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

The problems of secondary sources as data
Most research still relies on clinical observation of case studies and they comprise the
major part of the published literature. These reports suggest that the art produced by the
patient changes with improvement in the patient, and more contraversially that the act
of making the art promotes change in the patient. The generally accepted solution to the
recognised influence of the interpreter on the interpretation has been to have the patient
provide a verbal explanation of the picture 87 . So far, serious methodological difficulties
have not been recognised or addressed and reliable evidence for interpretive accounts is
not available 88 .
Presently, the measures which are used to assess art in therapy assess the
therapist's or the client's opinions of the psychotherapeutic process, or attempt to
correlate verbal interpretations with the visual products. The transformation to a verbal
explanation is useful, because the language of psychiatric diagnosis helps place the
elements of the picture in a clinical framework. However this transformation loses its
visual integrity of form as it places the emphasis on what the patient tells us, or even
what the therapist tells us, with a focus on interpretation of a covert message. In this
respect it loses the integrity of psychiatric diagnosis, in which form is implicit 89 . This
way of thinking about art has not been shown to be wrong, but it is difficult to test the
truth of it because of the problem that we have to rely on what people tell us about their
87
But that interpretation may not be a translation has been recognised, David Maclagan (1989), op.cit.;
H. Wadeson (1975) Is interpretation of sexual symbolism necessary? Arts in Psychotherapy,
V.2(3-4):233-
9.
88 Franklin and Plitsky (1992) Problems of interpretation, op.cit.
89 K. Jaspers (1963)
General Psychopathology (Manchester U.P., 7th ed. Eng. Trans.).
41