ABSTRACT
What are the origins of the vital human need for art? And what are the connections between our capacity to imagine—to create metaphor—and the therapeutic process? Early human cave art indicates that—through visual images, music, and storytelling we began to construct “sacred spaces” and performative rites. This suggests that, since the dawn of our species, the arts and mythmaking have enabled us to grieve our loss of an earlier hominid embeddedness in nature—to bear our aloneness in the universe, and manage the newly emerged existential anxieties we faced when we came to use language—and to be potentially trapped by it. We evolved the capacity to use the visceral power of metaphorical imagination within a relational context to create a sense of meaning and agency that partially transcends the limits of language. Through a clinical narrative the author views art and treatment in light of how both patient and therapist use “potential,” or “transitional,” space to experience, share, and transform the personal and existential dilemmas that haunt the human condition.
