ART/THERAPY

Celebrating the creativity of the therapeutic process and the therapeutic nature of art

The transformative power of the human imagination is central to therapy. It drives our ability to imagine, shape, and realise a better world than the one we experience. It allows us to open up and express our hidden, inner worlds of pain, trauma, and distress. And it provides the means through which the integration (or ‘making whole’) of the psyche can be achieved – both an inner integration, and the integration of our self with the wider social contexts in which we find ourselves.

This page celebrates this process, in all its dynamic, diverse, and exuberant forms. It will feature music, poetry, visual art, dance, crafts, architecture, and sculpture. And suggest how all of these aspects of human creativity are rooted in the process of inner transformation.

The Series

Each entry below is a self-contained piece in the ART/THERAPY series. Follow the links and go on a journey both inside and outside.

• ISMOND ROSEN: Pioneer of the synthesis of art and science — the sculptor, psychoanalyst, and psychiatrist whose work moved between the consulting room and the studio all his life.

• ROD TWEEDY: Iain McGilchrist, Ang Lee and the Revolution of Perception — what Life of Pi and the divided-brain hypothesis have to say to each other about how we see.

  Related: Online-Therapy.com — A structured, CBT-based online therapy program for individuals and couples.. (our notes)

• DESY SAFAN-GERARD: Music to Painting — My Encounters with Pierre Boulez — a painter and psychoanalyst on working alongside one of the twentieth century’s great composers.

• KAREN IZOD: Behind every fighting man are fifteen more — poems on war, family, and inheritance, including “A poem in which I learn what it was like to be my mother in the war”; see also her companion piece, A View from the Attic: on place and memory.

• MEG HARRIS WILLIAMS: Art and Aesthetic Conflict — on Meltzer’s idea of aesthetic conflict and what the encounter with beauty asks of us.

  

• TESSA CHRISTIE: The art of memory and space — paintings exploring the relationships between memory and space, structure and content, outer and inner worlds.

• JANET SAYERS: Barbara Hepworth, Adrian Stokes, and Melanie Klein — how a sculptor, a critic, and a psychoanalyst shaped each other’s understanding of inner life.

• JARBAS AGNELLI: Birds on the Wires — Agnelli noticed that the way birds station themselves on electric wires resembled musical notes on a staff, so he played the score to hear what it sounds like.

  Related: Talkspace — Online therapy and psychiatry through secure messaging and live video.. (our notes)

Why Art Belongs in a Therapy Archive

The pieces collected here share a conviction rather than a method: that making and encountering art does some of the same work therapy does. Giving form to what was formless, holding pain at a distance where it can be looked at, and restoring the sense that an inner world can be communicated at all. That conviction runs from Rosen’s sculpture through Izod’s poems to Sayers’s account of Hepworth and Klein. And it is why this section sits beside the site’s clinical interviews and book reviews rather than apart from them.

P.S. A few readers have asked which therapy programs we actually reach for — it's Online-Therapy.com; take a look here if you want the current details.