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

Others have given summaries of the immense influence of Freud and Jung on art
evaluation 21 , both need no introduction here. Freud never used drawings in his work, but
his model of the artist as a borderline psychiatric case became the public view of the
'unconscious made visible' of the artist's work. Freud's deconstruction of the work of
Leonardo and Michelangelo 22 was probably his influential contribution to the technique
of interpretation 23 . Jung painted and sculpted and encouraged his patients to do the same
"in order to escape the censure of the unconscious mind" 24 . He rejected Freud's negative
view of phantasy as a source of unconscious or as sublimations of infantile conflicts. He
made a distinction between personal and collective unconscious, and based his
interpretations and assumptions concerning archetypes 25 and universal symbols 26 on a
21
MacGregor (1989) op.cit., pp.245-270 gives a perspective of Freud and Jung's limited involvement in
true psychotic art and the development of method and theory from Kris; Joy Schaverien (1992) op.cit.,
takes particular aspects from psychoanalysis to develop her own methods for art therapy and evaluation,
but gives a very clear explanation of transference and counter transference; Ellenberger (1970) op.cit.,
shows the development from the theories of Freud to today's 'dynamic psychiatry'; Waller (1991) op.cit.,
presents a perspective of the synthesis of methods in psychoanalysis for
interpretation of art in therapy in Britain from 1940, and Maxine Borrowsky Junge and Paige Pateracki
Asawa (1994), A History of Art Therapy in the United States , Mundelein: Am. Art Therapy Assn., review
the art therapy literature which summarises the contributions of first and second generation art therapists
in America but is generally less theoretically orientated. For a more in-depth analysis of psychoanalytic
methods in art, E. Kris (1964), Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art , New York: Intl. U. P., and R.
Wollheim (1964), Art and its Objects Cambridge (reprint 1980): Writers Readers, probably give the most
understandable explanations. Books on art therapy generally are too simplistic and use a synthesis of
different methods with no overall context.
22
Laurie Schneider Adams (1993) Art and Psychoanalysis , New York: Harper Collins gives a perspective
on Sigmund Freud (1910), Leonardo Da Vinci - a memory of his childhood, Art and Literature, Pelican
Freud Library , V.XIV, Harmondsworth: Penguin, mostly derived from his childhood memories and
speculations on the infancy of Leonardo. It was in The Moses of Michelangelo, ibid., (1914) that he
explored expression in the artwork.
23 But he made a number of assumptions based on faulty translation of Italian histories.
24
C.G. Jung and R. Wilhelm (1931), The Secret of the Golden Flower , London: Macmillan, p.94;
Schaverien (1992), op.cit., gives a good description of the concept of the 'unconscious' and its application
to modern day art therapy pp.22-25.
25
Archetypes in art; inherited unconscious images that are component parts of the 'collective unconscious'
shared by all.
26 Universal symbol: a symbol that is assumed to represent the same referent universally. Such symbols
23