The art of movement : the Deleuze and Guattari art therapy assemblage.

The purpose of this thesis is to showcase the philosophical and
psychoanalytic collaboration of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in regards
to art therapy. The Deleuze and Guattari Art Therapy Assemblage is a
composition that includes the environmental, relational and material
elements of art therapy as contexts in which to process subjectivity. Key
Deleuze and Guattari concepts will be applied to the practice of art therapy,
implicating somatic and psychological processing within the production of
art therapy artworks. The generative capacity of art therapy constitutes
many creative sites in which to transport subjectivity. Rather than a fixed
form, subjectivity moves across a territory of different creative features.
The cartography of subjectivity is a network of passages through
relationships and contexts that implicate it with affects. This kinaesthetic
capacity will be underscored in relation to three methods of psychological
and somatic awareness (somatic psychology, performance art and authentic
movement) that challenge inhibition through improvisation. These three
methods stimulate the circulation of desire as a creative and collective
enunciation of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari represent desire as a
liberating potential acting on both body and mind - an opening commencing
from constraining circumstances that define and enclose expression. This
has specific implications for the treatment of trauma, which can impose a
set of limits that condition reactive versus spontaneous responses. The
Deleuze and Guattari Art Therapy Assemblage is a practice in which to
stimulate improvisational and experimental affects within the making and
viewing of artworks. The significance of this practice is its composite of
influences. It is an approach that emphasises not only artworks, but also
the performance of subjectivity, a happening within an art therapy space
offering choices for engagement and the enactment of different somatic
and psychological potentials.