The Brooklyn Rail

On the front page of the International Herald Tribune some years ago¹ there was a photograph of a homeless child, not quite asleep, lying on sheets of cardboard amid the urban debris of Jakarta. The caption read: “In Asia Poverty is Winning.” What makes this image still memorable for me is that the boy wore a bright red Spider-Man mask over his head as he laid there, engulfed in squalor, but lost in reverie. I continue to find myself thinking about that child imagining himself into another reality. The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett writes in How Emotions Are Made that “everything you perceive around you is represented by concepts in your brain,”² that those concepts, not the physical environment around you, constructs your perception of reality. “When you look at a rainbow,” she explains, “you see discrete stripes of color.… But in nature, a rainbow has no stripes—it’s a continuous spectrum of light, with … no borders or bands of any kind.… Speech also is continuous—a stream of sound.… You use concepts to categorize the continuous input … into syllables and words.”³

That images resemble Feldman Barrett’s account of words in permitting us to structure—and reorganize—our reality is the premise of art therapy, which has long been viewed as a minor sidebar to both art and psychology. Yet art therapy seems to be emerging with vigor of late, alongside the growing concern with PTSD since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In a new book called Modernism, Art, Therapy,⁴ Suzanne Hudson and Tanya Sheehan have assembled a series of essays by a diverse collection of authors that situate art therapy within a much more complex postmodern perspective, threading it through intellectual history (including modernism), studio practice, social activism, and the health sciences. But any discussion of art therapy depends upon our understanding of representation in the brain.

Most neuroscientists accept the theory of “constructed emotion,” asserting that the brain selects input from the world, accepting some information and ignoring the rest as noise. Feldman Barrett also shows how words organize that information, aggregating the actions of many dynamic neural networks in the brain to function, like a computer shortcut, into what she calls “concepts.” The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses the term “dispositional representations.”⁵ From Descartes’ Error (1994) to his new book Feeling and Knowing (2021), he, more than anyone, has elevated the importance of “feelings” in this process, describing them as “just as cognitive as other percepts.” As Damasio points out, “A feeling is the momentary ‘view’ of a part of [the] body landscape,” a continuous monitoring of the body’s internal state. “The sense of that body landscape is juxtaposed in time to the perception or recollection of something else that is not part of the body—a face, a melody, an aroma—feelings end up being ‘qualifiers’ to that something else.”⁶ Taken as a whole, “the reasoning system evolved as an extension of the emotional system, with emotion playing diverse roles in the reasoning process.”⁷ James Russell and others have also written about “core affect” and the altering “properties of stimuli, motives, empathy, emotional meta-experience, and affect versus emotion regulation.”⁸

Suffice it to say that we don’t perceive in analog—seeing like a camera. The millions of cells of the retina, for example, respond to different aspects of light input (color, contrast, and so on) and bundle them into more complex units of data that travel across the optic nerve, as electrical signals (“action potentials”) into the brain. The optic nerve has only half as many cells as the retina, hinting at the consolidation that has already taken place even before entering the optic nerve. In the brain this input undergoes further transformation, connecting with many dynamically and spontaneously generating networks of neurons, called upon to process the data into what Feldman Barrett calls a “concept.”

Feldman Barrett does a brilliant job of describing this aggregation process. She also points to a still underlying problem in science around the notion of essentialism. Darwin, she points out, shook up the entire history of science that preceded him with the Origin of Species in 1859 by replacing Plato’s, and then Kant’s, idea of “the thing in itself,” an immutable paradigm, with an unstable something that perpetually reinvents itself through evolution. Feldman Barrett offers an unforgettable illustration of a dog show in which judges measure each golden retriever against a perfect representation of the species. But that example doesn’t actually exist, she notes. The goldens are always evolving, (mostly improving) through impurities in each generation.

Much of science is still in the thrall of essentialism, the idea of rigorous reduction to an essential, immutable fact. Even Darwin himself followed up the Origin of Species with his essentialist treatise of 1872 on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. (When great minds go wrong, they often go far wrong). Feldman Barrett’s “concepts,” persuasively argue for “construction” and against essentialism. Yet, while we can probably all acknowledge that the proverbial tree falling in the forest doesn’t make a sound if no one hears it—because we need a brain to structure the mechanical waves into a crashing sound—the idea that, as she says, the tree does fall and produce waves, leaves us once again with an essentialist conundrum.

Representation in the brain is still an unresolved and important issue in neuroscience. Feldman Barrett makes clear that the neural networks which form “concepts” reconfigure themselves, calling on neurons that function dynamically in the moment. They bring together previous constructions and modify them with new input. So much of what we see comes not from the eye but from such networking—some practiced, some new. She also explains that no particular brain region or neuron always plays the same role and she convincingly demonstrates the role of words as a way of getting more quickly to the neural system that constitutes a “concept.”

The same, however, may be said of visual images too; something Feldman Barrett doesn’t address. As I have written elsewhere, images (like words) “help us to organize our thoughts and to represent them in our memory.”⁹ Damasio uses the term “image” more broadly to mean not only language and visual forms but also constructed perceptions of body states as well. The neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee makes the argument that a great artist must be articulate even if the core expression of his or her work remains ineffable: “exhausting the effable (and the mismatches they highlight) is a ladder that an artist climbs to reach an ineffable state.” He cites the artist Robert Motherwell, who said: “In my life I have never met a first rate painter, who was not highly intelligent and extremely articulate in his own terms.”¹⁰

Hudson and Sheehan call the first of the three sections of their book “Pedagogy” and begin with an account of Margaret Naumburg, a founding figure in art therapy from the late 1940s. Rooted in Freud and the pioneering educational theories of Maria Montessori, “Naumburg became interested in the impact that art, psychology, and education could have on healing inner turmoil and conflict,”¹¹ Julian Chehirian writes in the first essay of the book. Like her contemporary, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, “Naumburg believed that images were more potent than language in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.”¹² Surprisingly, Chehirian does not mention Klein, although her innovation of the psychoanalysis of children using toys and images led to her primary role in the development of object relations theory. Nevertheless, Chehirian’s account of Naumberg’s work, together with the essays that follow, provide a much-needed narrative of art therapy since World War II. Other essays in the section on “Pedagogy” fill in the history with more central figures such as Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942, where despite the circumstances she continued to work with children there) and Edith Kramer, her American disciple and an important advocate for art therapy in the United States.

From the Bauhaus master Johannes Itten, who influenced both Kramer and Dicker-Brandeis in the teens, to Moholy-Nagy’s rehabilitation program after World War II, the pages that follow detail the influences of the Bauhaus and Bauhaus masters in American education, and the contributions of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Modernism, Art, Therapy expands our thinking around art therapy to encompass broader cultural tendencies. For example, the way in which late sixties “encounter groups” found their way into art school curricula and even into studio practice. This section ends with a discussion of Lygia Clark and her hybrid practice of art and psychoanalytically-informed therapeutics.

“Clinic,” the second section of the book, includes Georgette Seabrooke Powell who comes into view for her “artistic career shaped by defiant and transgressive crossings between disciplines and institutions,” and her advocacy of “Black aesthetics in art therapy.”¹³ Historicized in the context of racism and in the marginalization of mental illness, Brazilian modernism receives particular and warranted attention here for its view of “itself as marginalized by Europeans and, therefore, conscientiously engaged in a project of breaking down insider/outsider binaries.” Centered on John O’Reilly’s photo montage Talking with Whitman of 1984, this section also examines queer “art making in the context of education and therapy,” and finally in social activist video in New York in the 1960s.

“Clinic” elides into “Exhibition,” the final section of the book. Here, Elizabeth Lee examines self-healing as a motive in Matisse’s release of psychological distress through painting, serving “therapeutically to restore [the] artist’s health.”¹⁴ Then the book circles back to “an intense and growing institutional interest in the possibilities of art’s psychological, emotional, and physical benefits”¹⁵ from the aftermath of World War I to the present-day rethinking of art in therapy and of the broad presence of art in public spaces. The last essays attempt a more theoretical summing up. The first looks at some seventies conceptual arts, and the final one addresses “the art therapy studio installed at the Palais de Tokyo” in Paris to challenge the cultural definitions that reinforce “the notion that art produced in relation to therapeutic spaces remains ‘outside’ culture.”¹⁶

Taken together, these quite dissimilar books (How Emotions are Made and Modernism, Art, Therapy) offer two perspectives on how representation serves us. From this we may speculate on how our encounters with the irreducibly enigmatic experience of a work of art, even a work we have made ourselves, nurtures something essential to the way we meet the world. Manuel Borja-Villel, the former director of the Raina Sofia in Madrid has written that art, “is an enigmatic signifier whose radical ambiguity allows and even demands mobility of relations, the contingency of beings and things. The artistic experience is a transitional phenomenon because it generates an illusion in the spectator that prompts him to relate with others and with an environment which, though exterior, is not perceived as alien.”¹⁷ Feldman Barrett affirms Borja-Villel’s observation of the contingency of things and the defining idea of art therapy depends upon that transitional phenomenon. In the same way, the imaginative leap into the identity of Spider-Man helped that boy on the street in Jakarta to master the circumstances in which he found himself, giving him symbolic agency to restore ego integrity (that sense of being psychologically whole, of creating a resilient form for the self) as against the disintegrating assault of the world. To say this another way, art can articulate and reorganize the coming together of our experience of the environment and our inner life. At the same time, this allows us to take control of our future by providing a psychic space in which to shape our posture towards the world in which we will be living.¹⁸