The Suffering of the Arts

One of the most important writers in my life has been the psychologist James Hillman, whose books The Dream and the Underworld, Suicide and the Soul, The Myth of Analysis, and others, helped reshape my inner world, and whose insights even ended up working their way into many a Village Voice column. I even met him once! - and we corresponded a little afterward. This morning, similarly psychologically inclined microtonalist Kraig Grady sends out a paragraph, typical of Hillman's therapeutically upside-down view of the world, from the 1991 preface to an earlier book Emotion. I can't imagine anything more inspiring to get up and read on a Sunday morning (thanks, Kraig):

The field of art therapy has always imagined the use of the arts to be therapeutic either for the expressive release of the blocked psyche or for symbolism, sublimation and communication, which thereby allow the patient to give creative formulations to the disordered soul. I want to reverse this relation between art and therapy of emotion. I want now, and finally as a last thought, to suggest that therapy is useful to the arts.

Let us assume that the arts in our western world are in as much disarray as the patients we encounter. The Arts themselves are suffering from exploitation, commercialism, delusions of grandeur, low self esteem, dried out rationalism, addictive careerism, fascination with success, vulnerability to criticism, loss of direction and intention, personalism, and so on. What seems lost to the arts is precisely what therapy deals with everyday: soul. Through art therapy soul returns to dance and painting, to poems and sculpture. Each gesture the patient makes attempts to place into defined form the emotional influxes that assail a human life. Each gesture is made for the sake of the gesture and not for anything external to the gesture itself. I dance my woe as fully as I can and paint my wild madness with a rich palette as I can attain, not for reviewers of my product, not for recognition, not for the increase in size of the letters of my name. I do it for soul's sake, and this gesture, encouraged by the art therapist in studios, practices, and clinics in the city after city, town after town, may be more than a therapy of the patient. It may also be a therapy of the arts themselves, restoring to them the archetypal gestures of the soul.