Abstract

Time, and in particular the subjective sense of time, is an invisible medium crucial to art therapy processes that has not received a focused inquiry in the literature. After a review in the introduction of those considerations which have been given to time in art therapy literature, the initial chapters of this thesis explore theoretical and developmental perspectives on the subjective experience of time as formulated in the schools of psychoanalysis, analytical psychology and existential psychotherapy. While each school ultimately deals with a client's experience of time as a whole, each is shown to preference one temporal perspective: psychoanalysis the past, analytical psychology the "other time" of archetypal reality, and existential psychotherapy the future cusp of the present. These findings are then integrated into an exploration of interior time in creative process, particularly with regard to the process and products of art therapy, in order to arrive at an understanding of how qualities and dynamics inherent in therapeutically supported art processes and their visual products make art therapy uniquely suited to establish healing connectivities within our clients' experience of time. J. T. Fraser's formulation of temporal umwelts, which he has identified the artist as particularly adept in traversing, is used as a unifying model for this study. Finally, a brief examination of several psychiatric diagnoses from the perspective of each as involving a disorganisation of temporal experience culminates in the presentation of the case of a client with schizophrenia. In form and content, his art process and products are shown to eloquently embody the meanings of his experience of the psychoneurodynamic, temporal disordering inherent in schizophrenic process.