The psychopathology of everyday art: a quantitative Study - World ...

Case study and controlled research has largely ignored cautions and tried to
codify symbols or signs, relationships between, and distortion of, images by relating
explanations to a theory of the unconscious in an apparent attempt to produce an
analogical translation that was largely unsuccessful.
Case studies of artists were more concerned with the debate as to intentionality
and generalisability of illustrations of what has been seen as psychopathology to other
psychiatric populations. This has also been largely unsuccessful.
The general direction of the impressionistic or discursive literature indicates that
only the patient has access to signs. The job of the therapist is to gain access to that
very personal language and delicately manipulate it. But unless the language is universal,
or at least common to a particular group, which most research insists that it isn't, it is
futile to try and chart it except retrospectively to extract general principles for the
charting of another individual course. This has now become the general direction of case
study research.
Research based on the idea that art is healing in itself, because it produces a
remote tangible communication outside the patient but from the patient to himself, rather
than from the therapist, tended toward the 'nurturing' case study. The emphasis on the
therapeutic relationship relies on the assumption of communication through the artwork
as the main outcome for the integrity of the therapy as art-related. The use of art was not
found to be inherently related to the therapy but provided a receptive atmosphere, which
could presumably be achieved in other ways.
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