I give a child wings, then teach him how to fly with his own
(Gabriel García Márquez: La marioneta)

I came into contact with the art therapy workshops of OPNI (the National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology) in the mid-1990s. I would never have thought that this form of artistic expression would captivate me for a lifetime. Of course, this encounter had its antecedents.

At the start of my career I worked as an art teacher in a primary school, with classes of thirty to thirty-five pupils. I found the straitjacket of performance pressure, impersonality and impassivity hard to bear. Once I had the opportunity to teach at a small school in Buda. It was attended mostly by so-called “difficult” children, whom the large schools would not tolerate because of their behavioural problems. Here it was wonderful to work with them. It was then that I understood that without a personal connection there is no encounter, and if there is no encounter, there is no reason for me to be there. I was afraid that even by the end of the year I would not know the faces and names of those sitting in the back rows, so – when my contract expired – I left the education scene for good. Essentially, I wanted to be present in a more relaxed yet focused way, to run a creative workshop with more, and more personal, attention, and to devote more time and patience to the participants, which seemed impossible in that setting.

I am not saying I had lost all interest in it, but I knew for certain that I could not continue down the old paths.

Increasingly clear ideas took shape in my mind about what we could create together with the children, and how, so that it would bring joy and enrichment to us both.

In the second half of the 1970s, numerous hobby groups were running in community centres across the city, and there was also an opportunity to put new ideas into practice. In 1975 I started my first art group for disadvantaged children in the 8th district. Their family backgrounds were typically not burdened with cultural expectations, which is (perhaps) why their associations and problem-solving strategies were extremely open and original. We worked in a free creative atmosphere that inspired us all. In this relaxed atmosphere − with the help of play − the unusual tasks helped my students become uninhibited and communicative, and they dared to cast aside the old, tried-and-tested methods to find new solutions and to experiment. A playful mode of self-expression can be recommended for every age group – adults included – because it results in light, uninhibited work.

With roughly this kind of experience in building groups and holding them together, I arrived at the National Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology; I had learnt to understand and use the language of visual communication at the Hungarian University of Applied Arts. And of course, I had no idea how all of this would become art therapy.

At first – and for quite some time – I was getting to know the situation, the children, the adults, and the possibilities. I tried to adapt my tried-and-true methods to the situation, but since I knew nothing about psychiatric disorders, I basically left everything up to them during the sessions. I thought that if everything could happen the way they wanted it to, if I let them show their true selves without inhibition, I would have a chance to really get to know them. I could clearly sense their resistance to getting involved, which they usually expressed with statements like “I can’t draw, I never could,” “I failed art class,” or “I’ve never had a knack for this.” I tried to get around this resistance and encourage everyone to open up through play, words, and drawing.

By creating an atmosphere of psychological safety and freedom – well known from educational practice – we can lay the foundations for the space needed for self-expression, being together and uninhibited creation, which includes accepting our patients together with their values and the difficulties arising from their psychological condition. I now know that, by strengthening the ego, this gives them an opportunity to reveal themselves openly and to seek new ways and possibilities for presenting and reinterpreting the events of their lives and for restructuring their relationships. In art therapy work on the ward, self-expression always operates within the duality of a diagnostic and a therapeutic function. The institutional team tries to map the background and causes of the psychological injury using its own specific criteria and methods, so that the goals and methods of therapeutic intervention can be determined along these lines.

In this complex approach, every form of nonverbal expression takes on particular significance. In conditions of psychological safety, bypassing the conscious and unconscious manipulations and defences of verbal communication, emotions, impulses, secrets, unconscious contents and instinctual drives that could not otherwise be shared can be expressed with ease. I try to support my patients in this by giving them complete freedom in their choice of materials and themes, so that they can truly do what they want. I have also been encouraged in these efforts by the successes of genuine presence.

Gábor, a 17-year-old boy with an intellectual disability, was admitted to hospital because of his deepening depression. He had attended a leatherwork school for a few years but did not receive a certificate. He was suspicious, withdrawn, passive and slow. He did not want to draw or paint anything, but he noticed that I had an enormous sack of artificial leather. He asked whether he could bring in his leather punch, because with it he could punch holes in these pieces of leather very well. I did not really understand what he meant to do with it, but I agreed. For months in the art therapy workshop of the rehabilitation ward he did nothing but punch and cut scraps of leather, fabricating small leather objects and little paper boxes. When the big sack of leather ran out, he made templates from thicker sheets of card, cut them out and collected them, seemingly without any prior idea or plan. Later he traced around them, always sliding them along the paper to create different rhythms, and then coloured them in. Using individual squares or circles and their overlaps, he composed peculiar ornamental surfaces. For a long time he drew these playful ornaments with great diligence, but I saw no particular enthusiasm in him. Months passed like this, seemingly fiddling about with nothing, yet in the meantime he tasted the security and peace of being accepted and taken in. Slowly and cautiously he began to open up verbally as well, and to build relationships.

Once, he found a book on heritage conservation in my cupboard, containing postcard-sized – very poor-quality – black-and-white photographs of decaying castles, mansions and manor houses. For some reason, Gábor was fascinated by the pictures. He spent a long time looking at the almost unrecognisable ruins, and then drew houses, using the atmospheric elements of his early stencil drawings and the structural units he thought he could make out in the photographs. Inspired by the tiny black-and-white pictures, enormous, exuberantly colourful palaces and castles were born.

With their childlike vision and magical atmosphere, his pictures guide us into the inner fairy-tale realm he created for himself.

While Gábor is almost inaccessible verbally—he lacks critical thinking skills, cannot comment on his own drawings, is difficult to converse with, and is unfamiliar with abstract concepts—his works are nonetheless harmonious, well-composed, and exceptionally beautiful. “In a general sense, a harmonious overall impression characterizes the drawings of people who are healthy and well-integrated into society. A harmonious drawing is clear, well-structured, proportionate, warm, with decisive lines, and regular,” writes Dr. Zoltán Vass in his book The Psychodiagnostic Foundations of Drawing Analysis (Flaccus, Budapest, 2006). Gábor’s drawings are like this. Cognitive schemas do not trigger inhibitions in him; he has no performance anxiety; he creates in a relaxed, engaged manner. He works in his daily life: he tends the garden, mows the lawn, and cleans in his village near Pest. He draws in the afternoons.

In 2008, he was the only contemporary Hungarian artist featured in the Hungarian National Gallery’s exhibition Images of Inner Paths (Belső utak képei), which presented Hungarian and Austrian art brut artists and was jointly organised by the Hungarian National Gallery and the Austrian Cultural Forum. In 2009, his solo exhibition was shown as the opening exhibition of the Psychiatric Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Gábor has managed to find within himself the strength that can give form to his world and encouragement to his life − and in this he is not alone. His path to becoming an artist has been unconventional, and I am glad to support him in his search for his own way. In the group, he builds his personality through the sublimating effect of creative work. He does not take part in the conversation, but he listens to what the others say about his picture.

Others regard the creative process as a form of communication in which the sender (the creator) transmits a coded message that the recipient(s) must decode. The messages are decoded through an integrative approach that takes into account the structural features, the drawing process, the content, and the verbal additions and explanations. A constant question is how we can understand as much as possible of the messages sent and of our patients' emotional and behavioural patterns, and how we can guide these onto appropriate paths. The verbal reflection that follows the creative work is an exciting, shared and mutually supportive process. It is good to fly once we have found our own wings.

And can we regard the works created in therapy sessions as art?

While psychiatrists, art therapists, and art experts debate whether the products of art therapy workshops can be considered works of art, the works are quietly created – far removed from all these cultural and professional debates. While art theorists debate the end of spectacular art, on the other side of the divide – by setting aside cultural traditions, seemingly hollow academic formalism, and convoluted narratives – a form of art is emerging that draws from within itself, surprising its viewers with its unique and unadulterated originality. While art therapy is indeed intended neither for art education (as many still believe today) nor for any kind of professional or conceptual support in the creation of works, creators have the opportunity to articulate their most personal existential reality. At its core, art therapy involves the visual representation of unconscious content and the integration of this content into the personality through some form of reflection or discourse. The emergence of this content occurs at various levels, and by no means is any level of skill in the realm of visual self-expression required. The representation and reworking of unconscious and often repressed content is somewhat akin to drawing up pure water hidden in the deeper layers of the earth – in pockets.

I am thinking of artesian wells, which draw their crystal-clear water from high-pressure pockets of water enclosed by rock deep below the groundwater table. Artesian water is trapped between two impermeable layers. The water is under high pressure in the shell-like cavity. As soon as the drill breaks through the impermeable layer, the water shoots high into the air like a fountain due to the high pressure. Artesian wells cannot be drilled just anywhere; specific geological conditions are required. Who would have thought that the most suitable places in the world for drilling artesian wells are actually in the Sahara?

In the same way, in therapeutic work it is not always possible to drill through the enclosed pockets, and even if we succeed, the pressure may not be enough for the crystal-clear contents to burst to the surface. We may find a well with a meagre yield, but sometimes, like a miracle of nature, an inexhaustible fountain suddenly gushes forth unstoppably.

This is how I view works of art that appear unpredictably. These phenomena cannot be interpreted solely within the framework of healing, because this kind of miracle demands much more – or rather, a completely different approach. We established the Tárt Kapu Gallery so that these miracles might find their rightful place. We might call it art brut or outsider art, though empathetic supporters, art lovers, and collectors across Europe seem to be rebelling against the discriminatory undertones of these terms. Many consider it a distinct, characteristic branch of contemporary art, yet we all feel that we should bestow some apt name upon the phenomenon in question. For a long time now, I have personally associated this form of self-expression with the term “artesian” due to its visceral nature and intensity.

Often we are talking about the works of artists who, due to their marginal status and mental or other issues, express their difficulties in connecting with others through their verbal statements (or, conversely, their silence); who constantly feel they have nothing to share or no reason to share anything of themselves; who have nowhere to look forward to (unfortunately, for many of them, not even backward).

A homeless, mentally impaired middle-aged man always painted in silence and never offered any commentary on either his own paintings or those of others. For months, he painted his elusive, strange, and alien houses, all composed identically – Chirico-esque mementos of desolation and abandonment. It was nearly impossible to approach him or strike up a conversation. He didn’t look at anyone, and I don’t know if he ever listened to anyone. A few months later, the unkempt, neglected man began arriving at the therapy sessions in clean clothes and with washed hair. I sensed that something had not only happened but had truly happened to him. Memories and images poured forth from the depths of his innermost being, and it was very important for him to show this.

János, who had been verbally inaccessible, finally spoke up after six months. With a distant gaze, he added to one of his pictures: “and we had four cows too…”

How should we view these images if we interpret the concept of “house” as a dwelling, a family, a community, or even a personal sphere? In every sense, the house refers to some kind of community, primarily family, home, a shelter and protective covering, both literally and figuratively. The inner process of therapy can be interpreted as sublimation or communication, but it is best to view it as both at once, since it is precisely through these that it exerts its influence in healing and self-healing.

Creation is a manifesto. It is an activity that captures and reflects internal processes, both for the creator and toward the outside world. The internal processes occurring during creation can exert a corrective influence on the personality at the level of experience and at the level of awareness. Tools can be provided for approaching internal experiences, and these tools are capable of mobilising aspects of the personality, thereby releasing powerful psychic energies.

Through nonverbal communication, the processing of experiences, on the one hand, reveals the inner psychological reality to the environment – thus resolving isolated experiences. On the other hand, it creates distance between the creator and their creation, which enables the analysis and conscious awareness of experiences.

The creative process is a focusing of inner forces; an opportunity to live through states of experience that support the ego’s defence mechanisms.

If all this – in rare moments of grace – also results in a work of art, if the drill breaking through the impermeable layer strikes a high-pressure pocket of artesian water, we may boldly acknowledge the nobility and value of the contents that surge up, hang them on the walls of our museums and call it, say, artesian art.

Pannonhalmi Szemle 2014/4