Creative Arts, Aesthetic Experience, and the Therapeutic Connection in Eating Disorders

Abstract

Abstract The treatment of eating disorders is often challenging. Clinicians may struggle to engage collaboratively with both patients and their family members. This is because eating disorders can lead to cognitive rigidity, changes of identity, a narrowing of focus, withdrawal inwards, and increasing difficulty in being flexible in thinking, behaving, and expressing oneself. The aesthetic domain of experience, by accessing emotion and making meaning with minimal language, can be immensely helpful in creating opportunities to enable non-judgemental discovery and exploration of meanings, experiences, and desires. It can also potentially help people who have eating disorders to express what is often a ‘felt’ disorder of embodiment, perception, and identity, rather than a ‘thought’ disorder of cognitions, beliefs, and rationality. In this chapter, the authors will focus on exploring how aesthetic experience as a component of engagement with the arts can be encountered in the experience of both living with and treating eating disorders. The authors will illustrate this with a range of examples from research and creative art and poetry. The authors suggest that understanding and acknowledging aesthetic experiences in eating disorders is important in understanding and exploring eating disorders, for both people who have eating disorders and those to seek to treat them.