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In this paper I attempt to explore developments in the inner world of an art student in intensive therapy, and to suggest how this corresponds with the unfolding of creative processes. At the beginning of the therapy the patient, whom I shall call Tessa, was 22 years old, and she complained of being hardly able to work creatively at all.
My intention is to try to make some links between development of the therapeutic process in terms of the transference relationship, changes in Tessa's art work as she described them to me, and a progression shown in phantasies and dreams. From an overall perspective this could be understood as Tessa's gradual emergence from a dark, furtive and intrusive way of being into a world of colour and space and of relationship to others.
In the first assessment interview Tessa told me that she had been to the clinic before, when she was 6 years old, following her parents’ divorce. It was thought then that Tessa was depressed, and she described to me how she would refuse to get out of her sleeping bag. She went on to tell me that she had hated her first therapist, and continued as follows relating her childhood memories of therapy, with rather pointed reference to her present experience with me:
With feeling, she described this dark, ominous gloomy building; she was been in a very narrow, dark room (she quickly glanced around the room we were in)… Every time she picked up a toy the therapist said something ‘significant’ (Tessa's tone of voice very mocking) so she didn't touch the toys, farmyard animals, as they were all ‘significant’; she brought he own from home next time.
My first impression of Tessa was that she looked much younger than her twenty-two years. I was struck by her rather childlike and serious demeanour, which was accentuated by her slight build, short straight hair-style, and plain dark-coloured clothes. She had referred herself to the Clinic ostensibly because she felt worried that she was unable to do any