I presented at the Psychology and the Other Conference at Boston College in September 2025. This conference is always a joy! It is also exciting to see my book being sold at the book exhibit since it is part of the Psychology and Other Book Series.

Here is an abstract of the paper:

In promoting strong mental health, we desire each individual to walk in a state of freedom. Freedom becomes then a goal or ideal that we encourage in our patients and all those around us. And yet, due to its familiarity, we must not forget what it looks like when freedom is deprived, when we are trapped in some kind of bondage, captivity or slavery. To walk in freedom means decidedly not to be enslaved to something or someone and not to be owned by another or controlled by something else. Thinking in terms of art, we know intuitively that art cannot be done under coercion or dictated by another nor can it be done for the sake of an agenda or to spread propaganda. Art may arise out of bondage, and often does, but art cannot be created by the slavery; any art made by those in captivity transcends the bounds of that slavery.

In this paper, I will explicate aesthetic freedom — in other words, I will look to expressions of freedom in art — in order to apply this kind of freedom to goals in mental health. To do so, I will perform a phenomenological analysis on the freedom that exists in art to find its necessary place. I will sketch the relation of art to freedom according to the existentialist accounts of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus and Gabriel Marcel. Keenly aware of the experience of bondage due to living through the occupation of France during the Second World War, the existentialists see freedom as saturating all creation of art (such as the writing of a novel or the painting of a still life) and all participation in art (such as the reading of the novel or the viewing of a still life painting) just like it saturates all actions of the human life. Although each thinker heralds freedom as essential to art and life, there are tensions that abound in their accounts of freedom with some privileging an autonomous style of freedom (“radical freedom”) while others emphasizing freedom dependent on others (“situated freedom”). In the larger chapter, I describe how freedom must be present at each layer of the aesthetic experience: in the act of the artist, in the experience of the audience and in the artwork itself, but for this paper, we will be looking solely at the freedom for the artist.