The Touch of Intelligence
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/SPI.2021.4.003Keywords
Arts Education, Arts Therapy, Affective Intelligence, Imagination, Beauty, MetamorphosisAbstract
I have yet to be persuaded that what arts therapists are doing with their clients either actually counts as art—rather than an applied form of occupational therapy—or seems likely to have any long-term effect on easing their suffering, other than by distraction and temporary companionship. I don’t for a moment doubt the relevance of the arts, properly so called, for individual and collective wellbeing—one of the aims of this paper is to spell out what that might mean—but
an art practice structured around the conventions of psychoanalysis seems to me entirely mistaken because, as a basis of legitimacy, it favours rationality and modelling over feeling and making good things.
Rational, analytical ways of knowing are a direct contradiction to the intuitive and imaginative procedures of art, where touch rather than talk does all the work. The arts offer to effect change in the patient from within rather than from without, via empathetic attunement between the therapist and the patient rather by than argument and persuasion on the one hand or compliance on the other.
References
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Collingwood R.G. (2013). The Principles of Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press
MacLeish A. (1984). Arts Poetica in Collected Poems, New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Ross M. (2011). Cultivating the Arts in Education and Therapy, Abingdon: Routledge.
Thomas D. (2003). Collected Poems, London: Everyman Editions.
Weil S. (2001), Gravity and Grace, Abingdon: Routledge.
Winnicott D. (2005). Playing and Reality, Abingdon: Routledge.
Witkin R. (1974). The Intelligence of Feeling, London: Heinemann Educational Books.
Wordsworth W. (1994). Collected Poems, London: Wordsworth Poetry Library.
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