eager to learn a different may of reading images and experience, eager to sick a methodology so distant from their usual habit; they have absorbed, reflected imaginal experience of the works patiently showing a good ability to dwell into the abyss of contradictory meanings. Results: At the end of the work each group tried to give some interpretations of the works of art, distil a new different knowledge about tutor figure coming to symbolic interpretations. Without coming to definitive explanations, they succeeded in identifying possible meanings, naming resonances, recognising correspondences between the explored matter and the world of symbols, archetypes the works referred to. At the end sparks of knowledge appeared, something different than a corpus of notions, concepts or competences. Perhaps they don't learn something more on tutor but their sensibility in regard of this educative figure became deeper, more complex as it appears in the final symbolic pictures they produced. The participants gained a particular kind of knowledge, something different from the ordinary corpus of notions, concepts or competences. They have learnt neither something more on tutoring nor new techniques of tutoring but their sensibility in relation to these experiences became deeper and even more exact as it appears in many final pictures they produced. But the most important result is to be found in the acknowledgement of the imaginal art world as a world of knowledge, a huge cultural heritage of symbols and myths coming from a tradition of centuries, able to enrich their professional background. Conclusions. These results suggest once more that the imaginal approach can be successfully employed even in the medical educational field, and that the symbolic art it refers to is not just a “didactic tool”, but an important cultural spring from which to draw water to revitalise our culture.