The Discipline
Values/Concepts/Principles - Life as a primary, absolute, value, from conception onwards, in any whatsoever psycho-physical condition.
The body as substance and primary identity of the person, foundation of what human beings share among themselves and with the universe. The psychosomatic unity of the human being: in this, GdL detaches itself from pedagogical and therapeutic disciplines that are exclusively focused on the mind or on the body.
Human potentials, common to all human beings, impossible to extinguish in any physio-psychological and cultural condition; and Child, Handicapped, Artist are the subjects where human potentials are manifest more immediately and evidently, as they are less affected by cultural elements and individual interests.
Animation as reawakening of latent human potentials, repressed or removed in individuals, groups, communities. In this sense, the animation project develops coherently from educational-therapeutic into political project.
Diversity, originality, art, as unusual, peculiar and exceptional expressions of human potentials. Integration as development, growth, achievement of the person and the human group, resulting in a coexistence based on equality. Integration is education, animation, and in most cases it is the most powerful form of therapy.
Common competences (particularly of knowledge and cure), innate or learned, to treasure against the dominant tendency to overlook and repress them, to delegate them to specialists, necessary but not sufficient.
The ‘art of living’, that is, the ‘one doesn’t learn, one knows’ principle, founded on an innate knowledge of the body, which carries in itself the laws of growth, and which expresses itself, in extreme situations, with surviving strategies, such as stereotyped behaviours.
The Social womb, as natural extension of the motherly womb. Among its main goals, GdL aims to everybody’s awareness and performance of this role, developing primary competences of cure, which we all possess by nature. In this, GdL is opposed to an “easy delegation” of such role.
The Human-Cosmos unity, which develops a cosmic empathy and leads to the search (see Bateson) of a connecting structure of the diverse orders of reality of the universe.
The continuity art-expression. Between “art” and “Art” the difference is a matter of degrees (more/less), not a clear-cut one (yes/no). This generates the idea of art as therapy and self-therapy: indeed, to express oneself is always therapeutic. Such continuity we witness, as a red line, among the child, the handicapped and the artist.
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