Hello, folks! We’ve had a good week here at common art and Boston Warm, so let me catch you up!
The card game Uno has been a big hit on Fridays at Boston Warm. For several Fridays in a row, we’ve had two large groups playing during the entire program time . Now, you might be thinking, “Alex, aren’t you an art-therapy intern? Why are you updating us on card games that are getting played?”
One of the greatest challenges that I have faced at my internship this year at Emmanuel is of an interpersonal nature and relates to a challenge that I am working with outside of the internship realm. It has to do with my tendency toward leadership, my need for being seen, and my addiction to creating intended results. I am someone who likes to enter a space and influence an outcome that I can imagine being positive in nature. I am a change agent and have been identified as someone who possesses leadership abilities for as far back as I can remember. (My first dream when I was a child was to be the president.) At Emmanuel this year one of the main things that I have gotten to practice is putting my tendency toward leadership on the shelf and, instead, showing up as just another member of the group or simply as a witness to what is happening to those around me. It has been through these experiences that I have been able to practice the dance of therapeutic presence. Continue reading
Upon the planned retirement of The Rev. Elwood Worcester, The Rev. Dr. Benjamin Martin Washburn became rector. For more about the Washburn tenure during the Great Depression, please see the chapter on him in Emmanuel Church, 1860-1960: The First Hundred Years.
This image of “The Emmanuelists” honors men associated with the Emmanuel Movement during Worcester’s rectorship: (top row) William James, Richard C. Cabot, Joseph Hersey Pratt, Pierre Janet & (bottow row): Lyman Pierson Powell, Samuel McComb, Elwood Worcester, Isador Coriat, and Courtenay Baylor.
In 1925 he and Worcester formed the Craigie Foundation to continue their work privately in anticipation of Worcester’s retirement from Emmanuel Church in 1929. In his book, Baylor claimed he had success with about two thirds of a thousand patients. Through his patients Rowland Hazard III and Richard R. Peabody he influenced William G. Wilson, a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.
For more information on Baylor’s contribution see:
In response to a devastating fire in Chelsea, Emmanuel Church rented one of the few houses left standing to provide care for the homeless. The Emmanuel Relief Station offered food, clothing, and medical care for the wounded. The church arranged for medical personnel, instruments, and supplies. The house was also used for the care of women during and after childbirth.
Religion and Medicine: The Moral Control of Nervous Disorders by Worcester, Samuel McComb and Isador A. Coriat, an early psychoanalyst, was published by Moffat, Yard.
Worcester published a series of six articles about the Emmanuel Movement in the Ladies Home Journal (Oct. 1908 – March 1909).
The Rev. Dr. Elwood Worcester
For more about the Worcester years please see the chapter on him in Emmanuel Church, 1860-1960: The First Hundred Years.
For more about the Emmanuel Movement please search our page & Timeline entries: 1905, 1909 & 1919.