Colour as material for symbolisation: a Kleinian reading of art therapy

Abstract

This article examines the terms under which the Kleinian theory of symbol formation may ground the reading of colour use in art therapy. It starts from the observation that Brazilian art therapy frequently resorts to tables of correspondence between colours and affective states whose origin is cultural and commercial rather than psychoanalytic, and which sit uneasily with the object-relations framework those same practices invoke. It is argued that the Kleinian contribution lies not in assigning meaning to isolated colours but in describing the conditions under which any expressive material comes to function as a symbol: tolerance of ambivalence, the movement from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position, and the reparative impulse sustaining the creative gesture. Drawing on Klein, Segal and Joseph, the article proposes shifting the unit of analysis from the chosen colour to the subject's relation to the material and to the act of choosing. It concludes that chromatic reading holds value as an interpretive hypothesis to be tested within the bond, not as a diagnostic instrument: no psychometric validation authorises inferring psychic state from colour, and the art-therapeutic frame must make that limit explicit.