History • 51visual elements. One summer in New Mexico I accidentally came upon a Hopi Rain Dance,
an event not normally open to the public. One need only witness such a ritual, with its total
and passionate community involvement, to sense the awesome power of the arts in a culture
where they are still central and very much alive.
Art Therapy: An Idea Whose Time Had Come
In spite of these deeply entrenched roots, the climate had to be ripe for growth. We would prob-
ably not have discovered so many ways of using art in, for, and as, therapy, had not the late 19th
and early 20th centuries been so fascinated by the concept of the unconscious (DVD 3.4). This
idea was popularized not only in the depth psychologies of Freud (A) (1916 –1917) and Jung (B)
(1964, 1972), but also in the novels of James Joyce and the poetry of the French Symbolists.
Artists have always delved within for the source of their imagery as well as their creative
power. It was not until quite recently, however, that exploring, knowing, and represent-
ing the world within was articulated as a respectable aesthetic goal. Around the time that
psychoanalysts were beginning to plumb the mystery of dreams, Western artists were in
the process of giving up the representation of the outside world for the mysterious goal of
expressing the inner one.
They were attracted to what seemed more pure, less fettered expressions of man’s spirit,
such as the masks of Africa or the prints of Japan. And they set out—not to reproduce exter-
nal reality as before—but to reflect the reality of the soul. This was the goal of such artistic
techniques as automatic drawing. And it was the essence of movements like Expressionism
and Surrealism—to depict emotion through color and line—as in Edvard Munch’s The
Scream (C), or to show the irrational landscape of the dream, as in the paintings of Salvador
Dali (D).
Meanwhile, the artist himself was becoming more and more of a social outcast. No lon-
ger automatically supported by social structures like the church or royal patrons, he became
more starkly than ever the lone seer, a prophet who saw and told of things we didn’t always
want to know. And perhaps even more than in earlier eras, the artist became a creature of
glamour, as did the creative process itself.
Psychiatric Interest in Patient Art
Also during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some psychiatrists, stimulated by the
possibility that what had been thought to be irrational might make sense after all, became
fascinated by the spontaneous art of the mentally ill (DVD 3.5). People caught up in the
turmoil of a psychotic break, threatened by loss of contact with reality, frequently felt com-
pelled to create something as a way of coping with their confusion (A). Sculptures of bread
dough, and drawings on scraps of toilet paper (B) or walls, had long been noted in institu-
tions housing the insane (cf. Prinzhorn, 1922).
Around the turn of the century, a few psychiatrists began to collect the spontaneous art-
work of their patients. Although most “regarded them only as curiosities” (Plokker, 1965, p.
83), there were some notable exceptions. Paul-Max Simon, a French psychiatrist, published
the first serious studies of the drawings of the mentally ill (1876, 1888). He was joined by
Cesare Lombroso (1887), whose linking of genius with insanity is still being debated today.
In 1901 a French psychiatrist named Reja wrote about the art of the mentally ill, noting
three types. These early workers appreciated, even before the advent of depth psychology,
that patients’ products were related to their conflicts—that, as confusing as they often were,
they made a kind of psychological sense.