Excerpt from “Image and Eros: Expressive Arts Therapy”
Within the process of expressive arts experiences, the therapist and the client are brought into a world that blends the literal and imaginal, where they find a mutual effective reality that can reconnect to psyche and soul in a strong container of support and beauty.
Oceana Larsen
Expressive arts therapy is the humanistic process of creative connection, where images, in a multitude of possible forms, are expressed, layered and danced together for a deeper felt sense, awareness and cognitive understanding of experience, conflicts, and spiritual dimensions of the self. In general, the expressive arts processes help the client get in touch, become aware, and then process the past, present, the inner reality/consciousness, and the spirit/higher consciousness. It provides many ways to get in touch and identify feelings, explore unconscious material (especially shadow work), awaken individual creativity, gain emotional healing, release energy, gain insight, resolve conflict, and discover intuitive, mythological and spiritual dimensions of the self. It is a way of experiencing the totality of life, by providing a way of multisensory and multi-reality engagement. Because of this inclusiveness, individuals are able to access greater wholeness, and find equilibrium and balance in their lives.
Imagination, Reality and the Senses
Expressive arts psychotherapy, like any art practice, is an intimate engagement with the senses and imagination. The intermodal practices engage the whole body and the senses that reside within. Through those senses, the imaginal and metaphoric worlds are woven with the literal, and the poesis of life is engaged. For the imagination is not fantasy, or illusion, but rather a channel in which we can open to that which is beyond our conditioned perceptions. The “imagination is not a separate mental faculty (as we so often assume) but is rather the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible” (Abrams 1996, p. 58). “It is because the arts are rooted in the existential capacity of the imagination to transcend literal reality that they can serve to present alternative possibilities of being to us” (Levine & Levine 1999, p. 11).
In contemporary Western culture, literal reality is valued highly as the only reality. The literal reality is what we all agree upon as fact in Western culture. In the expressive arts, the imaginal reality of personal experience is also given a value. Both the imaginal and literal reality that we experience can be encompassed in the term effective reality. In Minstrels of Soul: Intermodal Expressive Therapy, the authors explains effective reality:
An effective reality may be explained also as the experience if engaging in an, ‘I-Thou’ relationship, which does not assume objectivity and is distant from a distancing ‘I-It’ relationship (Buber, 1983, p. 13). In an effective reality, soul is affected and manifests itself physically and psychologically in a real fashion. With the term, we follow closely Gadmar’s definition of effective history…. A proper hermeneutics of reality will have to disclose the effectivity of a reality as a foundation for its own understanding. Effective reality, therefore, exists within both the imaginal and literal realms… It is created by anything that we are in meeting with, anything that is acting upon us or upon which we are acting (Knill, Barba & Fuchs 2004, p. 62).
In effective reality, the imagination has a place of value and a voice. The poetic, mythic, aesthetic and spiritual threads of life experience are honored. As the literal is allowed to become more imaginal, the pressure and need to control life lifts and we rehydrate our consciousness and enter into a home of being ensouled in our own bodies. “The psychotherapeutic use of the arts offers an opportunity to integrate scientific knowledge about the psyche with the more imaginative and spiritual hemisphere of the mind, where the power to heal lies” (McNiff 1981, p. 7).
Expressive Arts and Soul (removed)
The Image (removed)
Conclusion
In conclusion, expressive arts therapy is an intermodal artistic exploration involving the imaginal realities, the senses, aesthetic response of love and multi-sensory images. These imaginal sensory images communicate through the arts to heal and empower the client and the world. Through engagement and love in this living dream world of images, we can tap into the deeper, meaningful and soulful aspects of life and creation. Dancing with the arts in these ways rehydrates our hearts and souls, providing for us a dreaming experience of life that most of us secretly yearn for in our mundane, day-to-day, literal realities. The expressive arts are an experience of the totality of life. By accessing all of our senses and multiple realities, we find a deeper sense of ourselves and a deeper sense of home in this world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous. New York: Vintage Books.
Hillman, J. (1991). A blue Fire. New York: Harper Perennial.
Levine, S. & Levine, E. eds. (1999). Foundations of expressive arts therapy: theoretical perspectives. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd.
Kremer, J. (1994). The Dark Night of the Scholar. In Looking for Dame Yggdrasil (pp. 9-36). Red Bluff, CA: Falkenflug Press.
Knill, P., Barba, H., & Fuchs, M. (2004). Minstrels of soul: Intermodal expressive therapy. Toronto, Ontario: E.G.S Press.
McNiff, Shaun (1981). The arts and psychotherapy. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher.
Rogers, N. (1993). The creative connection: Expressive arts as healing. Palo Alto, CA: Science & Behavior Books, Inc.