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| Expressive Arts in Psychology and Transpersonal |
Finding Motivation & Inspiration
By: John P. Rettger, M.A.
Finding motivation and inspiration
It seems to me that the expressive arts are tied to and emerge out of the human urge toward form and the aesthetic. Dating back to ancient times, as made clear by numerous philosophers (e.g. Plato), the aesthetics were seen as a natural connection between body and mind (Wikstrom, 2005). Furthermore, as Jacoby (in Levine and Levine, 1999) writes:
the aesthetic urge, born when we are born, the potential to shape experience in such a way that it starts to talk and tell us what cannot be told differently, is built into our being as a gift. Like other gifts we do not always know what to do with it. All the same, the poetic world interpretation, ‘held’ and made possible by the picture, dance, music, theater, poetry, film, architecture, sculpture, performance and all the rest, is a way of bridging the gap of isolation and hopelessness that we sometimes fall into. It is a way of coming to our senses, feeling our being in the world and searching for its possible meaning (p. 64)
This quote illuminates many aspects of the creative process happening in exa. First, it speaks to an element of human motivation- ‘the potential to shape experience’. It is an essential and vital element of many different philosophical schools of thought that humans have this enormous capacity to ‘shape’ and ‘construct’ their experience. Indeed, many therapeutic systems, including cognitive behavioral therapy, place significant emphasis on the human shaped world. By truly digging in and having a willingness to closely examine how I, as a human being, shaped my world I have an amazing capacity to change my world. Exa places an important role in this. I have found that different mediums allow me to work with and access different emotions and pieces of my experience that I cannot get to by mere philosophical analysis.
The subject of the expressive arts
Exa facilitates deep emotional and psychological processing and experience. I think that the subject(s) examined through exa are unlimited. A relevant point here is to make consideration for the client’s process and relationship to difference forms of medium. As I speculated above, it seems that different emotions can be accessed through different mediums and channels. For me, examples of this idea play out through the utilization of poetic process to work with deep felt emotions related to human suffering. Another example is that when I need to work on my ambiguous relationship to a part of myself, I find that clay acts as a jet airplane taking me directly into that place. Therefore, I have this idea that different mediums likely work for different people for different reasons.
Relationship to the created
Through the process of working with different mediums, I realize that something happens when an art piece is created. Throughout the process I have a relationship with the piece I am creating. Indeed, “artist and artwork are partners in an exchange. They are ‘equals’, as partners are. Both need our care; to stay in the exchange instead of forcing the work our way is the challenge of this partnership, and this is also where the ‘new and different’ may become visible” (Jacoby in Levine and Levine, p. 64). When I paint, I like to think of my canvas as a lover. I find many parallels in this metaphor.
For example, the sensual, excitement of feeling the touch of the brush sliding across the canvas and with each brush stroke a new universe is created. I am forever transformed, and my partner is too. Jacoby further writes that “our formation, depends on keeping intact the separateness of the person and the art work – they are not each other but, as we have seen, ‘of the same stuff’: intertwined yet separate” (p. 65). I think this brings up another important psychological idea: individuation.
In a sense, Jacoby (in Levine and Levine, 1999) is speaking to the ability of the individual to maintain a separation between self and art piece. On a superficial level, this seems quite obvious, however going deeper into this relationship I can see how some may have a difficult time separating self from image. The image comes to be an extension of the self and through the creative process there may be a kind of merging, in almost a mystical kind of way, between person and image. I have had deep and intense immersion experiences in my creative process where it becomes difficult to see distinctions between self and object. I think this very point represents an important cross road between exa and transpersonal psychology.
Relationship to transpersonal psychology
Transpersonal psychology has since its earliest days concerned itself with the scientific study of mystical and creative processes. Examining the roots of exa and the roots of transpersonal psychology reveals that there are common roots. Both exa and transpersonal psychology are rooted in and make use of phenomenology. I think at the core of this connection is the desire of expressive arts therapists and transpersonal therapists to find an ability to bracket and put aside preconceived notions and ideas about what emerges in therapy and really see the ‘thing’ as it is.
This process may seem simple and straightforward, but it is much more difficult. It is particularly difficult for me because I was raised with a western mind. My mind wants to immediately jump to conclusions, categorize, and approach every encounter I have with the world through scientific method. Both exa and transpersonal psychology challenge this approach utilizing phenomenological methods that say, “Wait, let the image speak!” While this is a fascinating topic, a more deep and intense discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, I think it is important to recognize the relationship between transpersonal psychology and exa in order to situate exa within my broader intellectual framework.
What the expressive arts reveal
The previous paragraphs pointed toward what motivates humans to create, and what the potential subjects of those creations are, this section will discuss what may emerge from the arts.
I believe that exa can access the entire range of human suffering. The range includes the more mundane daily struggles, and also the most intense psychotic processes. One in depth example I will give to illustrate the parts of the psyche that exa can tap is that of the true and false self. Winnicott (in Warja, 1999) writes about the notion of true and false self with respect to the mother-child dyad. Winnicott’s true self is the “unique essence that exists within each infant” (p. 179). The true self is “sincere, unaffected, authentic and original within each person.” The needs of the true self are expressed through spontaneous gestures, thus revealing sincere feelings of the child.
Warja describes the case of Thomas, a 33-year-old talented musician (see p. 180 in Levine and Levine, 1999) suffering from performance anxiety to describe how exa allowed Thomas’s true self to emerge. Thomas, through exa, was able to discover that his true self became stifled by an “inner meticulous and sadistic tyrant” (p. 180). Working even deeper through a musical psychodrama, Thomas was eventually able to see that he experienced a lack of adequate mothering and realizing this pain allowed him to find his way to performing his music publicly once again. Prior to Thomas’s treatment in exa, he was living under the auspices of his false self- the self that is developed according to what significant other want of the child (Tudor-Sandahl in Warja, 1999).
To further examine what is revealed in exa, I would like to describe the poetic process in more detail. McKin (in Levine and Levine, 1999) writes, “Poetry is personal. It is our intimate connection to words. When we feel something closely and deeply, and respond fully, we search for the right words, the true cadence” (p. 211). I consider poetry to be a primary modality of expression for myself. Poetry has revealed to me some of the most intimate and deep parts of myself that were begging for expression. Specifically, I was able to discover and come to terms with my existential despair, my loneliness, and conversely, my ability as a human being to grapple with and make sense out of my suffering. Poetry has picked me up at times in my life when I could hardly pick myself up. Indeed, I have found parallels in my poetic process to how I live my life. McKin writes that poetry
“is by nature associative- one word leads to another, one sound calls to another, one image relates to another, and in this way a poem can be the wave you ride, allowing your controlling mind to step aside and follow what your intuitive understanding knows you know, and urges you on to be attentive, brave, crafty, deliberate, humorous, humble, patient, angry, or whatever it is you are feeling (p. 212)
I think the idea of experience can be substituted into the above quote to illustrate how the writing of poetry informs the living of my life: (consider this substitution) “Life is by nature associative, one experience leads to another, one action calls to another, one question or thought relates to another, and in this way life itself can be the wave you ride.” I think this point illuminates the point that the creative process can be related to the very process of living one’s life.
Dialoging with images
What comes after the creation of an image? Throughout the quarter, I have come to appreciate Brederode’s (in Levine and Levine, 1999) notion of dialoging with the images. Before I learned Brederode’s process I found it very difficult to have a intimate relationship with images. I simply could not find a way to access the wisdom of the images. My paradigm had become stuck on my desire to impose something on top of the image, I wanted to take some kind of psychological theory and scan the image for evidence confirming my diagnoses, and thus, my categorization of the image. I was unconsciously choking the image and stifling its beauty and birth by giving it some static label. It simply never occurred to me to listen to the image; I never thought to speak to the image, or tell the image a story about me, and then let the image tell me it’s story.
Exa teaches me to give room for the irrational and have the courage to sit still in the face of uncertainty. While paintings and images seem to have lots of chaos and lack of structure, they simultaneously bring order and structure. Images can act as a container and a holding space for enormous amounts of suffering. It becomes my job as the therapist, or even as the creator to simply let the image have its time and its space to live a life of its own. The true beauty of the creative arts resides in the ability to allow humans their own interpretations and their own experience of the image. The images do not try to exert control or influence over us; they simply allow us to have our reaction and experience while giving us room to change our feelings and views about them later.
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Created on 04/26/2008 09:34 AM by John
Updated on 02/01/2009 02:56 AM by John
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