Interview with Dr. Robert Irwin Wolf — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

You have a unique blend of psychoanalysis, art therapy, and fine arts in your career. Can you share how these areas have influenced and enriched each other throughout your professional journey?

I was considered the ‘school artist in junior and senior high school, drawing cartoons and illustrations for the school newspaper and yearbooks. Upon graduating I went to Pratt Institute obtaining degrees in both fine art and creative art therapy. My interest in psychology was followed by post-graduate training in psychoanalysis. Throughout my career I have been fascinated by the interplay between creativity and the unconscious. I have pioneered the concept of ‘Phototherapy’ and written extensively on the subject. As an artist I have continued to develop and hone my skills as both a photographer and sculptor in stone and wood.

With your extensive experience in psychoanalysis and art therapy, how do you integrate these disciplines in your treatment approach, and what unique benefits do they offer to your clients?

In my practice I offer patients the opportunity to bring photographs into their sessions which are then processed during the session enabling patients to reach deeper unconscious material safely and quickly. I also offer creative methods of processing dreams by asking patients to draw their dreams on art materials that I keep in my office, or I may ask them to draw their dreams at home and bring them into a session for us to process together..

You have a unique blend of professions as a psychoanalyst, creative art therapist, and artist. How do these roles influence your approach to sculpting, particularly when integrating human form and movement with natural stone?

My abstract forms often reflect gestural components of the human form. I understand these elements as offering viewers unconscious, visceral reactions to these forms. I often imagine I am the form and try to feel the movement in my body while I am transforming the stone. This visceral process, along with my cognitive understanding of how to use the necessary tools, unconsciously inform my actions as I work on a piece of stone or wood. I am literally envisioning myself as the stone as I explore the ‘visual metaphors’ that come to mind during this process. As an analyst, I am aware of myself and where I am in my life. This awareness informs my work as I am drawn to materials that have meaning at a particular time of my life. I believe artwork inevitably contains our unconscious content and presents a format in which we can externalize unconscious material. Once it is outside of us we can enlist the more cognitive part of our brain to reflect on, or mentalize the significance of the piece, bringing insight and integration as we make the unconscious conscious. Some of my earlier works reflect larger, more ambitious themes and visions that were part of being a young, aspiring professional and parent. This was a time when ambition was more central as I was building both a career and a family. Back then I was able to lift a much larger stone than I can today, therefore my more recent forms are usually smaller, yet reflect my ability to understand myself with more complexity. I can now look back on earlier work and see how they often reflected back important moments at different times of my life.

Could you describe your creative process, especially how you select different types of stone for your sculptures? What qualities in the stone do you look for that resonate with your artistic vision?

When I select a stone or a piece of wood I spend time roaming between different types, sizes and shapes. Recently I have walked in the forest upstate at my farmhouse and found a cedar tree that had been overturned in a storm. I cut several pieces with a chainsaw and began sculpting sections of the trunk. (Sail and Complexities # III). At ‘The Compleat Sculptor’, a stone supplier here in NYC, I take a spray bottle of water to spray the rough cut stones, which clears the surface dust and enables me to envision its potential, seeing the color and some minerals in the stone. Of course the deeper mineral and other elements would not be seen at this point. Lately I have been working more with wood, as it enables me to work with lighter material and yet create large forms. ( Sail ).

As a professor with decades of experience, how do you approach teaching subjects as diverse as psychology, fine art, and phototherapy? What key principles or philosophies guide your teaching method?

I am a pioneer in the field of ‘Phototherapy’, integrating photographic images into my clinical work with patients and students. My graduate teaching of art therapy students, for 40 years, has enabled me to integrate photography and sculpture processing into the curriculum. My stone carving course enabled students to create stone sculpture while simultaneously working clinically with patients. They would then describe parallels between their clinical work and how they approached the stone. For example, we would discuss how hitting the stone too hard paralleled damaging patients by being out of touch with how much confrontation they could effectively use in treatment. Finding the right degree of impact would slowly change the shape of the stone and metaphorically help the patient to grow in treatment. This was a visceral demonstration of ‘clinical attunement’. My Phototherapy courses enabled students to play with photographic images and understand their selection of an image as directly influenced by their unconscious. We would then process their photos which enabled them to see how unconscious material can be externalized, mentalized and ultimately brought into conscious awareness.

Your treatment process emphasizes a holistic view, focusing on non-verbal communication and implicit memory. How do you see this approach impacting the conventional psychoanalytic process, and what challenges and opportunities does it present?

Traditional psychoanalysis is undergoing major theoretical evolution as we integrate new neuropsychological research into treatment. Implicit communication is seen increasingly as often more important than verbal forms. The earliest forms of experience by an infant, often referred to as ‘attachment process’ is one which embraces all forms of sensory motor input. We don’t learn to communicate with words until after the primary relational patterns have been incorporated by the infant. It therefore follows that this early form of implicit memories and feelings along with any trauma related to this time of development, would be most easily communicated through pre-verbal, expressive modalities.

Over your career, what transformations or breakthroughs have you observed in clients who engage in creative processes during therapy? Are there any particular cases or moments that stand out to you?

I’ve written extensively on how implicit communication can include artforms to enrich the therapeutic experience. When a patient chooses an element from a dream to draw, they offer a way to delve more deeply into the unconscious content. An example was when a patient drew a dream in which he had verbally described an animal, the animal when drawn clearly became a wolf, (my last name) uncovering an important unconscious transference element that had, up to that moment, escaped more traditional verbal exploration.

As a sculptor and photographer with international recognition, how has your artistic journey intersected with your psychoanalytic work? Do you see your art as an extension of your therapeutic practice or as a separate entity?

My art is part of who I am and cannot be separated from my work as a clinician. When I work on my sculpture I enter a space where I often feel time loses meaning and I am more in touch with my own internal world. It often feels like the stone is telling me what it wants me to do and I am being guided by forces deep within myself that I can feel, but don’t often understand consciously. I always leave recently completed pieces within easy everyday viewing and slowly begin to process elements that had been unconsciously embedded within the piece. This is always an important integrative process for me. Also, the formal structure of naming a piece enables me to search for this deeper meaning as I explore possibilities until one seems to ‘resonate’ with me.

Having been involved in education for many years, how have you seen the fields of art therapy and psychoanalysis evolve in academic settings? What changes would you like to see in the future?

Until recently the field of art therapy has been often viewed as a second class profession with insurance companies denying coverage for art therapy while providing coverage for similar mental health fields such as social work and mental health counseling. As we uncover the importance of nonverbal, or implicit communication in psychotherapy I hope that the field of art therapy will gain recognition and value. Psychoanalysis has had a re-emergence of emphasis on early attachment theory which I hope will also demonstrate the importance in using expressive therapeutic interventions within more traditional talk therapy.

Where do you see the intersection of psychoanalysis and art therapy heading in the future? Are there emerging trends or areas of research that you find particularly exciting or important?

As part of the Steering Committee of the NeuroPsych study group at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, I have been actively involved in disseminating these concepts within the broader psychoanalytic community. Both the psychoanalytic community and field of art therapy, have benefitted by having new insight into the use of expressive art and nonverbal communication in therapeutic settings. We have been given renewed validation from the scientific community and now have terminology to describe what we have been intuitively using, without a clear voice.

Having been involved in education for many years, how have you seen the fields of art therapy and psychoanalysis evolve in academic settings? What changes would you like to see in the future?

As an academic I have seen many changes within the student populations that I have worked with. I suspect the environmental and political factors have contributed to what I now see as a decline in many young people in their awareness of their unconscious and an unwillingness to do the hard work necessary to discover deeper aspects of oneself. This parallels students' desire for a quick fix for their problems. Perhaps it’s the impact of social media and availability of mechanisms that allow them to avoid doing hard work. AIs may now be used to find quick answers (that aren’t always correct) to problems that we had to research ourselves in the recent past. In my clinical practice lately I see more young adults having problems with intimacy. Might the ease and availability of meeting new people encourage them to move away from interpersonal conflicts when they see an easier alternative by simply swiping their dating app? In my art classes I see students’ lacking ability to stay focused on one project for an entire semester. It’s much easier to turn out brief artwork that would defy deeper, more insightful exploration. There is a reluctance by students to roll up their sleeves and fully engage in their work, yet once they do, there often is an important moment of insight and growth from reflecting on their experience. Having trained at Pratt where instructors assigned projects that required commitment and patience, these students, in comparison, seem reluctant to pursue hard work to refine their artistic and creative skills.

https://www.robertirwinwolf.com/fine-art-sculpture