The purpose of this thesis is to showcase the philosophical and psychoanalytic collaboration of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in regards to art therapy. The Deleuze and Guattari Art Therapy Assemblage is a composition that includes the environmental, relational and material elements of art therapy as contexts in which to process subjectivity. Key Deleuze and Guattari concepts will be applied to the practice of art therapy, implicating somatic and psychological processing within the production of art therapy artworks. The generative capacity of art therapy constitutes many creative sites in which to transport subjectivity. Rather than a fixed form, subjectivity moves across a territory of different creative features. The cartography of subjectivity is a network of passages through relationships and contexts that implicate it with affects. This kinaesthetic capacity will be underscored in relation to three methods of psychological and somatic awareness (somatic psychology, performance art and authentic movement) that challenge inhibition through improvisation. These three methods stimulate the circulation of desire as a creative and collective enunciation of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari represent desire as a liberating potential acting on both body and mind - an opening commencing from constraining circumstances that define and enclose expression. This has specific implications for the treatment of trauma, which can impose a set of limits that condition reactive versus spontaneous responses. The Deleuze and Guattari Art Therapy Assemblage is a practice in which to stimulate improvisational and experimental affects within the making and viewing of artworks. The significance of this practice is its composite of influences. It is an approach that emphasises not only artworks, but also the performance of subjectivity, a happening within an art therapy space offering choices for engagement and the enactment of different somatic and psychological potentials.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:444957 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Whitaker, Pamela |
| Publisher | University of Sheffield |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14908/ |
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