Adam Phillips - Attention Seeking. Curiosity in therapy and art.

"If explanation is the self-cure for curiosity, we have a lot of explaining to stop doing; if desire is the refuge from wide-angled attention, we have a lot of wanting to relinquish."

Attention is something we give and receive, and is in turns needed, wanted, and feared in its various forms. In psychotherapy we notice that a symptom, a state of mind, is something that claims our attention in a particular way, and as Adam Phillips suggests, psychoanalysis (and by extension I am saying other forms of therapy too) might aim to free us from certain kinds of self-preoccupation.

The relinquishing of a 'symptom' might have something to do with gradually coming to find it less interesting (and less deserving of so much attention), or that it has a place, but as a part of the story not the whole, and that other parts are ultimately more deserving of our attention - more interesting. This is something to be arrived at, after a process of paying attention in a new way, asking the symptom what it is really wanting to turn our attention towards. A danger of psychotherapy, is that we become more absorbed with our symptoms and beholden to previous attempts at self-cure.

"Both psychoanalysis, as a writing and a therapeutic practice, and the reading of literature...work by making us self-conscious about the nature and the quality of our attention, our language; by drawing our attention to certain preoccupations, they make us wonder what our attention may be seeking and avoiding. ...everyone's attention is absorbed by something, even if it is only distractedness, or the lack of control they have over their attention.

And many people seek out and value experiences in which they can lose themselves, or become absorbed (psychoanalysis, at its best, contrary to popular prejudice, is the therapy that frees people to lose interest in themselves; there's nothing more self-preoccupying than a symptom, nothing finally less interesting that one's self). The kinds of interest we take, the forms of attention we prefer, seem to be the best ways we have so far of trying to get the lives we want."

— Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking

Curiosity and the image in Art Psychotherapy

In Art Psychotherapy some people will hope that the therapist will tell them what their image means. It is my observation that it is more likely the patient fears the therapist will tell them what the picture means, in two ways. Firstly the concern that it may reveal more than they are currently ready to share. Or perhaps some 'unthought known' which is too tender for sudden revelation.

But I think there is also a fear that in saying what the image 'means', the therapist will have taken from the client their own ability to make meaning, and denied them the opportunity for self discovery. That an interpretation becomes an act of theft. The role of the Art Psychotherapist is to collaborate without collusion, and enter into an explorative curiosity about the image, holding in mind its various levels of significance, one of which is being utilised as a transferential object.

Curiosity in galleries and institutions

With regard to explanation as the self-cure for curiosity, I am wondering about galleries which place increasing importance on accompanying texts alongside artworks. All justifiable as education, perhaps even democratising the viewing of art. But perhaps also worth considering it from the perspective of an attempt to close down curiosity and monopolise 'knowing'.