The methodology of intuition
Thinking stimulated by questions and awareness in confirmations
The Socratic conversation is like a game or an intellectual laboratory, where the participants are offered the opportunity to engage in intellectual experiments without having to be held accountable for their proposals. The conversation must be a dialogue where the participants jointly search for acceptable answers and no one is held personally responsible for anything presented. Socrates intended his method and questions to result in reflection. The questions would inspire the participants to critically examine their own thinking and thereby find an answer that leads to knowledge. This is in line with reflective listening and MI.
MI is reflective listening, which includes confirmation, open questions, reflections, and summaries. It aims to strengthen the person's motivation and commitment to change. The first step in changing is usually ambivalence. You know you want to change, but you see advantages in both changing or maintaining your behavior.
Conversing with objects in my studio comes naturally and makes my inner dialogues with myself and the object visible. That is, what I do not yet know about what I am thinking and the object’s desire for its materiality. My thoughts, intentions, and desires are brought into awareness. The dialogue and the automatic writing bring out what is hidden. The analysis takes place through reflective listening of the confirmations of the dialogue. The confirmations are a kind of guess and have an important function in gaining a deeper understanding, where you find out if your guess is right.
Here is an example of a reflective guess, a confirmation in a dialogue.
The painting says:
Can I be bigger?
The reflective guess and the confirmation could be for example:
You feel small
You would like to expand your body
You feel controlled
You are just curious and would like to try things out
You don't fit in your size - your purpose are not visible
In whose perspective, are you thinking about your intentions or the viewer's experience?
The dialogues with my paintings and objects started when I attended courses in MI at SiS, Statens Institutionsstyrelse. In the course, we practiced dialogic conversations and asked questions that lead to reflection. Practicing this technique, I was led down a path of dialogue and communication with my art. As a result, I developed reflective listening in my artistic process. An exciting development opened up to new routes of knowledge and new thought processes set me on a path of making my artistic process visible through words. Employing this new knowledge I could now combine my technique of automatic writing with the act of reflective listening and develop it in the form of a dialogue. But how can this be connected to learning, and learning in action?
