Psychology of Art

What is Art? What emotions or sensations do you feel when you create? What is the relationship between art, dreams, mourning, phantasy, symbolization, subjectivity, identity, sexuality and the unconscious? This course seeks to introduce the area of overlap between psychology and art, from a predominantly psychoanalytic perspective, including the mutual influences, borrowings, and inspirations between these two supposedly separate domains. It includes the psychodynamics of the creative process and what motivates us to do art. It looks at the aesthetic experience, how psychoanalysis can help us understand the powerful phenomenon of being confronted with a work of art, taken in its broadest sense. This leads us to study developments in psychoanalytic aesthetics, explored with various examples from painting, literature and film. Finally, the course looks at the therapeutic aspect of art and at the contemporary clinical practice of art therapy, including experiential art therapy activities.