Visual art dialogue in personal psychological learning: a private journey with public relevance

Understanding and managing emotion in psychological therapy is a complex and challenging problem for practitioners and clients. The traditional emphasis on verbal language as the mediating process in therapy is expanding with the inclusion of multimodal creative arts, based on visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic perceptions, to better support the reaccessing of emotion. This can be followed recursively by the use of words to develop narrative and meaning. The main research emphasis in this thesis was on visual art. Studies of other art forms may follow. Philosophical understanding, neuroscience advances and developments in psychological therapy underpin and explain this therapeutic expansion. A qualitative research approach is taken, engaging several different actions from within that research paradigm. The thesis is written as a metaphorical journey and conveys the experience of art dialogue and the experience of researching, as parallel stories. Psychological learning journeys undertaken by its author and a colleague, some clients, therapists and teachers, are described in three encounters. The first encounter explored visual art dialogue as a process addition to a developing experiential phenomenological approach using multimodal creative arts (The MIECAT Process - Lett 2001). The objective was for the colleagues to experience a lengthy creative arts sequence, developing and undertaking the process of visual art dialogue. Multilevel actions and outcomes were recorded throughout the collegial engagement. The collegial encounter required that the co-researchers pursue their own personal psychological meanings and report on their experience of the process. Personal narrative meanings exposed in exploring visual art dialogue, are not discussed, the emphasis being on confirming how actions occurred and their effectiveness for application. Actions stopped where direct verbal therapeutic engagement might occur. Following collegial experience, visual art dialogue was used with clients and other therapists and teachers, to question its broader relevance. The second inquiry, involving three clients of the author, asked how the process would support professional actions in a therapeutic situation. The third encounter engaged other therapists and teachers to expand on questions of by whom and how, art dialogue could be used. Psychological therapy theory suggests process location within a humanistic framework, in an eclectic focus or supporting the development of an experiential, phenomenological psychology process approach based on the known functions of mind and body. The associated personal and professional aspects of the experience of process exploration constituted a step in authorial understanding and may contribute to increasing knowledge of the creative arts applied to psychological therapy.