A discourse on the irrepresentable, a praxis of the irrespresentable, aesthetics and psychoanalysis have more than one point in common. Ceaselessly confronted with the mystery of the flesh and incarnation, aesthetics has the impossible task of explaining the unspeakable. Dedicated to representing human suffering, which by its nature exceeds all attempts at representation, psychoanalysis, for its part, seems to chase after an incarnation that is somewhat difficult. (Gagnebin, 1994, p. 31)
What is “psychological aesthetics,” and why should Art Therapists be interested in it, when the aesthetic value of art-works made in a therapeutic context, along with other technical or professional aspects of art, is supposed to be irrelevant? I am going to argue that, on the contrary, the aesthetic qualities of art-works, in the sense of their specific formal features, such as their use of line, colour and texture, and their compositional coherence or incoherence, not only make a crucial contribution to their overall “feel,” but are also the carriers of a range of complex and often subliminal psychological resonances, many of which are given a distorted twist in the psychoanalytic perspective of “unconscious” symbolism. There are many circumstantial factors that can contribute to exploring a picture’s meaning in a therapeutic context—the history of its making, the artist’s intentions, or the influence of the therapeutic relationship itself; but unless Art Therapists are prepared to take the links between aesthetic and psychological qualities seriously, not only in their practice but in their research, the “art” in their profession will tend to remain something unexamined and undervalued. The psychological resonance of the pictorial image obviously plays a crucial role in Art Therapy, yet it is one of the most difficult aspects to explain to others. It is also something that we need to explain to ourselves.
Since psychological aesthetics is a comparatively new field that involves redefinitions of both “psychological” and “aesthetic,” I shall start by sketching out something of its historical background so that its difference from traditional concepts becomes clearer.
I have chosen to write about psychological aesthetics in its broadest sense because I consider that there is more psychological common ground between pictures from an “art” context and those from an Art Therapy context than is usually admitted. Just as the psychological in art needs to be rescued from its exclusive contract with psychoanalytic forms of interpretation and from popularized conceptions of tell-tale “unconscious” symbols, so the aesthetic needs to be reintroduced to Art Therapy instead of being kept outside in the waiting-room.
Someone might ask: Wasn’t it there in the room in the first place? Perhaps this may have been the case in the pioneer days of Art Therapy, but its presence was almost invariably a tacit one; indeed I suspect that this was one of the aspects of Art Therapy that was not only inherently difficult to write about, but that gave rise to a certain embarrassment, and so never appeared much in the literature.
I think Art Therapy is currently facing a challenge: Whether to bow to the pressure to justify itself empirically and to concentrate on research in terms of “evidence-based practice,” or whether to try to develop its own qualitative forms of research. For a great many therapists in the public sector, the pressure is real and almost overwhelming; but at the same time it is obvious that many of the same therapists feel deeply uncomfortable at the prospect of spending so much time and energy on types of research that by their nature will do the “art” in their practice less than justice.
I believe that psychological aesthetics offers some exciting opportunities for Art Therapy to build (or rebuild?) bridges with the wider world of art, and to give substance to its imaginative calling. It will help to lead both the pictorial image and imagistic responses to it out of their captivity in the kingdom of a narrow-minded psychology, and also to free the aesthetic from its subservience to purely formal considerations. I see signs of this beginning to happen, both within the profession itself and outside of it (in the resurgence of interest in painting with an explicit psychological perspective: for example, in the work of Ken Kiff, Paula Rego, Francesco Clemente and others). There is a lot of work still to be done, and difficult questions about how much of it qualifies as “research” and under what aegis. I would like to believe that Art Therapists can help lead the way, following the example of Freud and Jung as adventurous and passionately driven explorers, rather than their tamed and institutionalized descendants. Freud (1932)
