On amodal perception and language in art therapy with autism

Abstract

This paper is based on the analysis of artwork produced by a 36-year-old male client with mild learning disability, who was withdrawn or encapsulated for self-protection into mild ‘shell-type’ autism. He was offered weekly individual psychodynamic art therapy for a two-year period in all. The analysis was carried out a year later as an MA research project, using two frameworks appropriate to non-verbal aspects of art therapy, one theoretical and the other visual. The findings offer evidence in art therapy of a language consisting of sensations and perceptions registered and expressed by the body, and between bodies, as contours, inscriptions or signs of expression. This language is structural, giving shape and form to sensed perceptions according to an innate temporal and spatial ordering. Its dynamic process constructs and develops the sense of self and other and underpins the capacity for intersubjective relatedness and learning.

Keywords:

• Art therapy
• visual research
• the body
• inscription
• contiguous object
• language
• autism
• learning difficulties
• amodal perception

Acknowledgements

Darian Leader, Lacanian Psychoanalyst, Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and Visiting Professor, Royal College of Art, for the term contiguous object. My thanks also to Vincent Dachy, Astrid Gessert, Gerry Sullivan and Joan Woddis.