Art and Music: Therapy and Research

Andrea Gilroy, Colin Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317799306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Research is an increasingly important componont of arts therapy courses This is the only book to look at reasearch in art and music therapy in depth There are very few books available about the UK practice of music therapy

Part I
The practice of research

Chapter 1
Researching the esoteric

Art therapy research

Joy Schaverien

In this chapter I will discuss research from a personal point of view with the aim of attempting to demystify the process. The chapter is based on the evolution of my own PhD and my experience of supervising and teaching students doing a Master’s course in art therapy. The MA is a course with a taught year followed by a year in which a research-based thesis on a topic of the student’s own choice is developed. The student often comes with a question that needs research but there is frequently a real inhibition about embarking on the thesis.

It often seems as if the whole notion of research is alien to the intimate conditions of the psychotherapeutic approach to art and music therapy. The way that we work is private, boundaried and confidential. How can we discuss and analyse the processes which take place in the closeted privacy of the art therapy studio? Isn’t it enough to say it works? The intitiates, the therapist and the patient, know it works and so why intrude with the penetrating gaze of the ‘scientific’ research method? The ‘esoteric’ of the title of this chapter refers to the amorphous area characterised by the often intimate relating of two people and a picture. Thinking about it beforehand, it can seem that to attempt to apply the spotlight of research to such an area will be an ungainly intrusion into a sphere of delicacy. It can be viewed as a potential theft of something precious; rather like researching love or religious experience, it seems an affront to the nature of the work that we should attempt to apply measures and methods.

Research is often seen as especially alien to the artist; it is usually viewed as a science and so research methods are understood as the territory of the scientist. Before commencing research the art therapist is often already engaged on a struggle within her/himself regarding the uncomfortable tension between these two modes of relating. Art therapists are often employed, in hospitals, as a member of a multi-disciplinary team. Here they work beside colleagues, particularly those with medical training, who understand mental distress as illness. Nurses and psychiatrists are trained in scientific method with an emphasis on the relief of symptoms. The art therapist comes from a different background; she/he is trained firstly as an artist and secondly as an art psychotherapist. Here the interest is in the meaning of the symptom, what it is expressing. Although the differences are seldom as stark as this might seem to imply, it may mean that we meet the patient from different viewpoints. This diversity is the richness, as well as the struggle, of the multi-disciplinary approach. Elsewhere (Schaverien 1989) I have written about the uneasy relationship between the artist and the medical-model approach. The thought of research seems to highlight this divide. Art therapists are often very suspicious of what is being asked of them when they embark on research.

Despite initial objections it is clearly necessary that we overcome them and conduct research. It is then that we realise that it can be rewarding to do so and that it is possible to find methods which are complementary to the work that we do. Far from taking away from the process, they can enhance the work by making us much more conscious of how it is effective. A quote from Bachelard offers a way of realising that perhaps the intuitive approach of the art therapist actually offers a good place to begin. It may be that we do not have to emulate the scientific method but rather find methods which may be more appropriate for our discipline.

A philosopher who has evolved his entire thinking from the fundamental themes of the philosophy of science, and followed the main line of the active, growing rationalism of contemporary science as closely as he could, must forget his learning and break with all his habits of philosophical research, if he wants to study the problems posed by the poetic imagination.

(Bachelard 1958, p. xi)

Thus perhaps the art therapist who is working with ‘the poetic imagination’ in the daily course of her/his work is excellently placed to begin to research. Like art psychotherapy itself, research brings to consciousness that which was previously unconscious. Research is rather like a torch which brings light to a selected area in the darkness. Through its beam that which was intuitively known becomes more easily discernible; a pre-conscious awareness is brought to consciousness. Like psychotherapy too there is a resistance to consciousness for fear that something will be lost. And, just as in the consulting room or studio, resistance is lifted by analysing the defence, so too with research. It is necessary to understand the defence and what it is defending in order to free the potential researcher.

I have found it helpful to realise that research is fundamentally, and simply, an investigation of what happens. It is a formalised way of regarding and questioning what it is that we actually do and the effects of that action. If, as a profession, we are to find ways and means of talking about and justifying our practice it is essential that we should become familiar with talking about it. It is no longer sufficient to say that we know it works; we need to be able to state, with confidence, to our colleagues and managers why and how it works.

Part-Time Study

At present the majority of art therapists undertaking research do so on a part-time basis. This was the case with my own PhD, which was registered at Birmingham Polytechnic in 1985 and was completed in the summer of 1990. I registered for the PhD in the year following the completion of my MA (Schaverien 1984). Both these degrees were completed part-time, the PhD taking five years.

Part-time study raises particular practical problems if the researcher is otherwise employed for the rest of the week. It is often difficult to find time to do the required reading and writing, and it certainly eats up weekends and vacations. However, there are also benefits in part-time research, particularly if the employment is complementary to the research. It may be an asset to be working as an art therapist when involved in art therapy research. This is because some aspect of that practice is usually the foundation of the research. The benefit of a part-time research degree may be that there is a continuous interplay between theory and practice, with the chosen topic always in mind. This leads to a particular type of Master’s thesis in which there is a balance between theory and practice. As course leader of the MA at St Albans, I have noticed that external examiners often comment on the commitment and originality of thought in the Master’s degrees of art therapists. The weakness is often in a lack of self-confidence and an underestimation of the significance of the thesis.

My aim in this chapter is to illustrate one type of approach which suited me. I do not aim to tell anyone how to do research but rather to tell my story, in the hope that others may gain the confidence to find ways to pursue a topic of central interest to them personally.

A personal investment in the topic is essential; if you are to spend five years of your life with a topic it has to be one in which you have more than a passing interest. Very few art therapists embark on research for the sole purpose of gaining a degree; it is more frequently from a need to understand better some aspect of the work in which they are engaged, and the degree is a secondary consideration. This is an exciting time for art therapy; I meet an increasing number of people in the profession who are becoming experts in particular areas of the practice. This chapter has the aim of encouraging them to overcome their diffidence and to write and investigate their own area of special interest.

Hypothesis

An hypothesis needs to be founded on one main idea. Any research is based on some motivating force or interest from which an hypothesis is derived. The title of my thesis is ‘Transference and Countertransference in Art Therapy: Mediation, Interpretation and the Aesthetic Object’ (Schaverien 1990). It was founded on a question that had interested me for some years prior to the research. I was curious about the ways in which the transference and countertransference in art psychotherapy were affected by the pictures made by the patient.

I selected the topic – or rather it selected me – from an early stage in my work as an art therapist. I found that I experienced intense feelings in the therapeutic situation for which I could not fully account. In an attempt to find some explanation for my experience I investigated art therapy literature and psychoanalytic theory. The literature regarding transference and countertransference in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy offered some insight, but I was left with the sense that there was an element which was not accounted for by these theories. This was the effects of the feelings evoked, in both therapist and patient, by the pictures. This led me to my hypothesis. This was that there were some, as yet unspecified, effects of pictures within the therapeutic relationship and that these seemed to be linked to aesthetic appreciation. In order to explore this I needed to investigate the aesthetic effects of the picture within the therapeutic relationship and, specifically, their effects on the transference and the countertransference. Thus the hypothesis – what is being investigated – leads to the question of how to investigate it: the need for a method emerges.

Method of Enquiry

Art therapists, in my experience, tend to retreat or flounder in confusion when asked to describe their research method. This is frequently because they have not been asked such a question before. When doing a degree in fine art, which is often the original training of the art therapist, the method of research is not defined as such but is, in fact, mainly painting or making objects. The artist may consider that this is not really research in the scientific sense. Thus, on unfamiliar territory, the mature student feels ill-equipped and unequal to the task. This is a great underestimation of their experience and areas of expertise. ‘The artist is just as much a discoverer of the forms of nature as the scientist is a discoverer of facts or natural laws’ (Cassirer 1944, quoted in Cassirer 1955a p. 29). What is actually required is a new way of formulating the processes in which the art therapist is involved every day. The art therapist is often an expert in her or his particular area of work but undervalues that expertise because of the effects of the dominant scientific culture.

Is all reality accessible to us only through the medium of scientific concepts? Or is it not evident, on the contrary, that a thinking which like scientific thinking moves only in derivations and in derivations from derivations can never lay bare the actual and ultimate roots of being? This does not cast any doubt on the existence of such roots. Everything that is relative must after all be rooted in an absolute. If this absolute persistently evades science, the evasion only shows that science lacks the specific organ for knowing reality. We do not apprehend the real by attempting to attain it step by step over the painful detours of discursive thinking; we must rather place ourselves immediately at its center. Such immediacy is denied to thought; it belongs only to pure vision. Pure intuition accomplishes what logical and discursive thought can never achieve, what indeed, once it recognises its own nature, logical thought will never even attempt.

(Cassirer 1957, p. 35)

Although it was clearly not his intention when writing this, I consider that here Cassirer is giving the art therapist permission to start research from the point where she/he is placed. The involvement with our clients and their art work places us ‘immediately at the centre’ of that which we aim to research. This should give us confidence, following Cassirer, to attempt to find a language which is appropriate for investigating our own discipline.

On a personal note, the MA (Schaverien 1984) was an important foundation for the PhD; it offered a theoretical base for further research and also gave me some confidence about writing. In 1982 I published a paper entitled Transference as an Aspect of Art Therapy’ (Schaverien 1982). This was a precursor of my PhD topic and it came from my work for the MA. The response that I received to this paper gave me confidence; and I realised that this topic might be of general, as well as personal, interest.

When registering for my PhD I encountered the usual question from the academic authorities regarding which method of research I would apply. My supervisor intervened at this point; he is a philosopher and had no problem in explaining that the method would be ‘thinking hard’. I was impressed by this and liberated, too, from a feeling that I had to justify my work in alien terms. Thus it was that I set about thinking hard and observing what happened in my practice as an art psychotherapist. Initially this included noticing everything that my colleagues said when referring to transference and everything I read about transference. To avoid any mis-apprehensions of my meaning here I should add that this ‘thinking hard’ was a disciplined and considered approach which developed into a systematic analysis.

The research method which I used was a mixture of philosophical analysis influenced by Wittgenstein (1921), Wollheim (1968, 1984, 1987), Langer (1957, 1967), Cassirer (1944, 1946, 1955a, 1955b, 1957), and phenomenological approaches: Merleau-Ponty (1962), Sartre (1957), Bachelard (1958). It was also a single case study approach, based on art-historical biographies (Kuhns ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: juxtapositions in art therapy and music therapy research
• Part I The practice of research
• Part II Clinical work
• Part III Context and culture
• Brief bibliography of suggested reading on research
• Name index
• Subject index