The Crayola Unconscious

Putting the Art Back in Art Therapy

BY SHANE BRENNAN

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Illustration by Hilary Falb
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"Photography saved my life. Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures." -Nan Goldin

Making and seeing art are processes that have the implicit power to heal, sooth and stimulate. However sure I am of this truth, I cannot completely align myself with the rhetoric of art therapists, who employ visual creativity as a psychological treatment. The healing power of art-making, both as a practical endeavor and a metaphor for psychological processes, has been taken up by creatively-inclined therapists since the 1960s. Even earlier, in the U.K., artist Adrian Hill coined the phrase "art therapy." Hill's definition, outlined in his 1948 writings, revolved around the therapeutic value of "completely engrossing the mind (as well as the fingers). [and] releasing the creative energy of the frequently inhibited patient." Thought of in these terms, art therapy sounds like something we could all use a little of, if it is indeed a creative outlet for uptight minds.

Why do we believe that art can heal? Is art therapy more valuable than art made on our own terms? I see a rift between the creation of art in the therapeutic context and art made in personal efforts by declared artists, yet they manage to yield a similar answer: when faced with undecodable feelings, our art can validate us. This article is by no means an objection to art therapy itself—I believe there is, in fact, a strong link between creativity and mental health—but simply an expression of a frustration with the way the discourse of art therapy has claimed the process of art-making as a metaphor for our psyches.

#Bif Brain Sculpture

While art therapy focuses, essentially, on the healing potential of art, it is often mistaken for art psychotherapy, which disperses art-making into a dynamic play among therapist, patient, and the patient's unconscious. Here, art's therapeutic value is appropriated by Freudian psychoanalysis. As a result, there is a great deal of confusion about what constitutes art therapy. The British Association of Art Therapists defines the practice of art therapy as "the use of art materials for self-expression and reflection in the presence of a trained art therapist," but this is just one of dozens of definitions—the ambiguity of this term pointing towards the uneasy, and somewhat forced bond between the disciplines of art and therapy. Such tentativeness is perceptible in its discourse, which often evokes noncommittal phrases like "creative energy," "life force" and "unconscious reservoirs."

This tension never yields an ideal balance between the creative and therapeutic, but rather imperfectly weds therapy with art. The contemporary ideology of art therapy, like the views expressed by therapist Daria Halprin, sees the creative process as a method to promote self-awareness and change in patients. Problematically, art therapists have moved beyond seeing creativity as simply beneficial, and have claimed it as a metaphor for aspects of psychotherapy. No longer simply a creative outlet, the psychoanalyst sees every artwork as a mirror image of the artist's mind. As Halprin proclaims, "the art mediums in therapy become the concrete materials we play and struggle with, put together, take apart, and reassemble as we encounter the patterned ways of being which run through our lives." Molding a sculpture in an art therapy session is done with the explicit aim of exploring psychological motifs; the processes of sculpting the art object and sculpting the mind are given an unsettling, one-to-one correspondence. One's unconscious is, supposedly, materialized in an artwork.

My objection to this framework lies mostly in its teleological orientation—the idea that artwork is made, during times of mental unrest, towards a particular aim. The art piece is matched up with preconceived ideas of a problem or issue. The therapist's reading of the artwork is a search for particular signs and their psychotherapeutic meanings. Any unexpected mark is labeled a "mistake," a Freudian slip of the pencil, and this error is highlighted as a telling moment of dis-inhibition. Art, in this logic, must act as a "therapeutic totem"—a record of mental images and themes—or it is deemed irrelevant. The mission to merge artistic expression and murmurs of the unconscious is to force art, when it is produced in a therapist's office, to carry an immanent and specific message.

On the contrary, probing for the motivations of the artist, I would argue, is a project that must be executed within the discourse of what is possible; the ends should not be placed above the means. Seen in this way, signs are allowed to remain dynamic, not locked down by pre-described associations. The message of an artwork is never stable—it is never made an "artifact" in they way art therapists have described.

Photo Transference

There is an alternative conception of the cathartic artistic process, one based on uncertainty rather than specificity—a healing that has nothing to do with the traditional therapeutic context, and instead is an intensely personal exploration. Individual artists have engaged their mediums to produce work that is not essentially or literally self-reflective, but an indirect exploration of difficult moments and concerns through what they (probably) do best. Art is not an activity that exists apart from the mind, and reflects it, but is in the mind and inseparable from it. For photographers like Nan Goldin, it would seem that art is not a targeted excavation of her deepest emotions, but a meandering narrative that allows her to record and contemplate her day-to-day experience.

Goldin photographs her life—not the cheerful glitz of snapshot events, but the dirt, grime and pain of her most bitter moments. She described her (most famous) series of photographs, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, as "the diary I let people read." Goldin's photographs are a method for her to digest experiences, confront emotions and harness the destructive entropy of her life. Writes Mia Fineman on Goldin (after her 1997 exhibition at the Whitney Museum entitled I'll Be Your Mirror): "She's an artist obsessed with taking control of her own personal history, with preserving memory from the ravages of time and the inevitable erosion of retrospective revision."

Beyond The Inkblot

As Patricia Nowell Hall insightfully writes: "There seems to be a paradox in writing about art therapy. Much of its essential healing power lies beyond words—experiencing is perhaps the best way of understanding." Part of what makes these works by Goldin so fascinating is that they call to mind areas of experience that lie beyond the verbal—the complex relationships between family members and lovers. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Jung suggests that our psychological ailments are not a result of the volcanic desires of our youth (Freud's "manifest content"), but rather the hyper-rationalism of our society. Have we tried too hard to rationalize creativity, prescribing it a structure that it inherently resists? Where in the intellectualization of art is there room for feeling?

The goal of art therapy is to obtain a sense of wholeness, to reveal (or create) connections between the disparate elements of sensation, feeling and image, and form an ordered "picture" of oneself. Even here, the metaphoric presence of art looms over our understanding of our psyches. Perhaps they are inseparable. Psychiatrist and writer Karl Stern, in line with the theories of Jung and the teachings of Taoism, observed two forms of knowing: "poetic knowledge" and "scientific knowledge." Truth, for him, is only reachable when they are in perfect balance—a balance that art therapy seems to be perpetually striving for and never quite achieving.

It is easy to demarcate the paths on which art therapy and fine art (even its most self-investigative forms) diverge. While art therapy lies in the camp of "play therapy"—the release of one's "natural" creative urges—Goldin's exposé of her life might be attached to the traditions of self-portraiture and photo-journalism. Interestingly, even though the tools of art therapists are numerous—the brush, pen and blocks of clay—the camera is rarely among them. Is the lens feared to be a mediator, a barrier that may block or filter the translation of psychic forces onto paper?

I would prefer to see the approaches to image-making of art therapists and photographers as permutations of a similar project—saying through pictures what cannot be put into words. Art therapist Edith Kramer boldly asserts that "art is inherently therapeutic." I would counter that art has been contextualized by the therapeutic practice in order to become "therapeutic." Nevertheless, it has been used countless times, in one form or another, to inspire healing. How, exactly, it resuscitates is a poetic logic that may never be the domain of your psychology textbook.

Shane Brennan B '07 sips from the unconscious reservoir.

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