I have not written a President's Message for our IAMA Newsletter for quite some time but I feel compelled to communicate my thoughts during these dark days. September 11, 2001 has changed the world forever, especially for those of us who live in the United States. Our thoughts and prayers are with those who lost their lives and their families, the many heroic responders to the crisis both on- and off-site, and our leaders who must walk the impossible balance between punishment and understanding of the cultural forces that led to these dastardly deeds of death and destruction.

In remarks I made in April of 1995 at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia a few days after the Oklahoma City bombing, I said "The opposite of war is not peace. It is the creative process." While I still believe that, I am having a difficult time with the concept because I also believe the perpetrators of terrorism must be rooted out and destroyed as soon as feasible -- or, if not destroyed, at least locked away and studied until they die.

In an item in an issue of the IAMA Newsletter published several years ago, we quoted drummer Michael Meade who said that only the arts have the intensity to counter violence. This, too, I believe in my heart. While I endorse the call for heartfelt prayer coming from all over the world, I believe engaging in the arts is very much, at its purest level, a form of active prayer, a yearning for a true spirituality, a deep and everlasting connection to the beauty and bounty of the universe and god's unconditional love. I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to say this.

Many of you have read my views on the power of the arts before, but I will re-iterate a few of them again now in this period of enormous opportunity for the new world into which we have been cataclysmically jolted by the events of September 11, 2001.

Among the most precious gifts that the arts give us is freedom, which, in my opinion, is health issue number one. Only a free people can be truly healthy through the creative process of both becoming and contributing. This is why tyrants who seek to control others are so fearful of the arts. That freedom has an impact on human physiology in sickness and in health is beyond question.

Another aspect of the arts that has a salutary or health-enhancing effect on individuals and society is the capacity for the arts to teach us to perceive reality more clearly -- a necessary trait for all of us, but especially for our leaders who need to be mentally healthy, rational decision makers in the very trying times ahead.

While the above are important there is one capacity of the arts that stands paramount at this time. This, of course, is the arts' unique ability to facilitate the triumph of EROS, or love, over THANATOS, or death, at this very precarious time in our world history when the scales could literally tip either way.

The capacity for the arts to enhance and augment a love of all life (biophilia) may very well be our last best hope. Many people over the years have asked me why I am so obsessed with the arts as medicine. I believe now more than ever that the arts are the only true medicine left. All else has failed.

Thank you for your ongoing involvement in the arts-medicine movement.

Dr. Rick Lippin

Founding President- International Arts-Medicine Association (IAMA)

Saturday 15, September 2001

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