Jeremy Spiegel MD, Psychology Today Blogger and author of the books, Art Seeking and The Mindful Medical Student

Art seeking—a visual arts-based tool for self-healing—is a method I devised over a period of years due to my own personal experiences interacting with many kinds of art, as well as from observations of such interactions by patients, some of whom were artists. Throughout decades of encountering art in galleries, museums, sculpture parks, black-box video installations, and avant-garde films, I have used art as a means for psychological insight and emotional healing, first unwittingly then more consciously. Viewing art gradually became less a casual pastime and more an experience of deep communion with the themes, materials, and structures of artworks. Art gave me insights into myself unmatched by anything I had gleaned from years of psychotherapy, as useful as those often painful sessions may have been.

To derive the most from art seeking, it is important to understand its six functions: aesthetic, symbolic, participatory, permeability, transformative, and memory. The first function of art seeking, the aesthetic function, relates to interacting with an artwork’s physical qualities, rather than its subject matter like form, line, color, and texture. Such aesthetic qualities have often been described by philosophers and art historians as what elevates a work from a mere craft to art. Form, line, color, and texture may combine with subject matter to yield an inspired creation that “calls you,” stimulating your senses, awakening deep feelings at your core that compel you to reel in its presence, and sometimes even to experience the divine.

To pursue the aesthetic function, let your eye wander of its own volition over artworks, experiencing how line intersects with line or some materials seem to take on qualities of other materials without categorizing or criticizing what is before you so you can be open to spontaneous experiences. For example, lush, soft-appearing carpet might magically reveal its true composition as a bed of tiny upturned pins. When something soothes you, or jibes with your color preferences, feel it fully. If there is a sense of beauty emanating from found objects of Mylar balloons with cartoon figures streaming horizontally across a blue video sky, or an installation resembling a faux science experiment where live plants are grown in tanks of golf balls and fed with Gatorade, take it all in without making judgments, such as denigrating the seeming banality of the ideas contained within the art. As you look at a work from this purely sensual point of view, see if its external characteristics correspond to any of your thoughts or feelings capable of enlightening you about aspects of yourself.

The second function of art seeking, the symbolic function, has to do with the ways ideas, images, and symbols serve as hooks on which to hang your emotional baggage. Meaning emerges at various moments during an art seeking session as you make mental associations between particular symbols in the art and your feelings, behaviors, or patterns. Gleaning meaning from images in art—perhaps a torn shoe, a mountain, or disfigured nose—differs from absorbing feelings emanating from an artwork’s forms, colors, or textures.

The symbolic function complements the aesthetic function since it is about how ideas, images, or symbols in art, as opposed to the physical qualities of artworks, trigger self-reflection and healing. Studying art’s symbols and other recognizable elements can initiate self-reflection, helping you reaffirm what you sense is true about yourself and transform aspects of your personality to live more in sync with your hopes for the future.

Although this function can be effective while interacting with abstract art since certain forms, streaks, or dots might remind you of specific objects and thus initiate self-reflection, the symbolic function seems to work best with art that is at least somewhat representational. As an example, consider Two By Two, 2007, by Yeshe Parks. This complex, bizarre scene of creatures requires a long, uninterrupted time to search out the ideas, images, and symbols within it. A number of animal figures and one man emerge from mouths like a psychedelic riff on a biologist’s diagram explaining how a food chain works. All the creatures originate from one hollow horn of a humanoid’s strange spacesuit. The suit’s freakishly long arms rest on the ground in a way reminiscent of a pair of didgeridoos. Abstracted elephant trunks, a group of haggard people, and a solitary figure perched on a precipice float within a slate blue sea or sky. Drawings of the humans suggest leopard spots, zebra stripes, and tiger patterns. Curved fingerlike “guts” visible in the spacesuit’s midsection, collaged text “islands” or “clouds” formed from torn dictionary pages, an elephant trunk plugging a man’s mouth, and a figure scaling a crooked ladder add to the work’s inscrutability. Its very obscurity, however, allows viewers to project their own meanings from a multitude of possibilities. For instance, you might gain insight about an inhibiting metaphoric food chain causing you to consistently fall prey to predator coworkers. Alternatively, you might discover that your parents’ knee-jerk fundamentalist response to your life’s every frayed edge or gray area is no longer either useful or relevant to how you choose to live.

The symbolic function is the one that most closely resembles a psychological test, such as a Rorschach inkblot or Thematic Apperception Test that encourages self-revealing projection. Using art as a guide to free associate and recognize problems in your life by focusing on some scene, figure, image, design, or action, is akin to using a projective psychological test. Freud believed in the healing benefits of free association, and to make the most of art seeking it is necessary to develop this skill just as you would exercise to develop muscles. When a psychologist employs a projective test, the patient is asked to “read into” an inkblot or a sketch of a scene to reveal inner feelings, behaviors, and patterns, or possible conflicts. Similarly, in art seeking an image or design might remind you of thoughts or feelings that guide you gradually to focus on deeper psychological issues. While identification of an inkblot abstraction, by itself, may not provide much in the way of “interpretive richness,” if such descriptions are accompanied by a context, such as a black bat that’s swooping down to feed off young children, this may add sufficient information to determine that the person feels vulnerable and may see in the inkblot his history of victimization. Alternatively, the reading of another inkblot by an individual who perpetrates damage might be: “It looks like a squashed bug, like I just put my foot on it.”

In comparing art seeking with such psychological tools, you will learn to appreciate that your reactions to particular images or symbols in art have the potential to yield core psychological information about you, especially when the context connected with them is taken into consideration. For instance, in isolation an image of a peach pit may not seem to hold much value, but if you allow it to conjure up memories of a day when you discovered one beneath the sand at Jones Beach after a traumatic breakup with your partner, it serves a symbolic function. Using this example to further differentiate between the aesthetic and symbolic functions, it becomes apparent that while the aesthetic function would inspire associations with the pock-marked appearance of the peach pit, viewing it instead as a symbolic object might awaken a memory of a math teacher with acne-ravaged skin who once made out with your mother on the night of a parent-teacher conference. The symbolic function’s emphasis on emotional content rather than physical qualities helps art seekers better understand the roots of anxieties and problematic personality features in order to heal them.

The third function of art seeking, the participatory function, is concerned with how art pulls you into its world, either indirectly through the attraction of some particular element or directly through engagement in the artwork itself, such as a work depicting a leap onto gymnastics mats. In considering how you are called to participate and noting your responses, you can gain insights about yourself. And while the aesthetic function occurs when the art seeker is a passive receiver of physical stimuli such as textures and colors that may elicit feelings, the participatory function is initiated as the viewer actively merges with the art’s story, becoming an extension of the art.

In the participatory function, what the art looks like takes a backseat to how you participate in it and what the participation evokes in you. For example, when an artwork encourages you to enter a special space and look at rows of yellow foam “mattresses” on which impressions of reclining human figures have been created by what was “ripped,” you may examine the art like a doctor entering a ward in an antique hospital —a perspective that might cause you to consider the meaning of your obsessive thoughts about illness and death. Or when interacting with an artwork that calls on you to come behind a wall and choose a white club-like object to swing around in front of a mirror, you might reflect on your aggressive tendencies or lack of assertiveness. Even when an art seeker’s participation entails something less concrete, like deciphering a narrative thread from one hundred small pencil drawings arranged rectilinearly on a wall, the mental activity involved reflects the participatory function. In effect, the participatory function offers the art seeker evocative experiences that do not necessarily require jumping into a foam pit, such as the potential for inclusion in the experience of others, exercising the mind as an impetus for trying new things, and an invitation to become the art itself.

The fourth function of art seeking, the permeability function, relates to an artwork’s ability to penetrate your psychological defense mechanisms, making it easier to confront painful feelings and memories to aid healing. Compared with the participatory function, it works on a deeper, psychological level—even on your subconscious mind. Typically this requires a shock to penetrate the walls you put up to protect your vulnerable self. As an analogy, you cannot perform abdominal surgery without cutting through the skin, fascia, and muscle to get to the guts.

When art seeking serves the permeability function, boundaries between you and the art dissolve either gradually or abruptly. To facilitate permeability, look for an opening where you can insert yourself into the art. The mechanism of permeability, the interlacing of art and individual, is like two embryonic stem cells that initially grow as neighbors sharing a membrane, but which, due to a common purpose of proliferating tissue of a specific organ, eventually merge.

In effect, the permeability function involves specific aspects of your past, present, and anticipated future rather than the participatory function’s effect on your whole being, and when art seeking serves the permeability function the artwork has the capacity to cause more immediate reflection on core issues as opposed to more superficial ones. For example, when viewing a photographic image of a young married couple swinging from ropes within the confines of an apparently sparse bedroom space with no bed, you may see an elegant pairing, interpreting it as something you never experienced as a child of a single parent or in an intimate relationship with a lover. At such times, you will likely experience moments of interconnections with and dissociation from an artwork, much as you might after getting off an airplane in a place you have never seen before and feeling as if you are in a dream. It becomes like improvisational theater that you produce for an audience of one, yourself.

The fifth function of art seeking, the transformative function, is concerned with reconfiguration or renewal. Of all the art seeking functions, this one is the most alchemical, inviting a deep merging with an artwork that encourages you to broaden your perspective and alter your internal dynamics in such a way that you will never again be exactly the same person as before interacting with it. Using such art as catalyst might result in a breaking free from destructive behavior patterns or a major overhaul of parts of your personality.

If you have been working on core issues in psychotherapy, or using other art seeking functions, this function may help you intensify a process already in motion. Whatever symptoms of anxiety or issues of identity or coping you have before interaction with the art will become less powerful after the transformation. For example, a deepening connection to a particular work of art may help manifest results from a psychic process, such as after nine months of therapy, finally extracting yourself emotionally from a passive-aggressive, manipulative ex-husband.

Finally, the sixth function of art seeking, the memory function, has to do with two things: how art seeking triggers memories as a prelude to transformation and how specific interactions with art can be deposited in your memory bank to save for reinforcing further insights to promote healing. The memory function permits you to keep interacting with certain artworks long after the closing announcement on the museum’s PA system, allowing you to summon art seeking experiences when you need them most—in times of crisis or when grappling with negative thoughts and emotions. Further, this function involves not just recalling encounters with artworks but psychically retaining the essence of such experiences to sustain transformations and facilitate ongoing healing. You might visualize this as the essence of your positive transformation encapsulated in the form of a crystal that you slip into your mind’s pocket to carry into the future as a reminder of certain feelings and ideas or as a source of new power. Or alternatively, you might see this nugget as the essence of your core conflicts, the negative aspects you have confronted and discarded to make way for greater creativity and peace.

From Art Seeking: Interactions with Artwork for

Psychological Insight and Emotional Healing

by Jeremy Spiegel, MD

www.artseeking.com

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/bloggers/jeremy-spiegel-md

Learn more about the benefits of this fascinating form of art therapy through Jeremy's book and website. Remember also to keep visiting The Ultimate Stress Blog and perhaps the Guggenheim Museum.

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