Making unformulated experience real through painting: Painting and psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice as two ways of making sense

AbstractI contend that painting, like psychoanalytic psychotherapy, is an intersubjective process able to connect hearts and minds of painters and viewers alike, because the creative process of making a painting brings painters into more complex and more animated relationship with themselves. My own painting process is largely nonverbal. Interactions between me and my evolving artwork‐in‐process reveal experiences, thoughts, and feelings not yet formulated in words, and so, not available explicitly to conscious awareness until visual representation allows questions of meaning and intention to be thought about and elaborated in the usual, verbal sense. I describe how my particular painting practice provides an experiential frame for the creative process of self‐articulation that goes on in psychotherapy, as well as how the physical and mostly nonverbal dialogue experienced in the painting studio served as a source of listening attitudes and self‐regulation in my work with a patient's inhibited self‐expression and thwarted artistic ambitions.