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Therapeutic painting
contents
- Repressed painting
- Target groups of a painting therapy
- The creative process
- C.G Jung and Arno Stern
- expressive painting
- Painting in dialogue
- Pictorial thinking
- Pictures of the mentally ill
- Vincent van Gogh
- Caspar David Friedrich
This method helps with mental states in which the affected person is "flooded" with stimuli and experiences in order to settle and concentrate through painting, for example in hypomanes and bipolars.
Painting allows one to perceive one's own world, the unconscious, one's own imagination, but also experiences, experiences and thoughts. This is particularly important in patients who have lost their meaning of life, for example, in depression. The repressed and the stored transforms into a visible and comprehensible reality. The affected person understands better what is fermenting in him.
Painting Therapy: Find the inner peace. Picture: klickerminth - fotolia Painting encourages communication and contact as well as spatial orientation, visual memory and visual perception, it strengthens concentration, it balances motor processes. It improves the body perception and slows down inner restlessness, it leads to relaxation and gives a sense of achievement; it detracts from the pathological patterns of the disease (which may be important for depressives or borderline patients, for example). It shows lost aspects of the self, opens the way for new solutions, and enhances the ability to experience.
Repressed painting
Mentally affected persons often suffer from experiences that they can not or do not consciously remember. But the repressed stores itself in the unconscious and robs energy, because fears and blockages arise, which the brain associates with the key event. Painting is, unlike any other method, suitable for bringing these events back into consciousness, because we think in pictures.
The image of a mermaid floating against the light in a deep-sea cave might, for example, remind the person concerned of an experience of deep depression, but in which he drew a spark of hope.
People who have trouble articulating their conflicts find a way to express their feelings through painting therapy.
Malt therapies work in the relationship between therapist and client, in the design of the (mental) space, they sharpen the perception, and they serve to reshape the self.
Target groups of a painting therapy
Malt therapies help almost everyone. Mentally healthy people can try themselves so, get to know unexpected aspects and goals of their own, and mentally handicapped can cure painting. Malt therapies help children with physical, mental and mental harm, people with physical disabilities who can not communicate with language, as well as people with intellectual disabilities.
Traumatized, victims of violence and depressives, who can not or do not want to talk about their experiences, open themselves better by painting than by most other therapies. Malt therapies are suitable for people of all ages, who go through mental crises, and also for the seriously ill and cancer patients.
Painting today accompanies psychiatry such as addiction therapy, neurology, orthopedics, psychosomatics, geriatrics, oncology and rheumatology.
The creative process
The painting therapy is not about the artistic quality of the picture. When expressing, unlike, for example, the Rorschach test, the meaning is not that the therapist interprets the picture. The therapy is rather the painting itself.
When painting, the affected person recognizes connections between himself and his environment and expresses his own reality. This is an essential aspect of self-awareness, and now sufferers and therapists can think about solutions. The painting therapy also opens up ways to express oneself, which were previously mostly closed to those affected.
Painting promotes concentration. Therefore, it is suitable for children with the diagnosis ADHD, who can do something without compulsion until the end.
The painting therapy is also a "chameleon". It can be combined with a variety of other therapies.
C.G Jung and Arno Stern
Carl Gustav Jung's big topic was the unconscious of man. He set forth a doctrine of archetypes rooted across cultures in the collective unconscious of humanity. Jung also dealt intensively with pictures: he analyzed and collected pictures of his patients.
In particular, he dealt with mandalas, symmetrical circular images that, according to Jung, express the unconscious. He recognized such mandalas as dream images and as symbols flashing in the psyche in crises. According to Jung, mandalas have an order and serve to organize chaotic states of the psyche.
According to Jung, every person carries around unconscious images that can be expressed through painting. The condition for this is spontaneity. He did not see the success of this painting in the interpretation, but in the process itself, anticipating today's expression.
Arno Stern put the Jungian pictorial theory into practice. He developed a method in which the images are neither analyzed nor discussed. Stern started from a communication of the painter with the matter, this image communication was supposed to arouse the expression painting.
expressive painting
In terms of expression painting, it does not matter what one paints and the aesthetic value of the result. The painter should feel as independent as possible.
The painting room should be completely protected from interference, no street noise, no bright light, and best of all no windows. All present should be participants at the same time. The head of the painting class is not considered a role model.
Expressive painting takes place standing - the whole body paints. The painting room is lined with painting walls, in the middle is a table with the colors. Brushes, spatulas, sponges, but also your own hands serve as a painting tool.
Let all emotions out. Picture: by Lieres - fotolia The painter accompanies the painters, encouraging them and "letting go" of everything, sharing their experiences and keeping an eye on the picture. The painter strives to keep the atmosphere calm.
Painting in dialogue
Painting in dialogue serves to create and master mental processes. In therapy with children, this method is particularly effective in arrested children, children with dyslexia and reading impaired and ADHD.
For children who have trouble expressing themselves in words, be it speech weakness or inhibitions, the color dialogue is an opportunity to get in touch with other people. Free painting inspires imagination, initiates self-healing, resolves fears and blockages. Children with damaged self-esteem learn to make something special out of themselves. The psychic strength increases, those affected feel better and develop self-confidence.
It takes about three to twelve months to treat children with children, and after a few weeks, the first effects on the psyche appear. The therapist sits opposite the child, and they communicate with colors, so they take turns painting.
Painting as dialogue is possible with couples, ie patient / therapist as well as partners, but also as a group dialogue, for example with a family or the team of a company.
Images that arise spontaneously in therapeutic painting reveal much. For example, people with developmental problems painted cave images resembling womb mothers. Clients suffering from paranoia paint countless eyes that they observe, while Manic paint over their pictures until they lose any structure.
Pictorial thinking
Children think in pictures before they learn to speak. These mental images become more complex over the years and in exchange with the environment. In adults, however, pictorial thinking atrophies in our society.
Many patients of a painting therapy begin to bring beautiful stereotypes to the canvas: blue sky, bright sun and happy people. Some clients are afraid to be considered ill, others paint the world beautifully because they are afraid of their inner states. Here it is the task of the therapist to ask those affected to paint unfiltered. With a compassionate therapist, the bleaker but more lifelike images increase from one lesson to the next.
Many sufferers are once overwhelmed, completely free to paint. First of all, you need predefined structures, for example mandalas. Incidentally, mandalas are suitable even for patients who are in an acute psychosis.
In the painting therapy is dispensed with difficult painting techniques. Pictures of schizophrenics and traumatized individuals often directly draw an undifferentiated inner life onto the canvas. The person concerned would be overwhelmed to implement these inner images with regard to perspective or lines. The freer he is from such instructions, the more thoroughly he can put his trauma in color.
If the patients are particularly inhibited, mandalas are a good way to get started. With them, the therapist can gently introduce him to other, simple painting techniques. The patient should start painting immediately, if possible, so as not to be in the grip of fears next time.
If the patient sits indecisively in front of the white sheet, the therapist may inspire him or give him or her assistance, either premature or otherwise. However, if the affected person already paints, the therapist should hold himself back, so as not to distort the images with foreign defaults.
The therapist should create a confidential atmosphere so that the patient paints authentically and is not afraid to be ashamed of the "demons of his unconscious".
Even though the therapist has learned image analysis, he should avoid far-reaching interpretations as much as possible. Such interpretations are often misleading. In addition, they often unsettle the patients so that the flow of images falter.
Direct questions to the patient about his image are allowed and strengthen the relationship of trust. However, asking questions means expressing the therapist's perception while at the same time asking the patient how he views his image. If the patient is too intimate with the question, he should not be pressured to answer it.
Pictures of the mentally ill
The pictures of the mentally ill have long been the subject of research. Around 1900, physicians even thought that they were able to determine the nature of the disease by the nature of the images. That did not work.
Still in 1962, the psychiatrist Helmut Rennert claimed that he could recognize the images of schizophrenics by 34 formal characteristics. Coated shapes, multiple heads or limbs and a recurring motif. In addition, schizophrenics would fill every open space with ornaments. Such "criteria" can be arbitrarily detected even in non-schizophrenics, and such schemes were not tenable.
In the 1920s, the art historian Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933) in Heidelberg collected over 5000 drawings, oil paintings and wood carvings of patients of the Psychiatric Clinic. He said explicitly that there are no criteria to recognize the art of the mentally ill.
Today, art therapy is part of every clinic that treats people with emotional problems. Ideally, the images develop a conversation between the doctor and the patient about the feelings expressed in the colors and shapes.
The Surrealists were enthusiastic about the art of the mentally ill and took them as direct role models of their own works. Salvador Dali bathed in the absurd and the fantastic. Today works by schizophrenic artists such as Adolf Wölfli, Aloise Corbaz, August Natterer, Louis Soutter or Oswald Tschirner are famous.
Psychosis, creativity and art are close together. Why this is so, psychologists and neurobiologists discuss today. In any case, psychoses sometimes release creativity from people who previously had little to do with art.
In an acute psychosis, the structural patterns in the brain change, unleashing a previously contained creative potential. Emotions rise, depression alternates with euphoria, but above all, structural components break down, leading to hallucinations, and associative thinking loses its grip.
Pictorial thinking floods conceptual thinking, while in healthy adults the conceptual limits pictorial thinking. The unconscious pushes to the surface. The sensations gain the upper hand over form and figure.
The person concerned tries to classify the new delusional impressions in his "normal" experience structure. So he systematizes his delusion. It ranges from persecution or doomsday delusion to hypochondria and guilt. It becomes exciting for the sick, who are so overwhelmed by impressions, that they transform them by trying to express the received symbols, for example as pictures. With them arises what can be described as psychotic art.
For a long time psychiatrists have been building a new life as free-lance artists, and ateliers of the mentally handicapped are widespread.
Vincent van Gogh
The most famous painter with mental problems was Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). He painted all of his paintings in the last ten years of his short life. Van Gogh cut an ear after a quarrel with his friend Paul Gauguin. In 1889, Van Gogh painted himself with his ear and pipe cut off.
The doctors diagnosed epilepsy, but it was psychic delusion. Chroniclers surpassed themselves after Van Gogh's death with diagnoses. There are many indications of bipolar illness; in any case, the artist suffered from depressions, nightmares and delusions that accompanied him to the end of his life and appeared in spurts. He spent his last time in the mental hospital Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. There he was allowed to paint for therapeutic purposes, here was his painting "Starry Night".
He suffered a severe attack, swallowed poisonous colors (a suicide attempt?) And died in poverty.
Caspar David Friedrich
"Of Friedrich must write once in detail, hanging over him for a few years a thick murky cloud of mentally unclear states while they lead him to harsh injustices against his own people, who openly I have spoken out against him, have completely replaced him." Carl Gustav Carus
Caspar David Friedrich, a major painter of the Romantics, also suffered from mental health problems. Yet romanticism is an art form, in particular the Black Romanticism, which shaped melancholy just as much as the exploration of the border worlds between man and the environment. It is forbidden to interpret such artistic devotion to mental states of demise as the pathology of artists. In Friedrich, however, there were clear signs of a disease.
His contemporary Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert wrote: "to the deepest seriousness as well as to the gayest joke, which is often found among the most distinguished melancholy and comedians. For the fact that Frederick was of the highest degree of melancholy temperament was known to all who knew him and his story as well as the basic tone of his artistic work. "
Mental problems of great painters must not lead to the fallacy, a painting therapy would glorify the psychiatric symptoms. For Maltherapien it is by no means to find in the "delusion of genius", and the pictures should not end up in the Kunsthalle. The patient should get to know each other better and find himself in a new balance. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)