ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand the relationship between the art and psychoanalytic fields of therapeutic practice. Psychoanalytically informed art therapy recognizes this and attempts to facilitate patients’ spontaneous expression in a variety of media—paint, clay, or collage. Sigmund Freud likens psychoanalytic cure to land reclamation, in which the ego takes over that which originally belonged to the id. These concepts lead to the ideas that imaginative modes of mental functioning—including creative or aesthetic processes, characteristic of the predominance of primary-process thoughts—are symptomatic of deep-rooted problems or more infantile modes of thinking. Some schools of thought emphasize the verbal interpretation of the art process and content, while others lay their emphasis on the integrative factors of the art process itself. The relationship between patient and therapist leads us to consider how one of the fundamental cornerstones of psychoanalytic theory and technique has been adapted within art therapy—that is, the transference relationship.
