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What do we do when the patient brings paintings to the session? Nothing different from what we usually do in our everyday work; we listen, we observe, we think, we interpret. And yet, we are placed in a situation where particular demands are being made on us, some aspects of which most of us feel unqualified to address. Marion Milner is one of the few
analysts who made use of the pictures her patients painted, as well as her own painting and drawing experiences, to think in a creative and insightful way about the content as well as the function of the images on many levels. Part of Milner’s contribution can be understood as encouraging us to examine the inner life of the artist while it is being translated and transfigured in the most concrete sense through the work that he does, which is not him and is him at the same time. The painter of the picture is externalising on to the painting a major part of his own individual and unique sense of self, including the bodily one. In this, he may not only be recreating internal reality in a reparative sense, although he is doing so as well, but may be creating the power to perceive it by placing it out there, endowing it with an otherness that may then be explored by him as the viewer.
To my mind, Schaverien’s contribution—which, unfortunately, does not make use of Milner’s considerable work in this area—is in thinking about aspects of the meaning of this first externalisation and the affects and effects on the therapist-patient dyad. Drawing on Lacan and Jung, she discusses a number of considerations regarding art in psychotherapy with particular emphasis on the aesthetic countertransference in both, the patient viewing the picture he painted, and the therapist looking at the picture of her patient. Her aim is to lead to ‘an understanding of the aesthetic effects of imagery on the transference and countertransference’. For instance, a mysterious image of a castle ‘seduc