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Short abstract:

‘Art as Psychological Record’ pulls together three case studies from the history of psychology to analyse the ways in which drawings and paintings are registered and understood as medical and psychological records.

Long abstract:

The broad field of psychology has a curious relationship with art, which has been operationalised as an object of study, a communication device, a therapeutic tool, and a record of mental states. This paper studies how artworks have historically been used as psychological objects ripe for interpretation and how the interpretation of art has intersected with methodologies hoping to concretely register psychological processes and states, such as diagnostics, psychometric testing, laboratory observation, and psychoanalytic interpretation. In the interconnected, yet distinct fields of art therapy, psychoanalysis and mental testing, artworks were positioned as available for analysis.

This project focuses on the multiple uses of artworks made in the Netherne Hospital’s art therapy programme, focusing on how psychiatric staff pictured art as scientific evidence and used them as case records. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein understood drawing as the practical mode of communication with children, comparing the process to talk therapy with adults. Like the language of her patients, the drawings were figured as insights into the unconscious phantasies and projections made by children. Finally, drawing has been used in widely in psychometric testing, here I focus specifically tests like Draw-A-Person and the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, which were designed to quickly register a child’s intellectual or creative capacities. Though these three case studies emerged from largely disparate places (asylums, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and mental testing), they still similarly posit that the marks made on paper can be interpreted psychologically.