“Get a pen. Put it on paper. Draw wherever you want. As you wish. You know, Paul Klee said, "Drawing is like walking a line." In the hospital workshop, I turn to the patient, smile, and continue: “So, let's paint together. We could draw houses and draw a path between our houses. Let's take paint. Turn over the paper. Upside down. If you don't mind, I can draw your sky and you mine... We can play and make...
For over 20 years, I have been speaking these sentences, playing and composing as a mental health clinical art therapist, as well as a lecturer and consultant, using creative methods with physicians, hospital directors, nursing leaders and entrepreneurs. Guided by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Jackson Pollock, as well as Plato, I spend my days exploring what the phenomenologist and game philosopher Eugene Fink calls "the peach skin of things." He glows.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once described play as “creation and destruction, creation and destruction without moral meaning, in eternal innocence”—as an action that can be found “in the world only in the play of the artist and the child.” When I ask my six-year-old Zhanna what happens when we play, she replies: “If all the children in the world play at the same time, it grows. It grows and grows. Play is like a dream, for, as the poet Paul Valéry wrote in 1914, in dreams "we have a combination of ALL POSSIBLE MEANS of different impressions." The game is the discovery of the multitude.
Yet, ironically, for all its emphasis on variety and freedom, the game includes strict rules, making it a skill that can be honed. Various play experts, such as Fink and the sociologist Roger Caillois, have attempted to define the necessary criteria for achieving the state of play, which Fink describes as bringing light or "enlightening" the world. According to another play expert, psychiatrist Stuart Brown, our need for play stems from our biological neoteny: We are the only mammals with an 18-year childhood. For Brown, play has certain key attributes: it is aimless, voluntary, and inherently attractive, while offering freedom from time, reduced self-awareness, improvisational potential, and constant desire. When we play, we exist outside of time and don't want to stop. Inspired by the improvisational practices of Peter Slade, Miranda Tufnell and Keith Johnston, I play the We... game with an adult therapy group and we take turns suggesting and acting out scenes. Everything is spontaneous. "We're climbing mountains in slow motion." "We lose every computer game." "We're eating a piping hot baguette." An hour later, the patient says in surprise: "I did not notice how time flew by." Last week, the hospital manager told me at the end of a seminar, "Today, time has flown by." During the game, we experience the positive form of St. Augustine's time - not the objective temporality of the rotation of the planets, but a change in our subjective perception. We exist outside of clock time. When my daughters are five or six years old, I watch them play their first "as if" games. Rose says, "I'm building a train." She spends hours arranging chairs in line for "passengers and drivers". When everything is ready, she, to my surprise, announces: “Everything is ready. Can I have a bite to eat? The game is a process, not a finished product. It's important to note that when we play and make art, the products we make, the things we make, are autotelic - they are an end in themselves; as Hannah Arendt wrote: "only where we come across things that exist independently of all utilitarian and functional references… we speak of works of art." Thus, play can be seen as an anti-capitalist activity.
Referring to the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Fink said that "because we are open to the world" (which is Dasein's "openness to the world"), we can play at all. Heidegger's concept of Dasein, a specifically human quality of being-in-the-world, is not much different from experience, defined by positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as a state of flow or in a zone. In the stream, the consciousness of time and self disappears. We feel satisfied and strive to repeat this experience. Extrapolated to the clinical context, the sense of flow during sessions means that patients eventually return and become involved in the process, getting deeper and deeper into the therapeutic process.
Suddenly our lines connect, line up like a skein of geese in flight.
The same goes for education and work. The game is a powerful engine. Recently, a poetess told me that while studying literature at Oxford, she lost her desire to write because of a despotic professor. It was only later, when she was printing and carving a fragment of Sappho in Greek boustrophedon on linoleum, that the vital pleasure of words reappeared in her. The antonym of flow is the fight-or-flight state.
One day
a new patient tells me, "I can't draw." At a kindergarten, a client and I come across a blank page. The intimate piano notes of "Falling, Catching" (2010) by Agnes Obel fill the space of the workshop. Music hovering around paint cans, darting between garbage can sculptures and reproductions of Camille Claudel's cheerful sketches. The woman repeats: “I can't draw. I never had to stop working." She shakes her head and repeats, "I should never have stopped working." Her psychiatrist describes it as her litany. She is very depressed. I say, "I think everyone can draw." Putting the tip of the pen on a white sheet, I draw a squiggle. The woman pauses and draws a line. All of a sudden, our lines curl up together, lining up like a skein of flying geese. As the piano music plays, we fill the white rectangle with black furrows, bisecting, welcoming, avoiding,
We check our work in ten minutes. She says, "But it doesn't look like anything." I say, “Imagination is just as important as facts. When we paint, we start from a unique place, Locus Solus.” She whispers, "I should never have stopped working." Her voice falls into the room like a petition, a prayer. I ask her: “What would you like to draw?” She says, “Golf course. I mowed the greens. I nod, "Great idea."
On a new sheet of paper we plan a course. Smiling for the first time, she determines the teeing zone, rough and green. 40 minutes draw blades of grass. Over the next weeks, we paint hundreds and thousands of emerald stems as she smiles, line upon line upon line. I recall the words of Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1958): "When the image is new, the world is new." When we play, we create, we rise, we emerge. Patients transcend their DSM-defined psychopathology, often experiencing a dawning sensation. Their world suddenly expands. The doors are open.
Every thinker and philosopher who writes about the game seems to ignore the fact that jumping into the dark requires trust. To play, you need to feel safe. Without certainty there is no flow, no dawn. Before starting practical classes with adults or teenagers, we write charters on cardboard and come up with our own game conditions. We discuss various ideas: the use of mobile phones; Be on time; respect; participation; confidentiality. When we play with adults, there is a great and justified fear of being infantile, ridiculed and somehow deceived. For group play to work, everyone needs to feel safe playing.
Pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who emphasizes the importance of this security, defines play as taking place in a "transitional space" between the imaginary and the real. In the “as if” game, the child knows that a banana is not a phone, but this does not prevent him from answering the call. For Winnicott, playing in this space allows children to shape their place in the outside world. Moving back and forth, they check reality. However, this ordeal - when babies throw toys, experiment with symbolic risk and failure - requires the presence of parents. The parent allows the game to be played without compliance or anxiety. As a consequence, Winnicott suggested that if we play safely with danger as children, then as adults we are better able to deal with rejection and loss and take healthier risks. The game, writes Fink, combines "highest desire and deepest suffering." For many years I have worked with adolescents diagnosed with psychosis. The highlight of our work was the short surreal play "The Lost Potato Masher", which they came up with based on kitchen items. The main roles went to the refrigerator, sideboard, toaster, stove, table and chairs, and the lost potato masher. The lyrics talked about parental abandonment, despair, loneliness, violence, fate and hope. In a teaching context, an improvised hospital manager once played the role of a dead patient's file thrown into a trash can. Both of these examples demonstrate the cathartic effect of the game, allowing us to sit with our shadows.
Most of my drama therapy sessions, and even when I use visual arts, begin with a warm-up, sensory preparation. We breathe, stretch and yawn. Pioneer playwright Peter Slade emphasized the importance of such physicality, tangible action in acting, jumping and jumping. “Let your body think,” I suggest to patients as we take turns imagining a sequence of free motions, twisting our arms and jumping, or creating water sculptures for miniature Japanese gardens. In play, the body can become the main source of meaning.
At all stages of life, Lego building, knitting, embroidery, and painting can all contribute to psychological well-being.
Throughout the world, many of the etymological roots of the word "play" are visceral: ludere is Latin for leaping fish and fluttering birds. The Anglo-Saxon word lâcan means
it can move like a ship on the waves, or flutter like a flame. The Sanskrit kridati also, as in the Germanic languages, describes the movement of the wind. In the game, we rarely stay still. We are alive.
A recent study by psychologists Maja Stanko-Kaczmarek and Lukasz Kaczmarek of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland found that the tactile sensations of finger painting induce states of awareness associated with well-being. When we draw, we are present in the moment, and our attention is wider. This can be contrasted with a state of "mindlessness", often a symptom of mental illness characterized by ruminating about the past or the future. The physical nature of play and creation places us in the here and now: it centers us in ourselves, mobilizing embodied knowledge that is essential for skill learning. At all stages of life, Lego making, knitting, embroidery, and painting can contribute to psychological well-being.
At the end of our sessions, I often ask patients to identify their physical as well as their mental and emotional feelings. Hugo Critchley, a mind-body expert and co-director of the Sackler Center for the Study of Consciousness at the University of Sussex in England, has explored the direct correlation between interoception (the ability to read the sensations inside one's body) and emotional states. intelligence. Play can be a collaborative, embodied activity. By playing collectively, we consciously transcend together.
This "commonality" of the game was emphasized by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. In Homo Ludens: A Study of the Element of Play in Culture (1938), Huizinga recognized that when we play, we enter into a "play community". We mutually withdraw and reject norms. Inside the game circle, the usual life laws and customs no longer apply. Play space and time are always limited: a stage, a playground, a screen, a piece of paper, a workshop, or a magic circle. So, when we apply drama therapy to patients with schizophrenia, for example, both the group and the space act as containers, allowing the person to use their imagination in a way that does not create hallucinations.
Many years ago I worked with an American with schizophrenia who often had hallucinations that someone was going to cut off his head. Every day in the hospital corridors, he insistently whispered: "They are following me." However, after warming up in the drama therapy room, he rarely had hallucinations. For several months he played the part of the duke in a play that we made up based on As You Like It (without once thinking that he was actually an aristocrat). "Playing as if" in the theater requires a collective experience, as opposed to a unique schizophrenic hallucination. The safety of the group also breeds trust, holding onto the new reality, allowing them to climb imaginary mountains, cross the Seven Seas.
A psychiatrist once prescribed art therapy to a young Spaniard who suffered a nervous breakdown after working in a fish processing plant for several months and now has an eating disorder. During our first sessions, I suggested a spontaneous Dada collage exercise in which he intuitively selected images and words from a collection spread out on a table. There are no right or wrong answers. He collected images of flowers, a young man washing his hair. From the cut out words, he made a beautiful naked text about the search for water, life. For several months we worked on these themes, exploring portraiture and self-portraits of the 18th century, and eventually created an artist's book. In this process, early work was the key—a seemingly random choice based on subconscious choices. This spontaneous element is the original substance on the canvas of the game. the main foundation of the house. But how to induce spontaneity?
During a workshop on creativity, I talk about the "watchers" at the gates of the mind, about which the philosopher Friedrich Schiller wrote to his lawyer friend Christian Gottfried Körner, the sentinels of the mind whose job it is to keep creativity at bay. “Imagine observers sitting on your shoulders,” I say to a room filled with entrepreneurs. These are your guards. You want to develop new ideas and solve problems. Your ideas, your solutions, arrive at the gate, and before they have a chance, your guards filter, ignore, censor your ideas as bad, stupid, ridiculous. Most of your ideas are never allowed to pass. The group laughs as I continue, “When we're creative, we take down the guards. Let ideas flow." In The Interpretation of Dreams (1889), Sigmund Freud, encouraging the expression of "freely arising" ideas, quotes Schiller:
it is harmful to the creative work of the mind if the mind peers too closely at the ideas already pouring in, so to speak, through the gate. The idea itself may be very trifling and very adventurous, but ... perhaps, in a certain connection with others that may seem equally absurd, it is capable of forming a very useful construction.
At the seminar
with a group of French social workers we throw paint on the canvas in the style of Jackson Pollock. The seminar takes place in the estate. I covered all the walls and floors with a tarpaulin. The workshop focuses on the “prize lâcher” – letting go – in decision making, stress management, emotional intelligence – and using creativity as a tool. With the help of brushes, we take turns dripping and spattering streaks of purple, blue, orange, yellow and purple paint. This method encourages us to move forward without fear of failure, using the “growth mindset” coined by human motivation psychologist Carol Dweck. We strive to explore and develop, like Pollock, who said:
When I paint, I am not aware of what I am doing. Only after a certain period of "acquaintance" do I understand what I was talking about ... the picture takes on a life of its own.
The vital role of play, chance and instinct in creativity was recognized by many art movements of the early 20th century, including Dada and Surrealism, and can be seen in jazz and later movements such as punk. Punk, as American artist Judy Nylon acknowledges, was a do-it-yourself, shape-shifting, "wingspan of the widest possible" kind. However, the game also illuminated much of human history, from Nicholas of Cusa's use of the ball game metaphor for theological reflection in De ludo globi (1463) to the development of the commedia dell'arte. Plato insisted that "life must be lived as a game ... and then a person will be able to propitiate the gods, protect himself from enemies and win the competition."
To play is to experiment, to discover, to restore pleasure, to solve a mystery, to do the possible and the impossible, to invent and do the impossible, to cross a bridge that cannot be crossed, to light a wet fire, to walk. on water, fly. Agoraphobics tend to sing in front of the crowd, dance, laugh and cry, draw pictures, forget worries, pain and death, live out of time, be in the flow, connect, disconnect, reunite, imagine, create.
A summer afternoon in a children's psychiatric ward in France. A 13-year-old girl looks me up and down and says, “I won't be able to join the group next month. I'm going to Won Direction. I say, "Who are Won Deerection?" A group of teenagers giggle. Each letter is articulated by a girl adopted from Rwanda and witnessing scenes of war, rape and violence. Won Deerection is a boy group. “Oh, One Direction,” I say. Everyone laughs at my British accent. "What's your favorite One Direction song?" I'm asking. She raises her eyebrows, "You wouldn't like that." I say, “You never know, I might like it. Why don't you bring the CD next week? She shrugs. Five teenagers say goodbye. One of them is mute, one hurts himself, the other cannot enter the room without crying. Later, the psychiatric nurse and I take notes
At the next session, the girl brings a One Direction CD and we listen to her favorite song, What Makes You Beautiful (2011). In a subsequent session, I suggest the following: “Let's pretend we're at a One Direction concert. The group takes the stage. Flashing lights. We call their names. At the top of our voices we shout: "Nile, Zayn, Liam, Harry, Louie!" and burst into laughter. Over the following weeks, the teens invent stories about a Greek vacation, riding invisible donkeys, sunbathing, and swimming together in a sparkling sea. A boy with autism can only join improvisations if he first imitates a radio quiz by shouting "We have a winner!"
At the beginning of each session, we call out the names of the band members. Last week, before school holidays, we sing together: "Don't you know you're beautiful, That's what makes you beautiful..."
In her article "Society and Culture" (1960), Arendt wrote that
without the beauty of man-made, worldly things that we call works of art, without the radiant glory in which the potential imperishability of the world and in the world is revealed, all human life would be futile and no greatness could stand.
Despite all this, the word "creative" sits awkwardly in my mouth, with its connection to pop psychology: a corporate feast feeding on "capitalist realism," gurus in collarless shirts holding hands, sticking hearts to walls. As a practitioner of the game, I have serious doubts about the formulaic, universal doctrines of the game. I view play and creation as intimate, personal activities. Their power in changing the individual is their Locus Solus. In Fragment 52, Heraclitus describes the Aeon, cosmic time, as a child at play, play as a metaphor for the ever-living cosmic fire pur aizoon, "lightning that governs everything." We can and should share imaginary actions, but our imaginations - if they are to empower us, turn us upside down and keep us up at night because we are beings who desire - must be allowed to burn with a unique bright light.
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