Svankmajer’s Schema Representation:"Symptoms" And Self-therapy In Images

Obviously,the healing effect of art is very remarkable,but people seldom focus on it when they access artworks.Arthur Robbins once proposed in the Artist as Therapist that both psychological phenomena and aesthetic phe-nomena can correspond.If these elements can be integrated together,it could promote the process of treatment.Artist Jan Svankmajer has regarded his artistic creation as an important way for self-therapy for a long time,but it is rarely mentioned in the research on Svankmajer.When it comes to Svank-majer,most people might associate surrealism,dolls or clay for the first time,but pay little attention to his self-therapy.Most of Svankmajer’s images are autobiographical,and the images he creates are closely related to his own mental state.It includes his awareness of his own symptoms,the self suggestion and the tentative self-therapy that come from Floyd’s doctrine.In addition,his mental condition is complex,one or two mental disorders can not sum up his experience.He suffered from in-fantile anorexia since childhood,and later fell into depression due to political reasons.He also experienced hallucinations while participating in military drug trials,and as a result,experienced paranoid symptoms that led to long term stress disorders.The impact of these experiences is almost always present in his visual world.As an artist,his creative motive is special,one of the main purposes of his artistic creation is to heal himself;he acts as a therapist as well as a patient;and his self-treatment is also very unique,art Therapy.Starting from art therapy,this paper attempts to sort out Svankmajer’s personal experience,especially his psychological changes at different stages and his compli-cated history of mental illness,combined with his works of image art,looking for and summarizing the symptoms of some mental illness that he himself had experienced or had been concerned about,and on this basis trying to re-store his self-repair program,explore the identity of this particular artist and his unique value of artistic creation.