Existential Analysis 26.

2: July 2015

Daring to Play: Art, Life and Therapy,

From Heidegger to Gadamer,
By Way of Barthes’ Punctum and
the Paintings of Paul Klee
Presentation, 22 November, 2014
Society for Existential Analysis Annual Conference

Marion Steel

Abstract
In recent years, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has come to be seen
as the holy grail to the nation’s mental health problems, with its results
being offered up as ‘scientifically proven’. Over fifty years ago, Heidegger
linked art with a different kind of truth to that of science, and Gadamer
continued Heidegger’s attempt at the recovery of the question of the truth
of art. Key to Gadamer’s philosophy is his recognition of the element of
free play within art and play as self-presentation. I argue that it is through
the dynamic, play-ful art of therapy, free from set directions and goals, that
we can be challenged to expand our thinking and achieve greater well-being.

Key words
CBT, happiness, Heidegger, Gadamer, Klee, Barthes, Play, Art.

CBT: A Route to Happiness?

In their recent book, Thrive: The Power of Evidence-Based Psychological
Therapies (2014), the economist Richard Layard and psychologist, David
Clark set out their plan to improve mental health resources in the UK.
Clark and Layard propose that the first step is to measure the mental health
of the populace using what they call ‘the new science of happiness’. The
results, they suggest, could then underpin the provision of therapy, by which
they mean CBT. For Layard and Clark, the provision of CBT offers a simple,
economic and effective answer for all patients with mental health problems,
with clearly measurable results. In a review in The Guardian newspaper,
the writer Jenny Diski sums up how for Clark and Layard measurement is
all: ‘The joy of simple measurement is the heart of Thrive,’ she observes.
‘If it can’t be or hasn’t been measured, it’s no use’ (Diski, 2014).
To this end, as Diski notes in her review, Clark and Layard’s provision
of CBT is so standardised that therapists can be trained very quickly, and
use a manual to conduct their sessions. This means patients can be treated

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by phone, online or with self-help books. Diski provides an explanatory

snapshot of the approach:
CBT deems patients who are depressed and anxious to be having
wrong thoughts. These thoughts are examined in the sessions and
found to be negative. Repetitive negative thoughts are called
rumination and patients are trained to alter their thinking to be
positive. If I claimed, say, to be depressed about the fact I will
die sooner rather than later, perhaps I would be told to focus on
the fact that I’m not dead today. This is true,’ she notes ‘but
doesn’t alter the inevitable, which it might be useful for me to
think about and come to terms with.
(Diski, 2014)
This form of psychotherapy is clearly economic – in both the spareness
and the bareness of its provision, and its cost effectiveness at delivery (and
I stress here at delivery). The economy is explicitly at the centre of the
case put forward for CBT by Thrive, and the claim that CBT is cost effective.
The authors make an economic case for rolling out this programme of
therapy; their figures show that by getting people ‘better’ and back to work
as fast as possible, the Treasury could regain the 4% of GNP that is lost
through the lost input (the lost working days, sickness benefit, lost tax)
– the economic cost of mental illness.
By the authors’ own diagnosis of the problem, loss lies at the heart of
things. Loss of happiness, loss of health, loss of functioning, loss of work,
loss of income. The authors wish to reverse this loss, to turn loss back to
gain, to get the patient symptom-free, back to work, paying his or her taxes.
But the question is: can loss be so quickly and easily eradicated? Recent
studies have questioned the longer term effectiveness of CBT. However, for
Lyard and Clark, CBT offers a route back to mental health. In fact, it offers a
route to happiness, which can be proven by measuring it scientifically. Key
to such an attempt is a definition of happiness. Lyard offered this up in his
2003 lecture series ‘Happiness: Has Social Science a Clue?’: ‘By happiness
I mean feeling good – enjoying life and feeling it is wonderful. And by
unhappiness I mean feeling bad and wishing things were different.’ In her
Guardian review, Diski hones in on this definition. ‘It is not just simplistic,’
she comments, ‘ but actually alarming that, by his own definition, unhappiness
– “feeling bad and wishing things were different” – stands as a description of
the mentally ill.’ She wonders if in their hope to increase happiness by eradicating
so-called negative thinking, in attempting to eradicate the wish for things to
be different ‘are the authors setting out to achieve a placid, self-satisfied
society, content with things as they are? A politician’s dream, but hardly a
healthy state to be in as we increasingly discover so many aspects of government

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and policy that require the oversight of a critical public’ (Diski, 2014).
Diski sounds a warning note in troubled times. Are we heading here for
a Brave New World bland satisfaction? Is happiness really achievable through
trying to abolish so-called wrong or negative thoughts and replacing them
with the right positive ones? Is happiness, as Lyard defines it, even a legitimate
goal to aim for – is it so easily measurable, sustainable? These are questions
that philosophers have pondered over millennia and cannot be definitively
answered here, however we need perhaps to hold them in our minds. As a
nation, are we even unhealthily preoccupied by the idea of happiness and
its attainment? As Nietzsche observes in Twilight of the Idols: ‘Mankind
does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.’ (1990, p 33)
Where in this kind of therapy that attempts to apply scientific thinking,
which places so much emphasis upon calculation and measurement and on
the thoughts (which it posits as either positive or negative) of an individual
psyche, where in this programmatic approach, we might ask, is space made
for seeking out the relational, creative, spontaneous, humorous, playful
aspects of living, which, I suggest, are crucial for making life joyous, happy
– in fact, where in this model is the spontaneity, the aliveness, the joy within
a therapeutic encounter? And conversely, where in this therapeutic model
is the recognition of the everyday sadness and sorrows of life? In a view of
life that posits the attainment of happiness and enjoyment as all (a question:
do we attain happiness?) it is notable that any attempt to confront and engage
one’s thinking with the difficulties of life, the struggles within our existence,
is absent. Where in such an approach is the recognition of the limitations
life puts upon us, the other side to fully functioning, so-called healthy living:
what of the role that ill-health plays in our lives, and death in life (others,
our own)? Where is the recognition of loss as a part of living?

Heidegger’s Warning
Over fifty years ago, in What is Called Thinking? (1968) Heidegger
sounded a warning, that a world view that privileges science to the exclusion
of all other ways of seeing, is in danger of missing something fundamental
at the heart of being. He tells us
The sciences are fully entitled to their name, which means fields
of knowledge, because they have infinitely more knowledge than
thinking does. And yet there is another side in every science
which that science as such can never reach: the essential nature
and origin of its sphere, the essence and essential origin of the
manner of knowing which it cultivates, and other things besides.
The sciences remain of necessity on the one side. In this sense
they are one-sided… The sciences’ one-sidedness retains its own
many-sideness. But that many sideness may expand to such

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proportions that the one-sideness on which it is based no longer

catches our eye. And when man no longer sess the one side as
one side, he has lost sight of the other side as well. What sets the
two sides apart, what lies between them, is covered up so to
speak. Everything is leveled to one level. Our minds hold views
on all and everything and view all things in the identical way.
(1968, p 33)
So we are considering here what is visible and what is not. We are considering
what becomes invisible to us, what does not immediately appear to us as
being there. For example if we apply such thinking to psychotherapy, we
might say that what gets focused on a lot in therapy is words, to such a
degree that, and especially within the NHS, psychotherapy and counselling
have come to be defined as talking therapies. We focus on words, but what
of silences? What about what is not spoken? When we think of the person
to person encounter within a session we might and we do most certainly pay
attention to the words, but what of all the other kinds of communication?
We might pay attention to the way we pause between the words, and at what
point the pauses occur, what it is that gets communicated in the silence,
what thoughts arise out of the silences, and then get spoken. We might pay
attention to the way we sit with a client, the position of our bodies, and how
it changes, what is known as body language, bodily sensations that accompany
words and silences, we might think about how we look at each other (a client
who had great difficulty trusting others, said to me, ‘I decided to trust you,
when I saw you walk towards me, the way you looked at me, it’s important
to me, I notice these things’) we might pay attention to how and when we
laugh together with a client and what gets communicated and created within
the therapeutic relationship in laughter.
Of course, we are paying attention here to what makes up the therapeutic
relationship, which time and time again, so many studies have pinpointed
as being the most crucial factor for therapeutic success. We are paying
attention to everything that falls between the cracks of the words within
a psychotherapy session. We are speaking of what is not easily spoken.
We are speaking perhaps of all the factors that lead to a therapeutic bond
developing, a connection between two people that can allow trust and
insight to happen. We are also talking of other things than explicit goals
or aims of therapy, that a client may come into therapy with, or develop,
important though the original goals or aims might be. We are speaking of
the possibility that can occur within therapy for the client to be encouraged
to go beyond what Heidegger named calculative thinking, to go beyond
the everyday narrow base of goal-orientated thinking, towards an expansion,
a broadening out of thinking and feeling, what Heidegger named meditative
thinking, and that in this explorative therapeutic space we have the possibility

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to discover who and what we are, and consequently how we want to live
our lives.
*
In my room in the hospital a client is speaking. We have just been sitting
together silently, near the start of our session. Paul begins to tell me how
he recently visited an art exhibition. This in itself is a big thing. Paul is in
his mid-forties, his long-term partner, Anna, died the year before. He is
struggling in his grief to remain connected to the outside world. He spends
much of his time in his flat, Paul is a musician but he has not been creating
music since Anna’s death. I listen to Paul speaking, he asks me if I have
been to the exhibition; I tell him that I have. He begins to tell me the
impression that it made upon him, how he felt engaged by it, enlivened,
and in doing so, he begins to tell me about a photograph. This black and
white portrait had been a dominant image of the show since it had been
blown up to many times its original size and portrayed some of the founding
members of the art movement - a group, of five or six figures, all gazing
out at the camera. Particularly striking in the picture was their direct gaze
that seemed to intimately address the viewer, but also the way these people
were dressed, their casual manner, their hairstyles (one of the women has
short spiky tousled hair, she wears a white shirt) and how they all appeared
startlingly contemporary, although the photograph must have been taken
around eighty years ago.
My client is commenting on this, how it felt looking at the photograph,
how he felt the vivid presence of these people, magnified there before him,
as if they were alive, and yet, he says thoughtfully, sadly, these people
now must be all dead. He pauses and looks at me. The statement has been
put to me almost as a question, highlighting its strangeness to him.
I am reminded of the book on photography by the French writer, Roland
Barthes, Camera Lucida (1984) and how Barthes describes one day coming
upon a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852;
he tells the reader ‘I realized then, with an amazement I have not been
able to lessen since: “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor” ’
(1984: 3). This experience begins Barthes’ book on the nature of photography.
I share this association with Paul, and Barthes’ idea of the punctum, the
aspect of a photograph that seizes the viewer, that makes an impact – very
often, it is a detail that might prick you, provoke in you an unexpected
response. It may be a minor detail, or not, an aspect that opens out one’s
thinking, one’s feeling, one’s response. As Barthes sums it up, however
lightning-like it may be, the punctum has more or less potentially, a power
of expansion’ (1984: 45)
The look of the young woman in the group photograph with the spiky
hair is unsmiling, almost challenging – she seems to look out at the viewer
almost defiantly. My client realizes this is his punctum, remembering the

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picture, how her aliveness appeared captured there in the photograph, it

is most of all her defiant spirit that stands out, crystallised, in his memory,
there in the white man’s shirt she wore, her dark spiky hair, so radical for
its time, and yet, my client feels keenly, the possibility, no, he corrects
himself, the probability of her death – that all of them, in fact, have to be
dead. He has found himself at the paradox of the photograph, that in it he
sees life, a young, pulsating, energetic life, yet he finds himself realising
he is looking at what has been.
We realise that this photograph strikes at the heart of Paul’s grief – the
‘what has been’, the presence of an absence in the photograph reflects so
vividly his own mental landscape, revealed in his dreams, which he brings
to our sessions, where Anna appears before him, vividly alive, although
there is now increasingly a half-knowledge that often filters through into
Paul’s dream world, his own thinking and feeling within the dream that
things are not quite right, for in the dream she is alive and yet, he knows
her to be dead, for at the same time in the dream world he feels her presence,
the haunting day-time knowledge of her absence now filters through, clinging
to his night-time consciousness. In Paul’s dreams Anna is in a way now
both alive and dead at the same time. He realises that the picture, like his
recent dreams, whilst it captures an excited and vibrant aliveness, yet
brings to his mind this shadow knowledge of death, absence, loss. And so
the photograph that Paul recalls from this exhibition, that had also impacted
upon me so strikingly, captures something essential for both of us (Paul
does not know it but my closest friend died, also of cancer, just a few
months before Anna.) We are both acutely tuned into life and death, and
how the two are intertwined (I also dream of my friend).
Barthes points to photography’s referent as different to other forms of
representation, like painting, for in photography the necessarily real thing
was there, for we can never deny that the thing has been there. Thus there
is a superimposition of reality and of the past, it is the essence, what Barthes
calls the noeme of photography: ‘That-has-been’.
This noeme, Barthes notes , ‘more or less blurred beneath the abundance
and the disparity of contemporary photographs, is vividly legible in historical
photographs’: For ‘It is because each photograph always contains this imperious
sign of my future death that each one, however attached it seems to be to
the excited world of the living, challenges each of us, one by one, outside
of any generality (but not outside of any transcendence)’ (1984, p 97).
In recalling the photograph, and linking its effect to the mood of his
dreams, Paul realises his reaction to the photograph echoes all the feelings
that have been arising in his night-time consciousness. There is the strong
feeling of bewilderment, the incredulity (dead and alive at the same time),
and something like a despair and elation intertwined. There is an anger in
Paul’s feeling of incredulity – how can it be! – a powerlessness at the state

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of things, a resignation, a sadness, a feeling of complete desperation at

times in the pervasive feeling of absence and loss, and yet also present at
other times, there is a kind of joy in his own energy of thinking and feeling,
his aliveness, in remembering Anna, of still feeling her presence and her
impact in his thoughts, in his life. It is also present when he speaks of the
books he has been reading, the exhibition that stirred him: we note together
the paradox of feeling the pull of life so vividly when one feels up close
to both the absence and the presence of death.
The therapeutic journey in working with Paul’s grief – the search for
meaning in what feels like a completely barren and utterly desolate landscape
of loss – takes us through the realisation of an abundance and complexity
of different and opposing interconnected feelings; we are focusing on what
is most difficult and yet an energy arises in our encounter and dialogue.
There is a feeling of great aliveness in our sessions, at times our spoken
thoughts seem to fly back and forth, like a ball that we throw one to the
other, or maybe it is more accurate to say like a balloon, that we pass back
and forth almost gently, floatingly, as if in slow motion, we take our time,
with developing the thoughts, that arise between us, and in so doing, I notice
how in our thinking and feeling in the sessions it is like we are playing,
playing with our thoughts, seeing where they go, how they join up, where
they lead us. I notice the feeling of freedom and the unexpectedness of where
we end up – it seems to me that this feeling of expansion and vitality of
being is an important aspect of what therapy can offer the client, especially
in a world that has become narrowed down, or closed off in grief or depression.
So we are speaking here of unexpected discoveries and experiences that
can emerge in the reflective space of therapy – if we allow the space for
them to appear. Discoveries that arise out of silences, out of finding a
space for thinking – and feeling – with another person, with whom one
can feel the trust that enables one to express one’s self freely, we are
speaking of the possibility for making discoveries that arise out of curiosity
(not coming from a place of knowing, but not knowing), randomness,
spontaneity, creativity, play.
*
A client has been talking to me in our session, she then stops herself,
and says ‘ I am rambling… it is strange to ramble.. it’s like free speech,
it is strange to listen and hear myself speaking so freely…to let myself
speak and hear the words come… it’s like a letting go.. it’s like taking off
a tight garment that I didn’t know I was wearing...’
This client, who I will call Ann, then pauses and says with emphasis yet
with a tentative smile: ‘This is new to me.’ In the next session Ann tells
me, ‘It is no small thing, to speak, to feel able to speak, and to feel heard’.
She tells me that she feels ‘a gratitude’ to me. She feels she has always
censored herself, and has never spoken out her feelings in this way she

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finds herself doing now with me, ‘freely’, it feels she says, ‘ like a revelation
’she adds, speaking slowly: ‘to speak and to be heard’.
Ann is a patient at the hospital where I work, she was referred by her
doctors for symptoms of panic. Ann’s panic followed a diagnosis of adrenal
cancer and her struggle going through chemo. Ann tells me how at difficult
points in her life she has experienced panic, it emerges as like a feeling
of constriction in her throat which makes it feel difficult to breathe, as a
result she was feeling like she could not go on with the chemo. Ann’s
diagnosis had been late and is now a stage III, Ann tells me that she feels
her GP did not listen to her, she relates this to being labelled as ‘a worrier’.
She once saw this term used in a copy sent to her of a hospital letter. She
told me of a psychiatric admission in her 50s when she had experienced
constriction in her throat and felt she could not swallow, consequently she
could not eat, nor had she felt able to speak. In our first session, Ann tells
me how her father died before she was born, in the Second World War .
Because her mother was deep in her grief, Ann was largely brought up by
her great aunt who would often tell her not to upset her mother, to be ‘good’
and not to cry. We look at her feeling of constriction in her throat, and how
it links to the feeling of not being able to speak about what she is feeling.
This has been replicated recently by her experience with the GP, and is
present again in her current situation with her hospital team. Ann tells me
how she feels pressurised by the medics to continue with chemo, in her
words, ‘to swallow her feelings’ and to be good’, ‘to put up with things’.
But it is as if her feelings get stuck in her throat and won’t go away. Over
the course of our sessions, Ann speaks out all she is feeling, with her eyes
closed. After a number of sessions the feeling of panic and constriction in
her throat subside, and she is able to resume with the chemo. This together
with the feeling of being able to speak freely and for her words to be heard
was a source of wonder to her.
I have spoken of this client at length because what is pertinent here, was
the importance for Ann of feeling able to speak freely, to be able in our
sessions, as she put it, ‘to ramble, to see where it takes me’, that felt for
this client so crucially enabling – to be able to speak, as she put it, without
knowing what she was going to say, just to speak and to see what words
come. It feels like, this client tells me, as we near our ending, like you
have permitted me to be able to know myself, in a new way, through these
words that I am speaking so freely to you’.
Rambling, free speech, to be able to speak freely – we are reminded that
a cornerstone of psychoanalysis was and still is free association. It emerged
early on as a technique in psychoanalysis from Freud’s sessions with his
patient Miss Elizabeth who protested against interruptions to her flow of
thought: a true example of client-led therapy. Freud would later cite as a
precursor of free association a letter from Schiller, in which he stated that,

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‘where there is a creative mind, Reason - so it seems to me - relaxes its

watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell’. (Malcom, 1988:
17) Freud also mentioned another possible influence as an essay by Ludwig
Börne, in which he suggests that to foster creativity you ‘write down,
without any falsification or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your
head’ (Jones, 1964; p 219) What is crucial about the method of free association
is that neither therapist nor patient knows in advance exactly where the
conversation will lead, but that it will reveal material that matters to the
patient and that it allows the free flow of creative thought.
In free association therefore the patient or client speaks without any
particular linear or pre-planned agenda, this enables the therapy to unfold
by means of intuitive leaps and linkages which may lead to new personal
insights and meanings. However, one could argue, it is also important that
the therapist meets the client in the same mode, that if the therapist is
similarly relaxed he or she can observe what freely comes up in response
to the client’s material, a to-ing and fro-ing of spontanteous and intuitive
associations and linkages can then occur through dialogue. The psychoanalyst
D. W. Winnicott was very aware of the two-way process of this kind of
communication between client and therapist, that is like a kind of free
play. Coming from his background of child psychiatry and working with
children he was sensitised to the role of play in creative expression and
from his work and observations of mothers and their babies he was able
to extrapolate what it is that makes for an enabling relationship.
In his essay ‘Playing: Creative Activity and the Search for the Self’,
Winnicott states that ‘psychotherapy is done in the overlap of two play areas,
that of the patient and that of the therapist. If the therapist cannot play, then
he is not suitable for the work. If the patient cannot play, then something
needs to be done to enable the patient to be able to play, after which psychotherapy
may begin. The reason why playing is essential is that it is in playing that
the patient is being creative.’ (Winnicott, 1991; p 72)

Heidegger and Klee: Art Renders Visible

The exhibition where my client, Paul, and I had seen the photograph was
centred upon the Bauhaus art movement, who, in seeking a freedom from
established ways of thinking, narrow and established classifications and
conceptualisations, would bring art to bear in the design of artifacts for
everyday life, seeking to inspire their creative development through the
interweaving of drawing, painting craft, music, theatre and play. The
artist, Paul Klee, was a key figure within the Bauhaus movement. Klee
was an outstanding violinist, throughout his life he performed at concerts
and early on had struggled as to whether his vocation was to be an artist
or a musician. Klee was therefore highly sensitised to the correspondences
between music, art, and text. In Klee’s paintings, linear structures with

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structural grid-like systems like musical notation, and fragmentary forms

repeated in a rhythmical fashion recalling the notes of a musical bar
appear. Rhythms of colour and light pulsate through his paintings conveying
movement and a dynamic energy. From early on, Klee sought to find a
freedom and energy of artistic expression through archaic art forms,
primitive art, and playful art forms, like doodling and scribbling which,
for Klee, were a dynamic expression free from cognition in which something
central to our nature and sense of self could be discovered.
In a diary entry in 1911, he conveys how the movement within his thinking,
expressed through his art, has led to a sense of his own developing self:
The possibility ripened in me of harmonising my swarming
scribbles with firmly restraining linear boundaries. And this will
bear for me a further fruit: the line that eats and digests
scribbles. Assimilation. The spaces still look a bit empty, but not
for much longer!
In lucid moments, I now have a clear view of twelve years of the
history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with the
big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self,
now gradually the reemergence of a self without blinkers.
(Klee, 1968: p 260)
Out of the genesis and the development of his art, for Klee, the genesis
and the development of his self.
In 1956 Heidegger made a visit to an exhibition of Paul Klee’s paintings
in Basel; in a letter to a friend two years later he expressed the originality
and radicality of Klee’s work: ‘Something which we all have not yet even
glimpsed has come forward’ (quoted by Schmidt, 2013: p 79).
Heidegger’s statement seems to echo Klee’s assertion in his text, Creative
Confession, published in 1920, that ‘art does not repeat the visible, rather
it renders visible’ (Schmidt, 2013: p 81). In this declaration, Klee was
challenging the idea long dominant in Western thinking since Plato, that
relegated art’s status to purely that of representation, a copy of something
existing, and declaring, in contrast, that art could call into being something
otherwise unseen. For Klee, art was in this sense its own origin; with this
in mind Klee refers to ‘the genesis of things’ as being apparent in art.
In ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ , Heidegger defines ‘origin’ as meaning
‘that from and by which something is what it is and as it is’ (2001, p 19).
In this seminal essay, Heidegger links art with truth, when he states that
‘the happening of truth is at work in the art work’. For Heidegger, this was
not truth as veritas, as correctedness – propositional truth – but truth in
the Greek sense of aletheia, the unconcealedness of beings. For Heidegger,

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in the work of art, the happening of truth is at work. Yet he notes that in
the words, ‘art work’, we are confronted with the thingly feature of the
given work, rather than its happening. We hear what is worked, but we
fail to lose its actuality, its truth, if we do not also take the work as something
worked, effected – the work’s createdness, he emphasises, can be grasped
only in terms of the process (my emphasis) of creation. In the happening
of truth in the work of art, Heidegger tells us ‘we are able to characterise
creation as follows: to create is to cause something to emerge as a thing
that has been brought forth. The work’s becoming a work is a way in which
truth becomes and happens’ (2001, p 69).
Was this what Heidegger saw in Klee’s work thirty years later in Basel?
Klee himself declared that ‘Art plays unknowingly with ultimate things and
yet it reaches them’. In his lectures and writings, Klee emphasised how painting
needs to be understood as a product of a dynamic activity, that it needs to be
seen as a movement, not as something static or frozen (Schmidt, 2013: 85).
Many of Klee’s paintings exhibit this dynamic quality by means of arrows
and other directions for movements. They also exhibit what Klee in his writings
referred to as ‘ a simultaneity of forms’ or the ‘multi-dimensionality’ of painting
through the paintings’ layering and overlapping, and varying materials. The
critic Dennis Schmidt notes how ‘the palimpsest-like character of Klee’s work
is not to be explained simply as a spatial overwriting of images; rather, it is
one way in which a painting simultaneously presents a happening of events
that are different’ (2013, p 85). And thus, perhaps, through this complexity of
interlinking forms happening, the interworking of space, light, colour and
form, something that has not before been glimpsed, becomes visible...
And, so, we might argue, in therapy, different happenings coalesce: different
thoughts, feelings, images, dreams, events, interweave and form new meanings,
new fusions, new truths.
As early as 1926, Heidegger had turned to art as revealing of truth. In a
course of lectures in that year, Heidegger referred to a painting ‘Deer in the
Forest’ by Franz Marc (who in fact was a close friend of Klee’s) to illustrate
what he meant by a ‘hermeneutic concept’. By this, Heidegger explained, he
meant a concept defined not by universality or stability but by agility. After
saying that the image in art was not to be restricted as a copy or as ‘pure
concept’, Heidegger states:
The deer in the forest, which for instance, Franz Marc has painted,
are not these deer in a particular forest, but rather ‘the deer in the
forest” … In artistic presentation a concept is presented which in
this case presents an understanding of something existing; more
precisely, it presents an understanding of a being and of its being
in the world as a being with me in my environment; namely the
being in the forest of the deer of the deer and the way and manner

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in which its being in the forest is presented. This concept of the

deer and this concept of its being we call a hermeneutic concept in
contrast to a pure concept of the thing.
(quoted by Schmidt, 2013: p 71)
Hans-Georg Gadamer who was present at this lecture, would often describe
Heidegger’s lively dramatisation of the painting, how he would imitate
the deer in the forest and how it would notice the presence of another
animal by smell, sniffing the air, lifting its head suddenly and becoming
very still. In this way, he conveyed, very memorably it would seem, how
the painting of the deer presented an understanding of something, most
crucially, in its context, that the hermeneutic concept was situated and did
not lift what was to be understood out of its situation. However, as with
his description of Van Gogh’s paintings later in the ‘Origin of the Work
of Art’, it is notable that at this point Heidegger did not reach towards
what was happening at this point within modern art, that is, the beginning
of the disappearance of the object and the challenge that abstraction was
to bring, in terms of ‘the making visible’ that he would later glimpse so
startingly and vividly within Klee’s paintings. 1

Gadamer: Play as Self-movement

Gadamer continued Heidegger’s attempt at the recovery of the question
of the truth of art. In Truth and Method, Gadamer (2004) was to concern
himself primarily with uncovering the notion of truth within the horizon
of understanding, in contrast to the view dominant in Western thinking
since Descartes that truth is to be secured through method. Gadamer
challenges head on the pervasive view that methodology has come to be
the driving concern even of the humanities (2004, p 110). Gadamer thus
follows Heidegger in wanting to demonstrate that art enables us to uncover
truths about ourselves and our world that no amount of scientific endeavour
can reveal. Key to Gadamer’s argument and his philosophy of art is his
recognition of the element of play within it.
Influenced by thinkers like Huizinga and Guardini, who had charted the
historical importance of play in all religious and cultic practices, and
notwithstanding that play arises out of a context that will be historical and
cultural, and to which we might add gender, class and sexual orientation,
Gadamer highlights the universality of play as a phenomenon, seeing play
as an elementary function of human life, present within all cultures. Crucially,
for Gadamer, it was important to understand the fundamental givenness
of human play as free impulse and not simply negatively as freedom from
specific ends. He sees play as expressive of energy and movement, and of
the to and fro of movement that is constantly repeated without any particular

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end or purpose. He points to certain expressions – ‘the play of light’, the

play of the waves ‘where we have a constant coming and going, back and
forth a movement that is not tied to any goal’ (1986, p 22). Gadamer notes
that ‘what characterises this movement back and forth is that neither pole
of the movement represents the goal in which it would come to rest.
Furthermore, a certain leeway clearly belongs to such a movement. This
gives us a great deal to think about for the question of art.
The freedom of movement is such that it must have the form of self-
movement (1986: 22-3). Gadamer refers back to Aristotle who described
self movement as the most fundamental characteristic of living beings, for
whatever is alive has its source of movement within iself. For Gadamer,
play appears as a self-movement ‘that does not pursue any particular end
or purpose so much as movement as movement, exhibiting so to speak a
phenomenon of excess, of living self-representation’ (1986: 23). This is
what we observe in nature, Gadamer asserts, as with the play of gnats, or
all the lively forms of play that we observe in the animal world, most
particularly in their young and in our own children. Gadamer points up
how this impulse towards play ‘ arises from the basic character of excess
striving to express itself in the living being’ (1986, p 23). For us human
beings it is the free flow of energy that fuels our creative striving and our
sense of aliveness. (When we think of depression and how the depressed
client presents to us, the classic flatness of affect, the feelings of hopelessness,
powerlessness or despair that accompany such a diagnosis, is it not this
excess of energy, this excess of self that has gone missing?)
Gadamer notes that whilst play is non-purposive, the activity is nonetheless
intended – and often, in the case where reason and rules are applied, there
is effort, ambition and profound commitment. The child, Gadamer notes,
is unhappy if he loses control in the tenth bounce and happy and proud if
he can keep it going to the thirtieth. He notes that this is one step on the
road to human communication, ‘if something is represented here – if only
the movement of play itself – it is also true to say that the onlooker ‘intends’
it, just as in the act of play I stand over against myself as an onlooker’.
Gadamer notes that the spectator is more than an observer, but one who
literally takes part: you have only to see at a tennis match the spectators
cricking their necks (1986, pp 22-23; 2004, pp 107-110). Gadamer notes
the step from ritual dance to ritual observation, to the liberation of representation
in the theatre… From here, Gadamer makes the leap to modern art, situationist
art, the happening, art as play, art as experience. As the art critic Susan
Sontag (1987) noted in her seminal essay on Style, ‘A work of art encountered
as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question’.
Sontag tries to pull art away from the expectation of content, the separation
of content and form, still so prevalent today, to assert ‘that art is not only

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about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not

just a text or commentary on the world.’ Sontag acknowledges that works
of art refer to the real world – to our knowledge, to our experience, to our
values, they present information and evaluations’ but this is not the whole
of what art does. She goes on: ‘their distinctive feature is that they give
rise not to conceptual knowledge’, which she notes as the distinctive feature
of scientific knowledge, ‘but to something like an excitation, a phenomenon
of commitment… which is to say that the knowledge that we gain… is an
experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge
of something (like a fact or a moral judgement) in itself’ (1987, p 22).
What is it that is so distinctive about form, Gadamer asks. The answer is
that we must construct it actively… there is constant cooperative activity
here’ (1986, p 27). Both Sontag and Gadamer, like Heidegger, draw on
Kant’s fundamental achievement in demonstrating that our understanding
of our selves, of our world, is not just a matter of conceptual thinking but
what Gadamer terms ‘aesthetic non-differentiation’ to bring out the deep
structure of perception’ (1986, p 29), which constitutes the meaning of that
cooperative play between imagination and understanding discovered by Kant.
It is part of unstructured play that the movement is not only without
goal or purpose but also without effort. The ease of play – which naturally
does not mean that there is any real absence of effort but refers phenomenologically
only to the absence of strain – is experienced subjectively as relaxation.
Gadamer points out how the fact that the mode of being of play is so close
to the mobile form of nature – shows us that for man, too playing is a
natural process. The meaning of his play too, precisely because – and
insofar as – he is part of nature, is a pure self-presentation.
Insomuch as nature is without purpose and intention, just as it is without
exertion, it is a constant self-renewing play, and can therefore appear as
a model for art, and I would argue, for therapy. Friedrich Schlegel writes
‘All the sacred games of art are only remote imitations of the infinite play
of the world, the eternally self-creating work of art’.

Art and therapy as a coming into being

Winnicott suggested ‘that a separate study is needed of creativity as a
feature of life and total living’ (1991, p 73). Clients invariably come to
therapy because they feel a sense of restriction in their lives, their situations,
their relationships and their sense of self. Winnicott emphasized the
importance of the therapist in a relationship that involved trust and acceptance
facilitating the client to find relaxation which would enable him or her
to feel a new expansiveness in their sense of self, that in the highly
specialised conditions of the therapeutic relationship, ‘the individual can
come together and exist as a unit not as a defence against anxiety but as

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an expression of I am, I am alive, I am myself. From this position, Winnicott

tells us, everything is creative (1991, p 76).
For Gadamer the work of art is not to be thought of, as has long been the
case in Western thinking, as merely an object and its representation, but
rather modern abstract art, with the disappearance of the object, paves the
way for a new understanding, in which the work of art is always a coming
into being, an event, a happening, a repetition of the movement of life. But
it is rather a presentation and genesis of things, when he says that ‘the work
of art provides a perfect example of that universal characteristic of human
existence – the never-ending process of building a world’ (1986, p 130).
In the paintings of Klee we see a new fluidity of forms and we also see
a free play of image and text. Klee was painter, musician, a poet. In Klee’s
art works, he attempts to go beyond standard narrow classifications and
concepts; his paintings can be considered an amalgamation of music, image
and text. Music permeates his thinking, his painting, his thinking about
painting, his thinking about self; witness a diary entry: ‘And now an
altogether revolutionary discovery: to adapt oneself to the contents of the
paintbox is more important than nature and its study. I must some day be
able to improvise freely on the chromatic keyboard of the rows of watercolour
cups’ (1968, p 244).
Gadamer too sought to explore the relationship between the image and
the word, or text, noting the link between the notion of the text and its
roots in words such as texture, tissue, textile. In the psychotherapy session,
if we allow free play to occur, without attempting to impose narrow
conceptualisations, it is likely that images, as they appear in dreams, or
presented around us, will appear along with words, since images, as a part
of the fabric of our understanding of our world, help us to expand our
understanding and our thinking.
Heidegger and Gadamer, Barthes and Klee all reveal that within the
work of art is the capacity for expansion, of our thinking, of our being.
Gadamer draws our attention to how this happens through free play, and
he also interlinks play with seriousness. ‘Those who have looked deeply
into human nature have recognised that our capacity for play is an expression
of the highest seriousness’ he tells us, and quotes Nietzsche: ‘Mature
manhood: that means to have found again the seriousness one had as a
child – in play’ (1986, p 130).
Gadamer points out that ‘the opposition between life and art is tied to
the experience of an alienated world. And failure to recognise the universal
scope and ontological dignity of play produces an abstraction that blinds
us to the interdependence of both’ (1986, p 130). Therapy offers a space
where playing can happen. It is through an open and exploratory, playful
and serious, reflective thinking that is then exhibited in free expression,

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that we can experience a rendering of the visible, an opening occurs, as

we are enabled to open up further our understanding, so further expanding
and enriching our world and our selves. This, I wouuld argue, is the project
of hermeneutics and of existential psychotherapy.
We can say that therapy is about self-creating. By that I do not mean
some fixed notion or concept of self that will cramp us and close off our
thinking to other ways that we could be. Developing a self-narrative within
therapy may be important towards understanding; uncovering a historic
sense of self, from reconsidering the past and rethinking the present, are
all aspects of therapy. However, I would argue that it is the dynamic,
playful process of therapy, the freedom from set directions and goals, that
encourages us to expand our thinking and develop within ourselves the
capacity for movement and creativity. This process of therapy, lived through,
and shared between therapist and client, can encourage us to re-think
ourselves, who or what we are. It is through such an open, playful, reflective,
creative thinking of the therapeutic space that we can discover a gain in
exhuberance and energy, feel an excess of self, remove our blinkers, begin
to see things that before had not been visible.

Marion Steel runs a private practice and works within Palliative Care
and Oncology at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals, seeing both patients
and their families. She also provides consultation, teaching and supervision
to other health professionals within the wider hospital setting. She is the
author of Do You Realize? A Story of Love and Grief and the Colours of
Existence, published by O Books (2010).
Contact: Palliative Care Dept, Ground Floor, Borough Wing, Guy’s Hospital,
Great Maze Pond, London SE1 9RT.
Email: marionsteel.ed@gmail.com

Notes
1
For this description of Gadamer’s enactment of Heidegger’s presentation
of the deer in the forest, I am endebted to Schmidt (2013) and also for
his observation that in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ Heidegger did not
seem to be fully responsive to the revolutionary character of modern
painting in which the object was disappearing. It seems to have been in
recognition of this, that later, after experiencing the work of Klee in 1956,
Heidegger thought about revising his seminal essay (2013, p 79 ).

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The Guardian, 25 June 2014.

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