Art Therapy for PTSD

De kooning said that the goal of the painting is to make the invisible visible. Art therapy makes implicit memory explicit. There is a really interesting triangulation to be observed between the fields of art, psychotherapy and neurology. Painters study the brain from experience. They are accessing neurological information through the constant interplay between sensation and perception. The result is a deeper understanding of how their brains work. Psychotherapy concerns itself precisely with sensation and perception. Neurology is interested in everything the brain is doing. The brain is sensing and perceiving. Hence the overlap between the fields of neurology, art and psychotherapy.

Art therapy announces itself as potentially very powerful for its ability to make implicit memories explicit. Of course, Freud thought that catharsis ie. the conscious expression of unconscious experience was therapeutic in an of itself. Art therapy takes the same trajectory in using the concretization of implicit or body memories such as traumas to rewire the brain into a more adaptive and functional whole. There is a lot of evidence to support the validity of the hypothesis that traumatic memory can be transformed through art and that intense recurring trauma responses can ultimately be attenuated. In fact all of psychotherapy, whether cognitive, humanistic,
existentialist or psychoanalytic assumes this hypothesis to be true. Art therapy demonstrates that the expression of implicit or body memories through image making can be therapeutic for those living with trauma. I believe that art therapy will eventually show itself as a primary treatment for PTSD and all forms of traumatic stress disorders. Art therapy has the power to re-wire the brain in such a manner that the areas involved in PTSD can be re-programmed or redirected to form other, more adaptive neural networks. The neurologist Ramachandran has shown that phantom limb syndrome can be de-programmed through a visualization exercise where the patient imagines a false limb being stimulated. Ramachandran also showed that stimulation of a certain region of the face could cause patients to feel sensations in the phatom limb. If i am not mistaken, that experiment corroborated the idea that neural crosstalk occurs, to the extent that neurons which are adjacent on the homunculus communicate or “crossfire”. As a side note, i believe this is what i experience when i am overwhelmed by word based thoughts as i am painting. The brain regions in the motor cortex responsible for movement of my right thumb and index finger holding the brush while painting are adjacent to language generation areas in Broca’s as well as the motor areas for the mouth and tongue so it is reasonable to conclude there could be neural cross-talk leading to word based thoughts such as this post, occurring regularly whenever i paint for prolonged periods. The brain areas involved in holding and moving the brush around on the canvas fire so often with so much intensity as to stimulate the area right next to them and cause parallel excitation. So to summarize, the hypothesis is that the creative-visual processes activate regions of the brain which can be used to modulate experience. Thus through the process of art making, whether through sculpture, painting, drawing, photography or any other visual artistic medium, it is possible to rearrange neurons, send them in different directions and
get them to respond differently. I am merely suggesting that art making contributes to our understanding of the human brain and helps us unravel the mysteries of ptsd. Given that the entire practice of cognitive behavioural therapy is rooted in evidence from biofeedback, it would not be surprising that art therapy should
also have a role to play in the restructuring of neural anatomy since art therapy is in itself considered a form of biofeedback. Through art therapy, the brush touches the canvas, sending back signals through the arm related to distance covered, location, intensity of mark on a purely sensory level. Once the eyes are involved, the rational mind is gaging what it taking place in the image the inferior parietal lobule plays a role in making meaning out of the various sensory inputs from the hands and eyes. That feedback is in a closed loop, leading to adjustments in the ever evolving decisional process of the artist as he moves his brush between canvas and paint. Lifting weights builds muscles, art therapy builds networks. I will make bolder statements as i become more confident with my
knowledge in this area. For now i am looking to put what i know out there and be contradicted by more knowledgeable people. Till then, this is it.