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

Gestalt Analysis
Rudolph Arnheim has been a seminal influence on the development of art therapy 47 . His
was also the monumental figure who presented the most comprehensive and unifying
framework for perceptual, emotional, expressive and cognitive-development for the
interpretation of the visual arts, Gestalt theory. The principles of Gestalt, therefore,
pervade much present day thinking about the assessment of artworks by art therapy
clients 48 and must therefore be mentioned.
The meaning of visual data was seen at three distinctive and individual levels: the
representational and recognisable; in symbol systems; and the abstract understructure,
the form of everything we see 49 . Any visual event is a form with content but the content
is highly influenced by the significance of the constituent parts, such as colour, tone,
texture, dimension, proportion and their compositional relationships to meaning.
47
see The Arts in Psychotherapy 1994, V.21(4) passim. Shaun McNiff and Bruce Moon, two prolific and
influential recent authors of art therapy texts and discussions, acknowledge their debt to Arnheim as do
others (McNiff, Celebrating the Life and Work of Rudolf Arnheim, p.247-8, and Rudolf Arnheim: A
Clinician of Images, p.249-260; Moon, What Kind of Art Therapy, p.295-298). Arnheim himself gives
an interesting brief perspective on his interest in expression, The Thoughts That Made Me Move, p.245-6.
Arnheim has been on the editorial board of the journal, The Arts in Psychotherapy since the 1970s.
48
see Dalley and Case, 1992, op.cit. Chapter 6, traces the development of psychoanalytic understanding
(from the point of view of art therapy) to the theories of A. Ehrenzweig (1967, The Hidden Order of Art ),
dealing with the unconscious structure of the work, actually at odds with the surface constructions of
Gestalt theory but are here integrated and seen as the predecessors of writers such as Adrian Stokes, painter
and aesthetician, with such statements as: "Stokes saw the work of art itself as an individual separate
object, differentiated, yet made of undifferentiated material" (p.133). The influence of Arnheim can be seen
in much of the description of assessment of art therapy, for example, in the reasons for rejection of
molecular analysis for the global assessment of the whole picture (for example in Wadeson, 1980 op.cit.)
and in descriptions of how the client experiences art in therapy. A recent example of the new 'empathetic'
research approach appears in the description of a client's experience of art therapy: Judith Quail and R.W.
Peavy (1994) A phenomenological research study of a client's experience in art therapy, Arts in
Psychotherapy , V.21(1): 45-57.
49
Donis A. Dondis (1973), A Primer of Visual Literacy Cambridge: MIT Press, p.13.
30