Wild Wisdom, the Imaginal Universe of Self and Other
“How does the unconscious come out in the art?”
As a practising art therapist and lecturer, that is the most common question surrounding what I do. The question will show up in other guises such as:
“Will you be diagnosing me when you look at my art?”
“Will my art tell you my secrets?”
“My art is bad, I am bad.”
“Don’t look too closely. My art will give me away.”
Does the unconscious show up in our creativity? And if so, how? To begin to answer that, we must pause to consider what we mean by “the unconscious”. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis who first coined the phrase believed it was the personal and hidden mind of information in a person’s psyche, that if brought forward to consciousness would cure “neurosis”. Carl Jung, one of Freud’s contemporaries believed two components were buried within the human intelligence; one was the personal unconscious and the other collective: a universally inherited, historical store of images and patterns that we understand unconsciously and without explanation, such as the idea of the “hero/heroine”, the “prostitute” and the “trickster”. Jung believed that if we can consciously recognise, identify with and so unite with these adiaphorous patterns of personality and action we can bring light to the darkness of our unknown minds. And when we bring light, we can see clearly and we can see clearly we can then exercise a freedom of choice as to how we want to be in the world.
From a phenomenological standpoint, we cannot prove either way that the “unconscious” actually exists beyond concept, but in my experience I can say that there appears to be a universe of information just outside the borders of our usual waking consciousness that if attuned to can provide insights into the ways we happen to show up in society.
To begin, the body (the flesh and blood home you live in) is a rich, personal university of untapped knowings that, should you tune into it will elucidate vital information that if acted on can lead to your personal growth. As Wallin in Attachment Psychotherapy (2007) put it, the body is a house of “non-verbal, non symbolic" memories seated within your physical being, a neurological aggregate of all your experiences since the day you were conceived and became flesh. And these non-verbal and non symbolic memories are what have taught you everything you now know, since when you first greeted the world with your first gulp of oxygen. All you know, your body has taught you through your lived experience.
When we tune into this wealth of intelligence, we can begin to see our embodied selves demonstrating via our nervous system, blood, muscles, organs and flesh, wrapped in a delicate skin that meets the air outside us in ever-present response to the world out there. We act out what we are learning through imitation and instinctive responses to threat and desire, but most often we have not yet found a thought-form to express these actions into concrete meaning. The unthought knowns of daily living might be a certain embodied feeling you have when around a person or situation (dry mouth, or dizziness, or a dull boredom). Through the senses of the body (smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing) we have developed complex automatic reflexive performances that we continue to act out whether we notice it or not. And when we act unconsciously, to use such a historically loaded word, there is space for a gap to form between our beliefs about our actions and the actions themselves. Essentially, when we say we believe, feel and think a certain way, but our body, our behaviour, our acting out disagrees we are living in incongruence. This causes a split, or a tear in the mind, as we can no longer marry our experience with our actions with ease and so a dissonance and unfriendliness towards ourselves will settle in. We no longer know who we are and so will struggle to live with integrity. And when we struggle to live with integrity it will impact our relationships with others as we are no longer providing a clear mirror to see into and be seen.
Taking the time to reflect on our felt experiences and our actions, particularly in the safety of therapy, we can begin to recognise the patterns of the implicit learnings that are still alive in the here and now. To understand these patterns we don’t necessarily need to have a doctorate in psychiatry or sociology to recognise what we are doing, feeling, acting like. The best way to recognise these patterns is to look directly at how they show up in our relationships to discover the non-conscious patterns at work. When we engage in meaningful curiosity around our relationships and the way we live in and through them, we stand the chance to see what we implicitly “know” and can begin to examine what our life situation might be wanting to wake us up to, so to speak. When we seek to empathetically understand ourselves in action with another, we discover that all meanings surrounding our lived experience are co-created, and that no-one truly lives in isolation. The very fact you are reading this is evidence of a historical relationship on the physical plane which created you. And you are now engaging with my thoughts written down. We are psychically engaged together, though our mutual contemplation and action as your eyes read my words and you experience felt senses, thoughts and emotions in response.
As Gergen in Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community (2009) puts it, “To employ the words you and I is to create a world of separations”. To put it another way, where we meet, here, on the page, something new can be born.
So then, when we begin to work with art materials in the attuned presence of another, we begin to foreground and give voice to not only our bodily, felt sense relationship with the materials and the world outside of ourselves of objects and things, but also the implicit embodied and relational patterns that we carry with us into the present moment.
As an aside, the most common relational pattern people will bring to therapy is the pattern they played out with a caregiver, very often in years too neurologically tender to remember with much intelligibility and precision. Often, on an imaginal non-conscious level on the part of the client, the therapist stands in for a person the client turned to in childhood for care as they seek to get their relational needs met in the now. This is a wonderful occurrence as the therapist can then be afforded the opportunity through the use of imaginal empathy to offer insight to the client’s patterns should they sense it appropriate and helpful. Once the client can “see” who the therapist is standing in for in the present, the client is more equipped to understand the implicit meanings placed on the original embodied felt sensing, meanings towards the materials and the therapeutic relationship. This universal pattern of transference is no where more common than in our romantic attachments, when we are prone to symbolically relate to the object of our affections in the same way that we responded to the opposite gendered parent from our childhoods.
“In effect, all meaningful action is co-action”, says Gergen (2009).
And in my experience this is true, as is also the reverse; all co-action is meaningful. All acting together is the over-lapping meeting place of selves, the matrix of human experience.
So, to answer the question “How does the unconscious come out in the art?”
I offer this:
I understand myself as a sovereign individual and as a part of the ocean of interrelated human experience. Each time I interact with another, parts of myself, parts of my experiencing will foreground into my awareness. This will illuminate my needs and values and simultaneously your needs and values, that could easily be overlooked. Attending to the relational space (rather than theories about what may be in the “unconscious”) provides flexibility in the present moment. And the relationship connecting us is not resting on theoretical command but is the ever-shifting nexus of personal streams.
This relational place, the space where we meet, holds and connects the felt, embodied responses between two or more people. This sense of universal continuity between persons allows me to let go of insecurities, dissonances and control of the relational dynamic, to let go of whether I am right or wrong as Gergen (2009) describes and step into into the complex, woven collaboration of human connection.
References:
Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. Guilford Press.
Gergen, K. J. (2009). Relational being: Beyond self and community. Oxford University Press.