Can paintings treat diseases?

"Dear Theo, I still have to ask you to bring me more drawing brushes in sizes
Different, six of every size please, hope you are well and your wife too and enjoy the beautiful weather. At least here we have the wonderful sunlight. As for me, my health is fine, and for my head, let us hope that it will improve, it is a matter of time and patience. "(1)

Vincent Van Gogh asks his brother, Theo, his close friend and the merchant of the paintings, in a letter he sent from the San Remi sanatorium, to send him additional drawing tools to work on his paintings. Van Gogh himself voluntarily lodged in the clinic after having suffered a massive fit, In an incident of cutting off his famous ear, it is not certain what triggered the collapse or the act, said to have been a fight with his companion in the residence French artist Paul Gujan, other historians say that is because he knew about the marriage of his brother Theo, the closest person in the world, The clinic for a year, and that was one of the richest periods of his life in terms of artistic production, leaving 142 oil paintings in addition to Hundreds of diagrams, some attached to his brother and sister and others.

Van Gogh's name was associated with bipolar disorder, a newly identified complex psychiatric illness, but there is no evidence of exactly what he was suffering. Some people define it as epilepsy and other neurological diseases. There is no proof of cure Or even if he can be cured from the foundation, but his first passion and the engine of his life, art, helped him to rise after many stumbling blocks, and in which he transmitted some kind of strength of resistance and adherence to life for the last moment or until the moment of surrender. His spells made him a seat quite powerless, but when he woke up, his paintings were what he was concerned about Valuable his mind alert and show him the beauty in everything around him.

Words such as the ability of art to cure are sometimes invoked. Sometimes this is a method of making money and the sick are aware that emptying their energies on paper will cure them. But the subject is not as simple as that. Their art in dealing with it, and systematic therapeutic techniques offered by doctors to patients who do not necessarily have technical talents as an alternative and unusual method of treatment and sometimes diagnosis.

How do artists deal with their illnesses?

"I have been struggling with pain, anxiety and fear every day. The only way I found it to calm my illness was to continue making art. I followed the thread of art and somehow found a way that enabled me to live"

At the age of seven, Yayo Kusama began to hear the sounds of the fruit of the pumpkin, the flowers and the dogs talking to her. She saw bright and shiny halos around the things. When these accidents happened, she ran to the house and recorded what she saw and heard in a small notebook. These visions and fears were the basis of her art.

Yayo Kusama was born in a small town called Matsumoto in Japan in 1929. She loved art from her young age, and her father encouraged her to buy the tools for drawing and coloring, but her mother did not agree with her paintings. The audio and visual hallucinations at a young age were held more than once in multiple psychic centers, which had no recourse but to express their fears about their art and talent, surpassed traditional media such as painting and painting and expanded into more contemporary media. It is not determined by a panel or frame A worm can be a complete room, and in the case of Kusama, the equipment in the vacuum allows her to build a room inside her mind, where she can walk around and examine her as if emptying her fears within a specific area.

One of the most famous of these works is the work of the "eternal mirror", a process in the vacuum that contains an enormous number of mirrors. When the recipient steps in, he sees himself repeating an infinite number of times. The idea of ​​repetition and patterns was a source of fascination and help to get rid of her concern. Sometimes, she puts out bright lilies like her mind, and other elements that represent her concerns, and allows the recipients metaphorically to take a tour in her mind, to see themselves divided and bound to an infinite number of times, as she feels, Yayo has not yet recovered, She has severe seizures and is sometimes referred to the clinic She found her way of dealing with her illness by combining her art with her life. (2)

"Since I started to remember and I have a deep sense of anxiety, which I tried to express in a technician"

Everyone knows Edvard Manch on the "Cry" board, which depicts a man standing on a bridge as if he suddenly absorbed the weight and horror of life and began to scream, and in his background the sky became colorless. In the case of Manch, the attempt to deal with mental illness through art carries more than one level, His suffering is a combination of internal and public anxiety.

Edvard Mannch is one of the founders of the expressionist movement in art, a movement in which real artists were ostracized and interested in exposing human beings from existential anxiety and conflicting feelings. These concepts were essential in the post-World War I period. The losses were severe at the national and personal levels, There is a manch loaded with the woes of war, the confusion of modernity, the new life of loneliness, in addition to his own personal obsessions. He suffered illness throughout his life. He experienced periods of illness in his mother and sister. What worries him, he has suffered most of his life from the A (3) (4) (4) (3) (3) (4) In his view, Manch was a reflection of his worldview, not a means of treatment.

I have reached the point where I can translate my feelings into pictures

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Does art help non-artists?

But what are the people suffering from the unrest but are not talented or artists? Can art treat or comfort them, can it be considered as a form of treatment in a formal way or is it merely personal judgment or a happy coincidence?

The term "art therapy" can be eliminated in the first place. It can mean a method of treatment through the creative process itself, or the use of the patient's art of psychoanalysis. The British artist Adrian Hill first made the term in 1942, Of tuberculosis, found great consolation in the practice of drawing and painting, and decided that this has a real therapeutic value from the fact that the act of drawing occupies the mind completely with the body, your fingers moving, and your mind focuses on producing something specific, and help to release energy, The practice of art and the time of their recovery, and that period resulted in his book "A. Art against the disease "of 1945, then the treatment of art is a relatively new concept, has it had roots before? (5) (6)

"I got so much that I could translate my feelings into pictures, or to say another finding the images that were hidden within those feelings made me more confident and quiet, if I left those pictures hidden
It would have torn me apart "(7)

In the early 20th century when psychology was taking its first steps to become a written and recognized science, its greatest teacher at great odds, Sigmund Freud and Carl Young, after a period of friendship and practical partnership, separated their views and scientific references, He began to engage in a nightly activity of imagining visions and images. At first he was tormented by these images, but as soon as he began to record them and form them on paper, he found his way of controlling them, collecting Young those mental mental experiences in the book (1915-1917), and was published only in 2009 and was called "The Red Book." (8)

Are we dealing with mandala?

"I met one of the sheikhs in a temple in India, explain to me what the mandala is, and how it consists of mental images carried out entirely through the power of imagination, and there is never one like the other"

From Young's experiments that transcend science to spirituality and art is the drawing of Mandala, literally meaning "circle" in Hindi, a spiritual ritual in Hinduism and Buddhism, representing the center of the universe and integration, and access to a sacred place through practical implementation and mental reflection. The mandala is called a circular drawing with repeated patterns. Young Mandala used a psychologist to diagnose his patients. He believes that the repetitive drawing of patterns and the realization of obsessions and fantasies to bring them together allow the patient access to a state of psychological and mental equilibrium.

The treatment of mandala is now promoted, but more superficially, the coloring books are used for adults and they only fill the blanks in color for previously drawn and printed forms. The idea of ​​imagination and the attempt to reach a state of mind has been eliminated from the idea of ​​art therapy in its contemporary form, but it has the basic value, Mind, and indulgence in an aesthetically pleasing job, the person does not make the same negative thinking if he is healthy, and does not give in to the dark thoughts if he is sick.

But the expression is still used in psychotherapy sessions. It is not possible to determine the accuracy of the diagnosis, but sometimes the words fail us, and the images speed up in our minds. By emptying them and making them visible, the psychoanalyst can draw from them signs that help him to diagnose and leave the patient in better condition if he succeeds. Expressing its properties visually.

Like any experience in psychotherapy, the results are relative because of the vast diversity of human thinking and responsiveness, whether the art practitioner is an artist who has already experienced a disorder or illness, whose talent helped him or failed to overcome it, or The practitioner of art is a person who has no direct relationship with him, but tries to find a haven by filling his mind and feeling satisfied or somehow emptying energy. This can work with some people, and others can see it as nonsense. Minds and bodies respond to chemical treatments to varying degrees. Treatment attempts are non-medical practice Fully self-contained.