Can psychotherapy make you a better artist?

Since the dawn of psychoanalysis, artists have been hyperfixated. Salvador Dalí was enthralled by Sigmund Freud, drawing the founding father’s skull as a whirling snail shell. Sophie Calle imposed a defiantly feminist touch on Freud’s London museum in 1999, when she draped a white wedding dress across his revered couch. Paula Rego famously infused her trauma-driven pieces with memories from her own Jungian sessions. Recently, pop cultural moments such as Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis podcast have played into the complex links between creativity and psychotherapy.   

It is estimated that more than one third of people in the UK have taken some form of psychotherapy. But for many artists, the studio offers its own kind of self-analysis.

So what happens, in our ultra-therapised age, when creatives also find themselves in the consulting room? Can the two practices work in tandem, expanding the mind of the artist and fueling creative work? Or can the heady world of traditional talking therapy suffocate the instinctive artistic drive? As an arts journalist and trainee psychotherapist, I have spoken to many artists over the last three years who find themselves between these two spaces, intrigued by the psychological depths of therapy while also longing to retain the inherent mysteries that shape their creative work. 

For Holly Stevenson, art and analysis are entangled. The British sculptor volunteered at the Freud Museum early in her career and became fascinated by his favourite jade ashtray. She now sculpts similar vessels filled with colourful phallic and yonic forms that conjure psychological dynamics. These pieces draw on her personal work with a Freudian analyst, and a series was shown at the Freud Museum earlier this year. “Psychoanalysis, in my case, has been a very long process,” she tells me. “I can see how certain sculptural forms, or cathected objects, have been arrived at through the process of being an analysand, both directly and indirectly.”

She sees her recent sculpture Sibling Displacement as an abstracted family portrait. Across the centre of the ashtray shape is a flopped, deflated phallic tube, while a small, disembodied head, doll-like bodies, and lurching faces scatter around the edges. Casual viewers of her work might not be able to untangle its personal content, but it offers a rich understanding of family dynamics that opened up in the consulting room. “Psychoanalysis and art for me are the same,” she says. “They are both about the creative life; getting complex elements to co-exist.” Stevenson does not think any aspect of her art should be kept separate from analysis. “Everything is relevant in a therapy space, isn’t that the point? Freud’s study feels like the ideal studio to me.”

Mandy El-Sayegh has a complicated relationship with analysis. The British-Malaysian artist’s expansive practice is driven, in part, by psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Donald Winnicott; she also reimagined Freud’s study for an immersive show at Ropac in London in 2023. “I’m heavily engaged in Lacanian discourse, and it is the only one that contains terms and ideas of contradiction that typically resist theory, such as jouissance and the sinthome,” she tells me. ‘Jouissance’ is used to describe an intense form of pleasure that might cross over into discomfort, often connected with excess, as Lacan described it, “a backhand enjoyment”. His idea of ‘sinthome’, meanwhile, reflects an indispensable part of ourselves that connects the seemingly disparate realms of the real, symbolic and imaginary together. 

For El-Sayegh, these ideas are less about expanding creativity through personal therapy, and more focused on bringing psychoanalytic models of play and multi-layered contradiction to her artistic practice. She has worked with a number of therapists over the years but hasn’t yet found the right fit. “I avidly subscribe to the theory, the form and ideas used in particular forms of psychoanalysis. I use these methodologies as a way to generate movement, especially in relation to a creative practice; ideas like [Winnicott’s] free association. But personally, it didn’t work for me in the clinic.” 

She is now drawn to more intuitive, physical approaches. “What worked therapeutically, with incidental effects on artistic practice, was with people in more unconventional disciplines. Embodied, ritualistic practices aren’t common in Western culture, but they are essential to the therapeutic ideas of working through and with others.”

Experimental trauma therapy is increasingly popular, with some artists moving away from the traditional roots of analysis. For her recent show ‘EMDR’ at Galerie Judin, US artist Lydia Pettit made a series of paintings directly inspired by her work with a therapist using EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) techniques. The paintings offer a visceral deep dive into Pettit’s mind as she wrestles with childhood trauma. A dark black liquid represents previously obscured or repressed parts. Pettit’s works were created at the culmination of therapeutic work, acting in some ways as a final, satisfying processing of the memories dredged up. 

When I spoke to the British collage artist Linder earlier this year for Burlington Contemporary, she told me about a very different EMDR experience. Her ongoing use of found pornographic imagery is led, in part, by her grandfather showing her explicit images as a child. EMDR gave her “a deep sense of peace about my childhood”, but “then for about a month, I couldn’t make any work because we’d neutralised pornography! It was like looking at a tin of beans because there was no pulse.”

Shadi Al-Atallah has likewise felt too analysed at times, to the detriment of art making. He paints richly psychological works, featuring multiple figures which could be understood as parts of the same psyche in sometimes violent conflict. “My experience receiving psychotherapy has been quite extensive and from my teenage years,” the Saudi artist tells me. “By the time I arrived at painting during my BA final year due to mental health, I had grown in my own understanding of myself but felt that a lot of my emotions and experience were swept aside and intellectualised.” His resulting pieces were a rebellion against the cognitive nature of psychotherapy. “My painting was very physical and involved lots of movement and pulling the feeling out of myself, like a ritual of purging and releasing.” 

The powerful movement in his paintings is often contained within interior settings, a combination of spatial memories and imagination. When he returned to trauma work, he began to explore these spaces with the therapist. This eventually built a nourishing connection between the consulting room and studio. “What had been abstract became more formalised and verbalised again,” he says. “It was like a feedback loop of feeling then naming then understanding.” 

It is perhaps this attuned ability to see how art and therapy help and hinder one another, that ultimately enables artists to step back when the latter threatens to consume creative thought. “Whenever I was back in therapy, I was really good at being emotionally in control but very bad at being an artist,” says Al-Atallah. “That rawness and openness that forms my practice is something that I have to maintain actively. I know when I’m in an ‘intellectualising’ mindset now. It’s behind so many of my creative blocks, so I have to keep it in check and make sure I’m feeling, fully.”