Can art foster emotional health? Part II

Last week, I explained that I do not believe we were put on this earth to be happy, nor to be mentally healthy either (all of us are more or less loopy). What we can aspire to is an approximation to what I call emotional health – and unlike happiness, emotional health is a meaningful, realistic goal which art can play an important part in achieving. 
Experiencing art can help us understand ourselves better and offer insight into our behaviour – but creating art can be an even more powerful tool.
For nearly a century, art therapies of various kinds have been practiced. Gestalt therapy, for example, may ask the client to sit opposite a chair in which they imagine themselves to be  and to speak to parts of themselves. They may enact how their parent treated them, or be asked to picture a loving parent offering a different experience from the one they had. 
But for most of us, it is the through writing poetry, painting pictures or playing music that we express our emotions and perhaps in the process discover what they are.
In some cases, it is possible for the creation of art to achieve profound changes. The five-book sequence opening with Mother's Milk about the fictional life of Patrick Melrose, by the English novelist Edward St Aubyn, is a model for how to carve superb literature out of horrendous maltreatment. 
In the book, Melrose is sexually abused by his father, a man of sadism and considerable psychopathy. St Aubyn has revealed that the father in his books is based on his own. 
Melrose wrestles throughout the books with a lack of self. As a youth he becomes a fanatical drug user. He struggles to stay sane, as voices in his head plague him. Free from drugs, he moves on to alcohol, and is unable to resist sexual infidelities. Yet as the books progress it becomes apparent that Melrose’s plight is no different at a fundamental level from our own. 
The books expose the universality of the tendency to either robotically reproduce, or react against, the care we received as children. Whether from an affluent home or a poor one, whether hideously mistreated or just averagely neglected, this is the human predicament. In a triumphant end to the books, St Aubyn provides a moving, satisfying and optimistic basis for seeking independent volition. 
Most strikingly of all, St Aubyn has revealed that writing the books saved his life in a very real sense, since they began with a Faustian pact he made with himself to either tell his story, or kill himself. In producing what is widely accepted to be some of the finest prose in contemporary fiction, he may have achieved some sense of self, because, just as Melrose discovers that insight into his motives and immediate actions is the only way for him to avoid re-enacting his miserable childhood history, so the same has been true for St Aubyn.
Of course, it does not matter at all whether you are a world-class artist or a dabbler in poems for your own pleasure. Nor does it matter whether the art you consume is of professional or amateur standard. The version of The Troggs’ Wild Thing at our daughter’s school concert this Christmas was as gutsy and sexy as anything you could hope for, albeit with occasional rhythmic glitches.
What matters in seeking emotional health is that you find ways to ring your bell; whether consuming or creating, the arts have an important part to play. Life is not a rehearsal and the arts can help us to realize that at the deepest levels.   

Oliver James is a Chartered Clinical Psychologist and practicing psychotherapist. Since 1988, he has worked as a writer, journalist, broadcaster; his books include the bestselling ‘They F*** You Up’, ‘Affluenza’, ‘Contented Dementia’ and ‘Office Politics’. His latest book is ‘How to Develop Emotional Health’, published by the School of Life/Macmillan.