A Journey in the Land of the Imaginative Art and Its Power to Defeat the Demons of Fear

Abstract

The world of art has always represented, among its functions, the search for an alternative world or universe to the real one, a parallel world where to take refuge both through production and through use, a world where to draw resources, fragments of imaginary space that represent aspects of reality, too disturbing and painful to be addressed.

This experience, if properly elaborated in the psychotherapeutic field, thanks to the resources offered by the imaginative world of art, can facilitate and accelerate contact, with some of the same brain areas involved in the experience of pain, loss, mourning and fear.

The deep emotional involvement that is experienced in front of a work of art, known as an aesthetic experience, allows the activation of brain areas that open the door to psychological experiences of growth and processing, with the language of the emotional mind.

The intertwining of creative and visual arts with mental health starts from psychoanalyst considerations, such as Freud and Jung ones, who considered the work of art an expressive form of the unconscious and a derivative of the process of sublimation of the basic instinct and continues up to modern times with several studies on how to use artistic material as a tool for interpretation and resolution of internal conflicts. It is easy to see the relevance of this approach in an era that is going to begin, that of the post-covid, in which the “demons of fear” have sharpened their weapons even more because of the aftermath of anxieties and uncertainties left by Covid- experience.