How Art Can Support Our Psychological Development

One does not become enlightened by imagining futures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Carl Jung

The value of both creating and interpreting art for our individual evolution as humans cannot be understated. Art allows material from the unconscious and subconscious parts of our minds to come bubbling up to the surface. These deeper structures of our minds do not process information or express themselves through linear thinking and rational language. They do so through symbolism, metaphor, and representation.

Different modalities of art — such as painting, writing, poetry, dancing, or sculpting — allow the subconscious and unconscious to communicate with our conscious minds. By engaging in creating or interpreting art, you are giving the deeper parts of you a voice and a safe space to work themselves out. Through art, we offer the subliminal parts of ourselves to become known. This is some serious self-awareness work we are talking about here.

One of the most painful experiences I’ve ever had in my life was a very intense heartbreak from a tumultuous relationship. The pain was visceral for me. No matter how much I talked about it, I couldn’t seem to fully process the experience. I needed something more, something deeper, something to access the areas that the relationship itself had touched.

As a result, I ended up immersing deeply into partner dancing and nature poetry. Together, both of these helped me to release the intense pain from my body and derive meaning from the suffering I was experiencing.

Through partner movement, I was able to access deep emotions that I was holding in. I was lucky enough to have good friends to dance with who allowed me space for my tears during dances. I also channeled my anger into creative and lively dances. I was physically releasing the pain by acting it out through representation, instead of sitting in a chair and being in my head about it.

Through nature poetry, I made sense of my experience as a storm. Storms bring intense winds of change that destroy the weaker structures currently in place in a land. They also bring copious amounts of water from heavy rains. After the storm, only the strong structures remain, the land is revived, and the water provides nourishment for the land to grow anew. With time, nature almost always bounces back. Often, she comes back more robust and resilient. I took this as a metaphor to make meaning of my experience.

Through this meaning-making, I came to see the pain I was going through was a personal transformation that broke me down so that I could build myself into a new me — and I did. Who I became after the heartbreak is wildly different than who I was before it in a wonderful, almost mystical way. The “storm” of the relationship shook me up in a time of my life that I was complacent and stagnant, and life felt rather dry.

A lot of the weaker things in place in my life at the time — like the job I was in, my graduate program, and some of the relationships I was investing in — were weaker structures that I ended up leaving behind. I got back on track with the profession I really wanted to pursue, I changed graduate programs, I created new relationships, and I reconnected in a very deep way to my own spirituality, which had gone arid before the relationship.

Thus, art was instrumental in my process of evolving from and beyond the experience. I’m convinced that only talking it out would have not had the same therapeutic effect.

Through art, our deepest emotions, instincts, and desires have a healthy medium and channel for expression. The parts that need to be released energetically — like the emotions and visceral reactions — can do so. As we use our physical energy to create, as we give our bodies over to the process, we quite literally release the energy that has been pent up in the subconscious and unconscious.

The parts that need to be interpreted and integrated can do so as well. As material comes bubbling up to the surface and gets expressed into creation, it can come into focus and become known by our conscious awareness. We then have the chance to reflect on it, understand it, make meaning of it, and integrate it into our conscious experience. Slowly, what was once hidden in the darker part of our minds comes to light and loses its grip on our lives.

As an artist herself, Deborah often works with artists, dancers, actors, and screenwriters to support them in their process of psychological development and mastering their craft. Learn more here.