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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Psyche and the Split-Brain by Jenny L. Yates is the kookiest book that I have found so far in my research for school. It also, coincidentally, contains my favourite art interpretations ever. Yates wrote the book as her thesis for a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the CJ Jung institute in Zurich (1992). She worked with two subjects, a man and a woman, each of whom had had their corpus colossum severed as a treatment for epilepsy. The corpus colossum connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Yates showed images of artworks to the right and left sides of each person's brain, separately, and asked them to describe what they saw.
I don't know much about Jungian psychology, but Yate's symbolic analyses of the results are a challenge to my credulity. She also makes some oddly rigid assumptions about the meaning of images. The man's right hemisphere responded to an image of a lion and a lamb with the phrase "morbid feelings." Yates suggested that "...this male's right hemisphere has an opposite perception to the mood of the painting. Clearly the image of the lion and the lamb is one of peace and calm." (p.32). Art interpretation is really not that empirical. Now that Mr. Right Hemisphere has suggested it, I can see many ways in which lions and lambs hanging out together might be quite morbid indeed. The book is a bit of a warning that trying to pin down the meaning of an artwork too explicitly is, well, kooky.
But my goodness! The responses these people gave to the artworks they saw are fabulous. I get the feeling that the man may be teasing a bit. Here's a sampling...
Female Right Hemisphere: "Four"
Female Left Hemisphere: "Green. Two circles in the middle, not exactly alike, separate."
Male Right Hemisphere: "Very small lady."
Male Left Hemisphere: "Color green. A ring, almost."
Female Right Hemisphere: "Trunk of a tree."
Female Left Hemishpere: "A flower."
Male Right Hemisphere: "Lady left the steam room in a hurry."
Male Left Hemisphere: "Chinese or oriental fan or shell with creatures more man than beast or fairies coming out."
Female Right Hemisphere: "I want to know more about that than any others. I am trying to figure out why. Why Jenny?"
Female Left Hemisphere: "Big yellow flower."
Male Right Hemisphere: "A vase, not an urn."
Left Hemisphere: "A cat, orange, background - a stage drop."
Second Round, Female Right Hemisphere: "Flower"
Second Round, Female Left Hemisphere: "Telescope, looking into the background."
Second Round, Male Right Hemisphere: "An Iris, but I don't think that it is."
Second Round, Male Left Hemisphere: "A kitten, orange, sitting on a substance, cotton."
