Art Therapy and Postmodernism

Creative Healing Through a Prism

Helene Burt

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857005366
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

This comprehensive book brings together the voices of international art therapists with diverse backgrounds and experiences and asks them to consider the role of postmodernism in their understanding of art therapy. These practitioners share a common postmodern belief that art is a unique way of expressing and mediating the human condition and that art therapy should not be a diagnostic tool but a collaborative healing process between the therapist and the client. Drawing on psychotherapy, aesthetics and philosophy, the contributors present current practice, research and case studies and show the many directions and possibilities of postmodern art therapy.

This book is an important addition to art therapy theory and will be a crucial text for all art therapy students, academics, researchers and practitioners.

PART I

Postmodern Art Therapy Practice

1

Multiple Perspectives

Art Therapy, Postmodernism and Feminism

Helene Burt

Introduction

In this first chapter, my intention is to explore the relationship of postmodernism to art therapy and to examine some points of tension between postmodernism and feminism. While art therapy came into being during the age of modernism and for very good reasons (see Haslam 2005), it is just as at home in this new age of postmodernism. Having said that, it is still true that art therapy practice can be modernist or postmodern depending on the practitioner, and also that neither is essentially better or worse than the other. Modernism coexists with postmodernism, a combination being necessary at this point in time in order to make sense of our rapidly changing world. Which brings me to the point at which I must clarify that the ideas here can only safely be applied to the Westernized world and that it is beyond the scope of this chapter to address the impact of postmodernism on the rest of the world.

Feminist-standpoint theorists have been suspicious of postmodernism, believing that it does not take a stand against inequality and the oppression of women. Initially, postmodernist thought was articulated through the fields of philosophy and linguistics and focused on the relativity of truth. This stance did not privilege any one set of values over another. Therefore, from a feminist perspective, postmodernism was not seen to challenge and fight against the oppression of women. This is the point of tension between postmodernism and feminism which I will come to focus on.

Modernism

Modernism, spanning roughly the end of the nineteenth century to the present, affected every facet of society from science to art to behaviour and was primarily defined by the rejection of tradition. Modernism tends to exhibit the following four characteristics:

1. the belief in ‘progress’ through the application of technological advances and logical principles

2. the determination to break with classicism

3. scepticism about the traditional beliefs in favour of direct experience as the true source of knowledge

4. recognition of the importance of imagination in safeguarding human freedom and realizing human potential. (Harrison as cited in Haslam 2005, p.21)

After centuries of lack of individualism due to the political and religious systems which were dominant in the West, the individual was beginning to rise above the mass of humanity he/she had been submerged in and speak of the self, the unconscious and individual freedom. Freud, who viewed himself as a scientist, introduced the world to the individual psyche, ego, id and superego. The inner world of the self, both conscious and unconscious, became the new source of exploration now that much of the physical world had been mapped. Carl Jung, with his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung and Jaffé 1965), made the journey to the self seem as exciting and challenging as climbing Mount Everest. The power of the individual to be more that just a minion is exemplified in Jung’s words: ‘I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become’ (2008).

Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Marcel Proust and Mikhail Bulgakov are all examples of modernist writers who introduced the world to new ways of narration and celebrated the individual psyche. In the art world, modernism was represented by all those who were ‘avant-garde’ – the cubists, surrealists, pop artists, for example – and the point was ‘art for art’s sake’ rather than in the service of religion or the state. Over the years, art became more and more exclusive, as the 1952 statement by sculptor David Smith exemplified: ‘nobody understands art but the artist, because nobody is as interested in art, its pursuits, its making, as the artist’ (Gablick 2004, p.22). Certainly that was a sentiment the average layperson would have agreed with after viewing a Jackson Pollock or Rothko painting. Jackson Pollock embodies modernism in his comments from a live interview: ‘When you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. It’s pretty negative stuff so far. I’ve been going through violent changes the past couple of years. God knows what’ll come out of it all’ (Rubin 2004). He is modernism personified with his emphasis on the individual, the inner journey and the self as a separate independent being for whom there is always a sense of loneliness and isolation.

Art therapy and modernism

Art therapy identified itself in the 1940s as a profession but was preceded by the recognition that art and imagery made within a modernist context was a road to the inner self. Two North American art therapy pioneers describe art therapy from a modernist perspective:

By using and choosing from a variety of art media, the individual gives expression to repressed thoughts and feelings related to conflicts, traumatic experiences, fantasies, dreams, self-image, patterns of relationships to others, his defensive operations, his impulse controls, and his reactions to and view of the past, present, and future. The artistic productions progressively unfold as projected images and provide a global matrix for stimuli for free association. As a result of this visual stimulation, the individual is offered an opportunity to comment in free association as to the meaning of the art product and the associated thoughts and feelings. In addition to revealing attitudes, feelings, and conflicts, spontaneously created art gives us information as to the individual’s intellectual capacity, and permits the person the opportunity to emphasize what is really important to himself. (Fischer 1973, p.7)

The process of dynamically oriented art therapy is based on the recognition that man’s fundamental thoughts and feelings are derived from the unconscious and often reach expression in images rather than in words. By means of pictorial projection, art therapy encourages a method of symbolic communication between patient and therapist. Its images may, as in psychoanalytic procedures, also deal with the data of dreams, fantasies, daydreams, fears, conflicts and childhood memories. The techniques of art therapy are based on the knowledge that every individual, whether trained or untrained in art, has a latent capacity to project his inner conflicts into visual form. (Naumberg 1987, p.1)

Along with twentieth-century psychoanalysis and psychiatry, art therapy focused for many years on working with the individual unconscious and healing through self-awareness. This is still a focus of art therapy, but there is today less of an emphasis on trying to fit into the medical model of diagnosis and cure, both bestowed on the patient by an expert, and more of an affinity with the postmodern notion that the client is the expert on him/herself and that therapists are consultants who co-construct, with the client, the path to wellness.

The advent of postmodernism

‘Once you notice something you are no longer an observer, you are a participant’: June Callwood (2007).

Much admired by her fellow Torontonians, June Callwood, journalist, author and social activist, spent many years developing and working in non-profit agencies during the years in which ‘political correctness’ spread with zeal through every sphere of the most multicultural city in the world. On a very public level, she had to confront the issues all Torontonians faced in trying to confront and change oppression and racism while holding positions of power and privilege. Her statement above speaks to the postmodern position which places all of us on some level of connectedness. The modernist notion that one could be an objective observer has been replaced by the postmodern belief that there is no objectivity, only multiple perspectives, and the only perspective you can be responsible for is your own. Callwood’s statement also speaks to why the current postmodern practitioner, whether art therapist or artist, feels a sense of responsibility on a global level. You cannot just notice that genocide is taking place in Darfur, because you are part of it on some level; at the very least you need to speak out against it. As art critic Suzi Gablick elaborates, ‘Whereas the struggle of modernism was to delineate self from other, in the emerging realm of quantum inseparability, the world becomes a place of interaction and connection and things derive their meaning by mutual dependence’ (1991, p.150).

Foucault

My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-telling as an activity…who was able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relations to power… [W]ith the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the ‘critical’ tradition in the West. (Foucault 2001, p.5)

In the 1960s, Michel Foucault, a French philosopher who identified as a structuralist, began challenging European ways of knowing and reasoning. Starting with his first major books, Madness and Civilization (1965) and The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973), Foucault pointed out the oppression practised by those who define and treat madness and illness. In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970), Foucault examines discourse and epistemology and concludes that they are determined by the time and context they exist within and by those in power. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), Foucault’s theme of oppression being relative continues as he points out that ‘In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating’ (p.303) and that ‘Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline’ (p.302–303).

In a sense, Foucault was one of the founders of ‘political correctness’ which continues to enlighten the Western world with the realization that Eurocentric thinking is biased and oppressive. In the 1970s, medical terms such as ‘mentally retarded’ were changed to less pejorative terms, in this case ‘developmentally delayed’. Colloquial terms like ‘Jew down’ and ‘Indian giver’ were fast abolished for obvious reasons. More appropriate racial designations were also adopted, such as Asian rather than Oriental. In Ha Jin’s most recent novel about an immigrant from China making a life for himself and his family, A Free Life, one of the characters explains how and why the word ‘Chinese’ can be experienced as oppressive:

Mie Hong continued, ‘The other day my daughter told me that a Korean boy in her class broke into tears because some students called him “Chinese.” That made me remember that once a homeless bum had yelled “Chinese” at me simply because I didn’t respond to his panhandling. He didn’t know my ethnicity for sure, but why did he call me that? And why did the Korean boy feel so humiliated by the word “Chinese”? I did some research on this, and here, let me share my discovery with you.’ She pulled out a square of paper from her pants pocket, unfolded it, and went on to explain, ‘In English the suffix “-ese” suggests “inferior, insignificant, weak, weird, and diminutive.” You all know what “China” means. It means “hardened clay or dirt.” So combining the two parts together, “Chinese” means “tiny, petty, and odd stuff made of dirt or clay.” After looking up the verbal roots in The Oxford English Dictionary, I finally understood that “Chinese” was a racial slur, originally used by the British imperialists to put down our people and break our spirit. Not only us, but other races such as Japanese and Vietnamese, as if we were all peewee peoples, lightweights. By comparison, the suffix “-an” designates people of “superior” races, for example, Roman, American, and German.’ (2007, pp.493–4)

Feminism

While postmodernism is viewed as having originated with certain mid-twentieth-century philosophers such as Michael Foucault, the reality is that early feminists were already identifying the institutionalized and contextual oppression he later came to write about. At a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, Sojourner Truth made a speech pointing out the Black woman’s doubled subjugation:

That man over there says women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me the best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I Postmodern Art Therapy Practice
• PART II Postmodern Art Therapy Practice in the Community and Globally
• PART III Postmodern Art Therapy Research
• PART IV Postmodern Art Therapy Theory and Epistemology