Pergamon The Arts in Psychotherapy, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 235-239. 1995

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FROM THE DEPTHS TO THE SURFACE: ART THERAPY AS A DISCURSIVE

PRACTICE IN THE POST-MODERN ERA

PETER BYRNE, M.Phil.*

How does art therapy fit into the post-modem world that is our present cultural habitat? The evolu- tion of our discipline between the 1940s and 196Os, the height of the Modernist movement in art, pro- foundly influences both our theory and our practice. The particular branches of Modernism taken up by art therapy were, of course: (a) Abstract Expressionism, premised on a supposed connection between “univer- sal” inner feelings and impulses and the artist’s ges- tures on the canvas; (b) Primitivism, child art, insane art, graffiti, tapped into the so-called genuine roots of creativity; and (c) Surrealism, where links were pos- ited between automatism, the unconscious, dreams and art. These three branches gave permission for artists to dispense with the formal language of con- ventional figure drawing, composition and perspec- tive so that we could honestly say to our clients it doesn’t matter if you can’t draw, because there was a world of art out there that endorsed this statement. However, as these branches of Modernism evolved toward Art-Povera, Assemblage and Pop-Art with in- creasing emphasis on the image as signifier itself, rather than on what was supposed to be signified by the image, in other words toward Post-Modernism, art therapy had to ask new questions of the art world. How can we use Warhol, Koohns, Clementi, Fischl, Sherman, for instance? What do Beavis and Butthead, the Benneton billboards, tell us about the social norms against which pathologies stand forward as figures against a ground? What does the Post-Modem prop- osition-that there are neither universal inner truths

nor a fixed external world that art can either express or represent--entail for art therapy?

Modernism is characterized by its sense of social and personal history, its belief in progress, as well as by its conception of the individual, its dichotomizing reason and unreason, so that in our field the Modem- ist art therapist’s task is to turn unreason into reason. The aim may be, for example, to overcome too ag- gressive a superego and to modify it, give it back as a less dangerous, more useful force or to coax into awareness the unconscious repression that has dis- guised itself as a symptom, to at last identify the true pathological culprit. The strategy is to first uncen- sor, to interpret, to find and face the cause of the symptom.

Generally speaking (but with a few exceptions), art therapists have espoused positivist psychological out- looks, bent on curing the symptom via insight or ad- aptation. Therapeutic strategies have included inter- preting symptoms according to theories rooted in “going back to origins.” These origins could be ei- ther the Oedipus complex or early infantile traumas or assaults, abuse, deaths. Alternatively, there have been strategies, rooted in a transcendent teleological mode, of assisting archetypal processes to unfold. Fi- nally, there have been strategies for “beefing up” the (narcissistic) self, for enabling the person to assert him or herself in the here and now-strategies for self-expression, individuation, self-realization. Now this requires our assumption of a concept of selfhood including personal, social and historical levels of

*Peter Byrne is Head of the School of Art Therapy, Edinburgh University Settlement, Edinburgh, Scotland.

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236 PETER BYRNE

identity, that is, of a causal sense of history, of a narrative concept of “myself” that links birth to death as a series of consequences.

Post-Modernism, however, does not accept reduc- tive causality nor hold with expansionist teleological interpretations of history. It is against the singular and for the plural, preferring whole galaxies of meaning to emerge from a limited set of phenomena. It is op- posed to the notion that the symptom must have only one cause. Thus, it calls for a pragmatic rather than analytic approach to therapy, one where needs can be identified not in terms of social goals or of personal “integration,” but in terms of the clients’ wishes and desires being facilitated.

However, our approach to therapy has remained Modernist, rooted in the Humanist ideal of free indi- viduals claiming their natural right to health and hap- piness. There could hardly be a greater contrast be- tween, on the one hand, the Modernist individual with individual rights, demands for self-expression, self- realization and so forth, whose mental health is mea- sured in terms of integration and autonomy and, on the other, the Post-Modernist subject whose sign of health is an ability to manage fragmentation skillfully, to stay split in the face of the threat of fusion with the imaginary-the Other.

If we accept Post-Modernism as a cultural force to be reckoned with, we need a theoretical stance that enables us to understand and intervene effec- tively in our clients’ lives, not as interpreters of signs and symbols in their pictures, but as co-creators of meaningfulness.

I must admit that it was by accident that I found a position from which I could review our activity as therapists in these terms. In art therapy, normally, the work of each client has a consistency, a style or per- sonality, even when the visual vocabulary is impov- erished. The pictures do not usually vary much from each other. Sometimes they do vary in content as the client tacks from one preoccupation to another, but there is usually strong consistency in the images, in the use of materials, which is traceable through the client’s work from beginning to end.

As a research student in the mid 197Os, I studied the production of a series of pictures (made by a young female black patient, resident in a psychiatric hospital). They did not quite follow this pattern. I was not the therapist because I did not want transferences involving myself to enter into the images. Rather I was witness of a fascinating process of image-making over a period of about a year. My research was about

how clients might acquire artistic competence during the course of art therapy despite art therapists’ refusal to “teach” them how to make pictures. This client did indeed quickly transform herself into an accom- plished artist very much to my satisfaction as a re- searcher. She assimilated a number of schemata and rules of art-making without overt instruction. But as I was primarily interested in the role of art in art ther- apy, at first I missed what turned out to be the most significant feature of her work-the fact that she em- ployed several different visual vocabularies and about a dozen different sets of images during her therapy.

By the end of six months or so the range of images was bewildering. But as the following months passed, a definite pattern seemed to be emerging. It could be described as a search for an acceptable compromise between a growing awareness of her sexual identity and what that might entail in her social context, and a desire to retain a self-image as a spiritual healer-the first seeming to derive from her instinctual drives, the second her ego-ideal. The end of my research project coincided with the end of her stay in hospital. Later she was readmitted and many of the same themes reappeared, this time transformed by psychosis into vibrant or ironic versions of their former selves.

In my attempts to understand these images over the following years as I presented them in lectures to students, I tried to explain them in terms of her at- tempts to symbolize her Freudian neurotic conflicts or in terms of Kleinian themes of paranoid-schizoid/ depressive positions or of symbolizations of Jungian archetypal processes or of Hillmanesque psyche/ soma/anima configurations. But the plethora of im- ages (nearly 200) would not fit easily into the univer- salist molds I was attempting to use. I was looking for their meaning within a Modernist assumption, that it would eventually be discovered “behind” the pic- tures or “underneath” them-a meaning that pre- existed the pictures.

I was becoming aware of a mounting critique of Modernism, and by the mid 1980s my attempts to explore the phenomenology of the art therapy process had brought me into contact with certain ideas about language, particularly about the proposition that meanings issue from language and do not pre-exist it. Macdonnell (1986, p. 9), placed the issue in an his- torical context:

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were two main kinds of theories of meaning, both of which assumed that words stood for

ART THERAPY IN POST-MODERN ERA

pre-existing ideas. One of these asserted that meanings came from things which were “rep- resented” in words; the other that meanings de- rived from universal ideas which were “ex- pressed” in words and given individual form by each speaker.

Rorty (1989) also criticized this Liberal Humanist position, seeing the “expression in individual form” part of the equation as emanating from and tied to Romantic theories of the Imagination, a faculty whereby we access a posited inner self. He was pre- senting and criticizing a picture of language as me- dium, mediating between language users and the world “out there,” which is represented through lan- guage . , . or, conversely, as a medium mediating between the language user and an inner world that is expressed through the same language. He put it this way in his critique of both representational and ex- pressionistic theories of language.

I can explain what I mean by a medium by noting that the traditional picture of the human situation has been one in which human beings are not simply networks of beliefs and desires but rather beings which have those beliefs and desires. The traditional view is that there is a core self which can look at, decide among, use, and express itself by means of such beliefs and desires. . . So we have a picture of the essential core of the self on one side of this network of beliefs and desires, and reality on the other side. In this picture, the network is the product of an interaction between the two, alternately ex- pressing the one and representing the other. This is the traditional subject- object picture. (1989, p. 10)

If we follow Rorty as he went on to argue against the legitimacy of our assumption of a core self (leav- ing aside discussion of representation), one is forced to reject the linked idea that it can be expressed lin- guistically. Furthermore, if language is not a medium of expression for the client in verbal psychotherapy then art is not a medium of expression for the client in art therapy. Art is a practice-the art therapist is a collaborator in a practice aimed at giving the client the opportunity to create improved self-descriptions- taking advantage of the wide variety of communica- tion repertoires art has developed over the last couple of centuries. Macdonnell and Rorty came to my at-

tention relatively recently. Back in the mid 1970s it was the ideas of Wittgenstein and Foucault in partic- ular that initially provoked a reappraisal of my under- standing of what happened in the process of my cli- ent’s art therapy.

Wittgenstein’s (1972) philosophy of language em- phasized language usage, the pragmatics of language over and above semantic and syntactic considerations. A semantic approach (in art therapy) would be to work with what the clients’ signs, their images, stand for, what is signified by them. Syntactics emphasizes the structures of signs, the universal grammatical rules said to underlie the variety of patients’ images, where once again we are more interested in what is signified than in the signifier.

The third aspect of language, pragmatics, seemed to offer a clearer route to making sense (of my par- ticular client’s images). It considers not only the sign and its meanings, but also the sign and its users. Language is a social interaction between language users. So, in my client’s case, images are made up of socially shared symbols circulating in the social world, which she first interiorized and then repre- sented. The “re-mixed” collage of pre-existing im- ages are utilized to speak of her suffering. The client’s meaning and values are socially comprehensible, mass media texts have become part of the client’s language game or “tool box,” to use Wittgenstein’s terms. The client kept pictures of bridges; she copied postcards and teen comics as a sort of homework for her art therapy, as I discovered later.

Foucault (1973) had stimulated me to seek another perspective on my understanding of the field of psy- chopathology. He created a paradigm shift enabling us to reframe much of what takes place in psychiatry and psychotherapy as discourse, albeit, in the begin- ning, discourse about unreason. He said that it was Freud who restored the possibility through psycho- analysis of a discourse with unreason; our madness is encouraged to discourse with our sanity. He argued that the human subject is constituted in and by dis- course-a host of discourses mixed in with each other-from home, church, school, advertising, po- litical propaganda, and so forth. The patient brings a pathological discourse of self into therapy. Pathology is seen as distorted discourse, distorted by repression, censorship, excommunication, splitting-off aspects of the self. Therapy attempts to help un-distort the dis- course via action in language.

This set of ideas about art, language, self chal- lenges our current theory and practice as art thera-

238 PETER BYRNE

pists. Must we then create new theory from scratch or is there already a model therapeutics that accepts Post-Modem critiques of the notion of the subject in history, applies discursive strategies in therapy and eschews the notion of language (or art) as medium? Finlay (1988, p. 43) indicates one candidate:

. . . we are suggesting that there are certain elements in Winnicott’s therapeutic practice and metapsychological writing which, whether it be self-consciously on un-self-consciously, surpass the Modernist paradigm and dovetail with certain Post-Modem tenets of the subject in discourse, more especially (a) acknowledge- ment of the a priori disintegration of the subject, (b) the importance of the meeting of surface membranes to constitute ontology, and (c) a theory of interaction. (my numbering).

We have looked briefly at (a) in our discussion of critique of the Modernist conception of the self. Fin- lay’s reference to (b) “the meeting of surface mem- branes . . . ” brings yet another discourse forward for our consideration-the discourse of the physical- ity of bodies, particularly the infant/mother construc- tion of meaning through touching and looking, with its intriguing possibilities for exploration in art ther- apy, itself based on touch and look. Similarly (c) the discourse with media and the playful elements in art and its cultural positioning in our society between the hard world of manufacture/commerce and leisure/ entertainment, have strong resonances with Winni- cott’s use of play and his concept of the transitional space.

Finlay wrote (1988, p. 31):

The Play Element of Regression in the Psycho- analytic Process provides a sheltered situation for a regression to this transitional zone where paradox can be allowed time and again in a playful exchange and mirroring between patient and analyst (Winnicott, 1971, pp, 7-27). Win- nicott does not give self-reflective rationalizing interpretations so much as he enters into a kind of mirroring play with his patients. His early procedure of child analysis, the “squiggle” game, is precisely this mutual mirroring, play- fulness, and above all, “holding,” that Winni- cott says must be allowed to spoil children, and the child in adults, time and again.

There is not enough space here to amplify this return to Winnicott. However, it seems very clear to

me that, within the field of art therapy, the tools forged in such socio-discursive practices would seem to provide ideal implements for excavations into the archaeology of our subject as well as for its cultiva- tion. One area of cultivation would be the elaboration of a specific approach to technique in art therapy, thanks to the realization that some theories of lan- guage that are beginning to be applied to psychoanal- ysis could be applicable also to art therapy. Psycho- analysts, such as Lowenstein (1956), make the point that the mutative agent in treatment is not the process of self-reflection by the patient, but the interaction between patient and therapist. This is nothing new, and Winnicott too had been saying as much since the 1960s and earlier, but the problem had been that such an approach could seem suspiciously like mere indoc- trination because there is a lack of equality between patient and therapist. The power relationship is asym- metrical; it certainly did not conform to Habermas’ (1971) ideal speech situation of free and open dia- logue in which the patient is emancipated through a dialogue of truth, truthfulness and sincerity. The controls wielded by the therapeutic situation alone, from the time and length of sessions to the financial arrangements, militate against this aspect of equal opportunities.

In countering that critique, Finlay demonstrated the application of a more specific tool, Bakhtine’s concept of quasi-direct discourse, involving a highly interactive mode of communication between therapist and client where the therapist may employ not only the client’s own words, but his or her personal pro- nouns-“I’m feeling pretty angry”-said by the ther- apist on behalf of the client’s repressed rage.

There is a dyadic interplay of language without the pretense of equality between the two participants (such as is claimed by Rogers, Perls and Maslow within Humanist psychotherapy (Richards, 1989, p. 117). Winnicott understood and used quasi-direct dis- course in his work with children when he identified a “transitional zone” where the paradox of who is whom in such an exchange is allowed to remain. In this zone the subject comes-to-be out of the mixture of fantasy and external reality, of self-image and the look of the other, reproducing the earliest experiences of infancy.

To quote Finlay (1988, pp. 4O~ll):

The genius of Winnicott’s practice and theory of psychoanalytical discourse lies in the fact

ART THERAPY IN POST-MODERN ERA 239

that it did not refuse the observations of Post- Modernism concerning the nature of the subject and discourse. It began with the Post-Modem crisis, the “unreality” of the subject, and with the material as opposed to “semantic” nature of discourse. He then used this materiality of discourse, discourse as holding, as etching its way to feelings, as union and separation of membranes/surfaces, rather than discourse as interpretation, to allow the person a playful- ness, a merging with the therapist, while rec- ognising simultaneously the joining and separa- tion entailed. Out of this experience, the patient could come to have a sense of substance as self-relatedness-to (not merely cut off from) other. In contact and deferral of contact, be it verbal, sonorous, chromatic, olfactory, or physical, the individuals adapt to each other, an indication that each has a being but that being is dependent on or joined to that of the other, not just referred to by it.

The therapist and client (like the mother and baby) etch on each other’s “identity yet separation,” in a discourse described by Trevarthen (1993) as a “con- vergent emotional narrative”-the mother/baby lan- guage-game producing narrative cohesion without semantics, relying on the corporeal, musical, poetic, tactile aspects of language, those very aspects that

subsequently translate into semantic narrative as we discuss their images with our clients.

I said that these socio-discursive tools could be used for digging into our past too. By excavating and analyzing the numerous overlapping discourses that have made and are still making our practice, we will see that the history of art therapy is a history of in- creasingly useful metaphors rather than the story of an increasing understanding of how things are.

References

Finlay, M. ( 1988). P osrmodernism and psychoanalysis. Paper pre- sented at the School of Art Therapy, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Foucault, M. (1973). Madness and civilization: A history of insan- ity in the age of reason. New York: Vintage.

Habermas, I. (1971). Knowledge and human interests. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Lowenstein, R. (1956). Some remarks on the role of speech in psychoanalytic techniques. Inr. J. Psych.-Anal., 37, 460466.

Madonnell, D. (1986). Theories of discourse. Oxford: Basil Black- well.

Richards, B. (1989). Images of Freud. Cultural responses in psy- choanalysis. London: Dent & Sons.

Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency. irony and solidariry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Trevarthen, C. (1993). Expressive communications. Paper pre- sented with Ellen Dissanayake at the School of Art Therapy, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Ham- mondsworth Penguin.

Wittgenstein, L. (1972). Philosophical investigafions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.