So long as I help the patient to discover the effective elements in his dreams, and so long as I try to get him to see the general meaning of his symbols, he is still, psychologically speaking, in a state of childhood. For the time being he is dependent on his dreams and is always asking himself whether the next dream will give him new light or not. Moreover, he is dependent on my having ideas about his dreams and on my ability to increase his insight through my knowledge…
I have turned these hints to practical account, urging my patients at such times to paint in reality what they have seen in dream or fantasy. As a rule I am met with the objection, “But I am not a painter!” To this I usually reply that neither are modern painters, and that consequently modern painting is free for all, and that anyhow it is not a question of beauty but only of the trouble one takes with the picture…
Many of my more advanced patients, then, begin to paint.
Although my patients occasionally produce artistically beautiful things that might very well be shown in modern “art” exhibitions, I nevertheless treat them as completely worthless when judged by the canons of real art. As a matter of fact, it is essential that they should be considered worthless, otherwise my patients might imagine themselves to be artists, and the whole point of the exercise would be missed. It is not a question of art at all–or rather, it should not be a question of art–but of something more and other than mere art, namely the living effect upon the patient himself…
But why do I encourage patients, when they arrive a certain stage in their development, to express themselves by a means of brush, pencil, or pen at all?
Here again my prime purpose is to produce an effect. In the state of psychological childhood described above, the patient remains passive; but now he begins to play an active part. To start off with, he puts down on paper what he has passively seen, thereby turning it into a deliberate act. He not only talks about it, he is actually doing something about it. Psychologically speaking, it makes a vast difference whether a man has an interesting conversation with his doctor two or three times a week, the results of which are left hanging in mid air, or whether he has to struggle for hours with refractory brush and colours, only to produce in the end something which, taken at its face value, is perfectly senseless…
The concrete shaping of the image enforces a continuous study of it in all its parts, so that it can develop it effects to the full. This invests the bare fantasy with an element of reality, which lends it greater weight and greater driving power. And these rough-and-ready pictures do indeed produce effects which, I must admit, are rather difficult to describe.
For instance, a patient needs only to have seen once or twice how much he is freed from a wretched state of mind by working at a symbolic picture, and he will always turn to this means of release whenever things go badly with him. In this way something of inestimable importance is won–the beginning of independence, a step toward psychologically maturity. The patient can make himself creatively independent through this method, if I may call it such. He is no longer dependent on his dreams or on his doctor’s knowledge; instead, by painting himself he gives shape to himself.
For what he paints are active fantasies–that which is active within him. And that which is active within himself, but no longer in the guise of his previous error, when he mistook the personal ego for the self; it is himself in a new and hitherto alien sense, for his ego now appears as the object of that which works within him. In countless pictures he strives to catch this interior agent, only to discover in he end that it is eternally unknown and alien, the hidden foundation of psychic life.
It is impossible for me to describe the extent to which this discovery changes the patient’s standpoint and values, and how it shifts the centre of gravity of his personality. It is as though the earth had suddenly discovered that the sun was the center of the planetary orbits and of its own earthly orbit as well.
Collected Woks 16
Paragraphs 101-107
