Sculpture is an instrument used in the psychotherapeutic field, mainly within the systemic-relational model from which it originates and then spread to other theoretical-methodological fields of psychotherapy. Even before, Sculpture is a creative, artistic and symbolic phenomenon.
This article explores the links between sculpture and creativity and explores the main characteristics that make this instrument unique and significant.
Sculpture is an instrument used in the psychotherapeutic field as a form of symbolic and spontaneous art. As such, the call is to "creativity", understood as: productive capacity of reason or fantasy, creative talent, inventiveness.
Something new can be born from creativity and even an image already known, such as that of one's family or couple, through creative reproduction, can take on new meanings.
In the words of Andolfi (1977) the sculpture of the family is defined as "the symbolic representation of a system, as it focuses on the common aspects of each space-time system in energy; in this way relations, feelings, changes can be represented and experienced simultaneously" (p. 71).
Sculpture is, first of all, a task that the therapist gives to the family system to enhance the non-verbal and to pay attention to the family's transactional modalities. This technique, through the use of a creative mode, privileges motor expression to represent emotional situations. The objective of this task, therefore, is to probe the sense of the family member through a creative act of its own protagonists. Sculpture, Constantine notes (1978), "allows people to get acquainted with their metaphorical maps, to make these internal realities external and visible and, therefore, accessible to study and change" (p. 16, ed. or.).
The classical characteristic of sculpture is given by the representation ne in the hic et nunc of the family system: in this sense, its representation is synchronous. That is, a representation in which converge the perception that the subject has of his family world and the internal complexity of the subject that makes its representation explicit.
Starting from this specificity, different types of sculpture have been affirmed.
According to Vallario (2011), sculpture can be defined and represented as:
An art form - in the sense that it activates the creative capacity of the individual. In his activity, the therapist often presents himself in a dimension that straddles the scientific and artistic dimensions;
A metaphor - as a context that conveys countless messages related to the meanings that are attributed to it, breaking the logical categories through an analog description, supported by imagination and emotional involvement. Through the metaphorical language of sculpture, patients are helped to recover a clearer, more significant and complete vision of the family system with which they are struggling, in everyday life and within the same setting;
An evaluation process - observing how the family structure is organized and favouring the choice of hypothetical ways of therapeutic intervention. Moreover, direct observation of the performance of structured tasks allows both to use the evaluation process itself as a strategy to promote change in the clinical context (Crowell and Fleischman, 1996; Fivaz-Depeursinge Depeursinge et al., 2004), and to involve the family in the evaluation process by promoting intentional awareness and minimizing resistance to collaborate with clinicians to defend themselves from negative judgment on their parental function (Mazzoni, Tafà, 2007, p. 72);
A test - the sculpture proposes to trace elements to represent the whole family starting from a reliable and valid cross-section, as if it were a projective technique. Sculpture is projective because it proposes an ambiguous stimulus, meaning by this the whole family and not so much the individual statues represented by people. Moreover, it is an unstructured evidence with a non-directive delivery: leaving a situation of relative freedom granted to the sculptor, favouring his unconscious tendencies. In this direction, the sculpture has an unstructured approach that allows an infinite range of possible responses and provides the opportunity to reveal aspects of the personality that are not manifest, latent or unconscious.
In conclusion, we can say that asking for a spatial representation of the family group has the sense of an imitative and symbolic game, of a "light", analogical task, which allows expressive spaces of freedom and disinhibition, which if used within the therapeutic context helps to give a more complex analysis and enhancement of the system itself.