Interpretation in art therapy research and practice: The hermeneutic circle

Abstract

I have wanted to write this paper for a long time, but it is only recently that I have found the language that most effectively communicates the ideas that have grown out of my clinical and scholarly work. The impetus for this effort comes from two sources, both of which can be labelled as professional frustrations I have experienced. The first has to do with the confusions in the field of art therapy around the function of interpretation. The second is connected to this, but more specifically has to do with the limitations in scholarship and research that have at least partially grown out of the field’s historic debate over interpretation. In this presentation I discuss each of these issues separately and present a model that addresses both concerns, offering a more useful framework for understanding the role of interpretation in clinical work and giving a much-needed opportunity to build rigorous methodologies of scholarship that respect the centrality of subjective inte~retation in art therapy. Much debate has occurred around the idea of interpretation. Questions of when to interpret, what to interpret, how to interpret and even whether to interpret have consumed the field. Its journals, conferences and likely its training institutions have spent hours concerned with this kind of discussion. I confess to having p~icipated in much of it. But in recent years I have backed away, frustrated with the confusions that have been catalyzed by the arguments and aware that the discussions were simply thrusting its participants further into the polarity struggles that have been endemic in the field. To interpret or not to interpret seemed to be symptomatic~ly reflective of the old tensions between “art as therapy” and “art is therapy. ’ ’ Surely there is a more integrative way to grapple with the concerns. Interpretation needs to be seen as something other than an either/or clinical style. Franklin and Politsky (1992) have created a wonderful first step in the much-needed effort to utilize the work of other disciplines (i.e., philosophy and literary criticism) that have also struggled with the idea of interpretation. The second frustration I have experienced has been with the epistemological inconsistencies between clinical and research practices in the field of art therapy. Although the clinical work of the art therapist is subjective, open-ended, intuitive and qualitative, our research efforts have historically been attempts to reorient our approach and become objective, narrowly focused, empirical and quantitative. I believe that, out of the model of interpretation I elaborate in this paper, an oppo~unity emerges to find compatibility between clinical approaches and scholarly practices, a need that has been addressed by many art therapists interested in research (Junge, 1989; McNiff, 1986: Rubin, 1984; Wadeson, 1980). Basic to the model I develop is my belief that the crux of the pyschothera~uti~ event is the phenomenon of dialogue, and inte~retation is but a com~nent of that dialogue. Seen within the context of psychotherapy as a humanistic, dialogical and phenomenological event the role of the interpretation can be conceptualized as the inter-subjective creation or construction of the participants. The remainder of this paper elaborates this idea to provide an integrated