Kochaj Innego jak siebie samego. Psychodrama
Love the Other as You Love Thyself. A Psychodrama

Summary/Abstract: Popular culture usually promotes a plastic model of love (mainly erotic love) by projecting images of beautiful young bodies. How then should we perceive love in the context of old age, Down’s syndrome or Parkinson’s disease? This is a question asked by Izabela Kowalczyk as she refers to the works of Artur Żmijewski. In a video called The Art of Love the artist shows how the physical limitations of elderly, disabled and sick people make the expression of their feelings a challenge and an art which is difficult to master, as they are something that society considers a repulsive minority that collides with popular aesthetics. The problem, however, is not only a visual one. The old body is an omen of the inevitable and the handicapped one – of chance and the fragility of human existence. Thus intolerance and lack of empathy result from fear as well as, in the author’s opinion, the inability to fully love one’s own self: anything which does not comply with popular standards and is different within us is negated and removed. In this way a sick, elderly or disabled person becomes the Other, a scapegoat which brings relief to “normal” people. In this aspect Izabela Kowalczyk follows the concept of Julia Kristeva who believes that hate and social violence towards the abject result from the fact that we cannot cope with the abject carried within us. The conclusion is simple: accepting the coexistence of diversity, both in the internal as well as the external world, would mean that the Other would no longer be a problem.

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