Nadia Tortoreto

Art therapy derives from experiences of dynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, consists in the search for psychophysical well-being through the artistic expression of thoughts, experiences and emotions. Through art are elaborated all those sensations that cannot be brought out with words, through creative actions the internal image becomes an external image and communicates the inner emotional world, but also becomes therapeutic for those who benefit from it. Is not captured the beauty, but the meaning, the communicative and the emotions that it provokes. Images are active subjects. The sense of the painting or the sculptures is not in the image they show us, but in the fact that someone is watching them. The work of art becomes a system of suggestions, of its own truth predisposed to configure an image. For Freud the image, and this is where all its potential lies, wherever it appears and manifests is a sort of intermediary between an unconfessed unconscious and a confessed awareness. Therefore it has the status of a symbol and this kind of symbol is a « symptom ». For Jung, the image in its construction is « the identification of the psyche » so the image has gone from a simple symptom to a therapeutic agent. Jung had stated that psyche consists essentially of images, in addition to the individual unconscious that Freud called « personal », he distinguished a collective unconscious that the psyche inherited through primordial images or archetypes. This primordial or archetypal image is found in myths, fairy tales, dreams, artistic manifestations, paintings, sculptures and three-dimensional constructions. The image is the container of affections, of emotions that involves the Ego, binds the inside and the outside, gives meaning to what is experienced. Each of us has its own resources and a self-regenerative potential that a work of art simply stimulates bringing to light resources and emotions that have been trapped for some time, rich hidden « truths »; it’s hearing one’s own music.