Into the Grey
Shaun McNiff in his book “Art Heals: how creativity cures the soul” (2004) calls out to all art therapists to adjust their reliance on perceiving artistic expressions as mere signposts pointing to the artist’s personhood and pathologies. Instead, he advocates for treating the art as an independent, autonomously expressive being in and of itself.
Not only does his recommendation challenge many an art therapist, this attitude of no-strings attachment to the meaning of the art made in therapy has surprised many clients of mine over the years of practice. It is, in my experience, not only art therapists who are tempted to half-diagnose, half-problem solve in a messy process of likely projections but the clients themselves seem to expect it and suspect their art will reveal all. In anticipation of engaging in the therapeutic process with art, a would-be client confessed to me: “I’m weird”. This disclosure felt like a warning shot, a preemptive strike incase I wasn’t prepared for their particular strain of abnormality and maybe I should get out now before things got even weirder. Perhaps they imagined I was hoping to find their internal reality in an order that is close to working, or close enough to normal-ish and I would be disappointed to find out this was not true. Perhaps they were remembering art class in which all creativity was subject to critical judgement. Or, they suspected I would find them so weird that they had imagined it would be impossible for me to build a secure enough relationship with them and the joint enterprise of therapy would have been for nothing. I reassured the person it didn’t matter if they were weird and anyway, I wasn’t there to diagnose, or judge. But they still felt the need to underpin their self described weirdness was actually of the “very weird” kind, to which I just smiled.
Labels are useful tools. Tools can help us get a conceptual handle on the vagaries and repeating patterns of human existence. Labels such as “weird”, “depression”, “anxiety”, “OCD”, “control freak”, “too scared”, “too sensitive”, or “very angry” serve a purpose in creating a shared language and intended meaning, but they run the risk of providing us with fixed definitions of what we mean in a given circumstance. Life, like people, by nature is not fixed, but is an ever-shifting, unfolding movement of vital energy expressed as personhood and so there comes a time when a self descriptive label may not fit what is occurring. Labels are words. Words are concrete definitions, descriptors of the world. You are not a concrete definition, nor can a concrete definition ever fully describe who you are. Although definitions and descriptions can be useful in getting to know oneself and another, in the art therapeutic relationship your participation in the universal human experience and your essential ALIVENESS is what is of most importance. Being alive means that you are, given the right conditions likely to GROW, which means you have great potential to become more than the person you are right now. This expansion of selfhood that is possible through art therapy includes felt joy in living, peaceful connectedness to others and contribution to the larger whole.
I see the virtue of McNiff’s request to shift one’s attention away from seeing the art made in therapy as a definite indicator of selfhood or of illness and so, I attempt to remove my diagnostic glasses and peer into the not-yet-unknown. My glasses are, after all, a product borne out of implicit and explicit education that is personal to me and my own familiarity and capacity for literality. I agree with McNiff who believes that the parts of our selves that seek for rational clarity and solidity must be relaxed. This is to allow an opening for a more collaborative gathering of imagination between client and their art therapist; this partnership can creatively tap into its own inherent wisdom. As Jesus said, “Where two or more are gathered, there I am”. Perhaps, what Jesus was pointing us towards is that shared relationship, which is centred on loving and forgiving community is the ultimate picture of God, or the very truest nature of things, if you don’t like the God word. Psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, in discussing “How Faith can re-enchant a left-brained world” (2024) he describes how mental, emotional and physical flourishing are dependent on finding ourselves embedded in a trusting community in which values are shared, on acknowledging our need for closeness to nature and giving space for the experience of the sacred or the divine. This, I describe as a sense of essential connectedness to the larger order of things that inspires awe and respect for Life as it is expressed, discovering that all things, even good and its opposite have their place in the cosmic order. What I know is, where there is relationship, where there is empathy, care and understanding, there is the opportunity to know beyond labels, because people don’t exist as lists of symptoms and descriptions, they live in and out of the sharing of stories and feelings, the narratives that hold paradoxical opposites the complexities of selfhood. We all possess the left and the right, both blackness and whiteness of traits. Just as the juxtaposition of opposites in form are required so as to read typed blackness of the text on the whiteness of the page. Seeing the other through the retelling of self through the poetry language of artistic forms rather than just labelling words, allows a sensitive reading in between the lines of a person’s words, pictures and things that speak of significance. Seeing through the eyes of intuitive, empathic and symbolic understanding, such as artistic creation helps us do, leads to the discovery of a coherent personal meaning (McGilchrist, 2019). Seeing in this sensitive artistic way helps us notice where the words describing personal story as if written in black ink bleeds and merges into the empty space of the page; what once appeared to be hard black edges of someone’s worded labels of life soften and the edges can become grey as they sit on the edge of becoming white. Through seeking not to read the other’s art as if laden with secrets to be read at a glance, but to revere the art as a testament to the client’s aliveness and dignity of being, art therapists can become alive to the nuanced personal voice, the edges of where the black meets white, the grey. The art therapist through seeing with an artistic lens learns to sit with the un-safety of concepts penciled, not yet pinned down.
It is my experience and observation that we yearn for a rock solid definition of our lives, even if that worded coherence comes in the limiting form of “weird” or any other uncomfortable label. All of humanity shares a disquieting sense of being suspended in discomfort in the void of not knowing exactly and ambiguities of living which are renewed every morning upon waking. If we can, we will call our lives almost anything at all, no matter how constricting or self deprecating in an effort to lessen the pain of not being able to articulate who and where we are in the grand scheme of life.
Analysing art, as a lifeless and flat extension of the person who made it, leaves little room for seeing of symbolic expression which hints at larger, shared meaning. Good art therapy allows room for fostering the created expressions to utter of their own accord, not in a literal sense but through the archetypal which is the non-language of form, structure and texture that may echo what psychoanalyst Jung called our shared, collective unconscious (1959). Just as people get to know each other not only through sharing words, but also in the fleshly patterns of bodily movement, tones of voice and punctuations of momentary facial expressions, so too can the symbolic arrangement of materials be understood as a life-imbued, personalised dialogue between client and art therapist, which allows for ever-shifting viewpoints and implications of individuation and the fulfilment of a life.
With an analytical attitude only, the meaning of the art expression has already become; it is known and securely positioned in descriptive parallel with its maker. And so, the maker has definitively described who they are, at least in the eyes of the art therapist. With an analytical attitude only, the art provides narrow explanations and provides evidences for the symptomatic labels we use to define ourselves and will hold these diagnoses firmly in place as we see those labels reflecting back through interpretation of the art. Affording art the respect and the opportunity for autonomous self description, the same I would offer to a person, and allowing the art to reveal its metaphorical messages and symbolic reason for being, the art therapist in relationship with the client is able to discover what is on the edge of the explicit knowing, what is grey. If what we already know is able to be thought in language and then spoken out in black and white terms, then the art’s value is in representing what we are not been able to think, or speak to another- we must listen attentively and ask the art what those messages are. Together, in relationship, the client and art therapist attune to and respect the messages of the art, and together can be witness to the complexities of living that the art knows, but are on tip of the artist’s tongue. The art then, acts as a non-languaged speaker, as a living testament of the client’s unique aliveness and capacities for growth in the world.
References:
• Jung, C. (1959). The archetypes and the collective unconscious. Princeton University Press.
• Mcgilchrist, I. (2019). MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY : the divided brain and the making of the western world. Yale • University Press.McNiff, S. (2004). Art heals: How creativity cures the soul. Shambhala.
• Seen & Unseen. (2024, July 9). Iain McGilchrist: How faith can re-enchant a left-brained world.