“Psychotherapy and Confessional Poetry” by Michael Thurston discusses the shift in mental health practices from psychoanalysis to psychotherapy in mid-century America. This included medicating patients through use of “tranquilizers, electroconvulsive therapy [and] insulin shock therapy” (148). Successful results yielded “docility and compliance” that brought “the mind to a socially acceptable orderliness (or at least the appearance of it)”.
I became curious about the approaches to mental illness during this time and, while researching, stumbled across a book review published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry on April 1, 1956. The book, entitled Experimental Studies in Psychiatric Art, was written by Dr. E. Cunningham Dax in 1953 and reviewed by Margaret Naumburg three years later. Dr. Dax produced a formal research to study art productions “of a group of mental patients” that were to be “statistically measured against the work of a control group of other patients who are engaged in an alternative occupation” (431) with the hope that results would “legitimize the use of music in psychological medicine” (434).
But can statistical averages really measure creativity or the effect of music and art on the brain?
Dr. Dax writes, ” the term ‘art therapy’ has been used with increasing frequency, but without, as yet, any justification; at present it can only be said that creative activity is believed to be a useful aid to psychiatric treatment. If the experimental methods of dealing with mental illness are labelled as if they were curative, without the necessary statistical support, disrepute must follow. Patients may attribute their recovery to the therapeutic effects of the arts, but such subjective statements can have no scientific validity until a group, for which a programme embracing one or other of the arts has been prescribed, can be shown statistically to recover more quickly or in a greater number than do a comparable series of matched controls” (431-32).
The doctor’s results showed him this: “it was found that the degree to which the various pieces of music evoke the characteristics of depression or elation in the paintings are statistically significant” and he thus reported that his findings appeared to be “of some importance for, if the implication is followed that depression or elation may be induced by music under other than these experimental conditions, this would be one of the initial steps towards the legitimate use of music in psychological medicine” (433-34).
But the reviewer has a different opinion: “Since musicians and those who respond to music have always known that ‘depression or elation may be induced by music,’ it seems superfluous for Dr. Dax to elaborate his statistical tests to prove this” (434).
Dr. Dax’s study, “discovery”, and subsequent prescription for music therapy might serve as a snapshot of the medical field’s attitude toward mentally ill patients in the midcentury. The focus in his study was somewhat the effects of music within the patient, but more focused on the outcome produced on the canvas, as measured against sterile objectivity standards such as color, merit, and the general “mood” of a patient’s piece. There was also no discussion of the influence or caliber the artwork produced could have on a more general population outside the mental hospital.
This is a reason the confessional poets can be so greatly admired in their work. Art produced from writers with such outspoken illnesses — even depicting their accounts of time spent in asylums — became recognizable as meaningful art to a general population. As a group, they wrote about “poetic explorations of drug and convulsive therapies and of the routines of institutional life” that went deeper than personal experiences. They “reveal[ed] the poets’ understanding of the construction of the subject in American society during the postwar decades” (Thurston 144).
Even at the time, it seems as though Dr. Dax’s study was a bit underwhelming, if his reviewer’s opinion reflects anything of a greater population. However, his endeavor to use music as art therapy was useful, and was perhaps thinking somewhat outside the box for his time. But music’s ability to produces emotions within us is certainly nothing newly-observed, if even under the sterility of a hospital study. Music and art have, and will continue to be, the overflow of our spirits. It just so happened that the confessional poets were willing to examine another aspect of life that was emerging in midcentury America, with the development of psychotherapy and its harms and ill effects on the body and brain.
Laura, this great and I think, yes their work is surely to be admired for the duress of their “treatments” and the initial states that got them there. While the work is beautiful and true I wonder if writing really was a kind of therapy for them since Plath and Sexton both went on to complete what they had planned to do when they were much younger. One of our readings even quoted one of them saying how they would talk about their attempted suicides at length–perhaps this was a sort of muse for them. I wonder, still, what the effect of rehashing these moments and this desire repeatedly really did to help their struggle.
Charlotte, when you speak about what Plath and Sexton “went on to do,” do you mean their suicides? This concept of their own deaths as muses for their work is intriguing. It reminds me of a few especially haunting lines in Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”: “I am only thirty/And like the cat I have nine times to die./This is Number Three.” She goes on a few stanzas later to write this melodically eerie bit: “Dying/Is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well./I do it so it feels like hell./I do it so it feels real./I guess you could say I’ve a call.” If what you mean to say is that their artwork might have not only examined, but perpetuated, their mental illnesses, then I would probably have to agree with you on that. So, is art therapy, then? Therapy to what end?
“Dr. Dax produced a formal research to study art productions “of a group of mental patients” that were to be “statistically measured against the work of a control group of other patients who are engaged in an alternative occupation” (431) with the hope that results would “legitimize the use of music in psychological medicine” (434).”
There’s something really chilling about this experiment, though I think the motivation behind it was noble, in attempting to prove the validity of “art therapy.” I think it’s also a little bizarre that the reviewer kind of offhandedly remarks that of course music can inspire emotions; this is something that everyone kind of accepts, but there has to be some sort of psychological study or studies that have proved it in the past.
I certainly thing you summarized succinctly how this article applies to our readings: “Art produced from writers with such outspoken illnesses — even depicting their accounts of time spent in asylums — became recognizable as meaningful art to a general population.” Your questions in your comment get at a different matter: what did “art therapy,” if we can qualify the poetry of the confessional school as such, do for them? Would writing about suicide, attempting and perhaps even attaining understanding at its purpose or motivations, only encourage someone who is suicidal to go through with their plans? Plath, Sexton, Berryman, and Lowell all committed suicide; I don’t doubt that there is the possibility their poetry, making them see what was in their heads on the page, may have contributed to their ultimate demises.