Psychoanalysis, Art, and the Vale of Soul-Making

Alongside its therapeutic aims, psychoanalysis tries to help people develop their identity as deeply and richly as possible, fulfilling the potential of whoever they have it in themselves to be. What language should we use for this kind of transformation? Analysts talk of the psyche and psychic change. Religion also describes a person’s inward development with a different vocabulary. Analysts tend to shy away from the word soul , even though it is what psyche means. Religions, for their part, may shy away from a psychoanalytic emphasis on the body and its sexuality. Psychoanalysis and spirituality both involve a particular kind of attentiveness to the Other – an attentiveness that has the capacity to be transformative. To engage with a work of art may also be a transformative experience. Certain works of art evoke in the viewer a quality of attention and reveal in themselves a quality of presence, which connect art both to spiritual experience and to the attentiveness that analysts try to offer their patients. The artworks illustrated in this chapter reveal how psychoanalysis can be, in the phrase of the poet John Keats, a vale of soul-making.