Abstract
This research, as a multiple-participant case study, has explored the integration of Self Psychology and art therapy with three women who have disorders of self known as Narcissistic Behaviour Disorders. These disorders are defined in Self Psychology by the presence of perversion, addiction and/or delinquency that represent the enactment of fantasies that are markedly and decidedly narcissistic in nature. In this thesis, only addiction and perversion were considered feasible for psychotherapy in which the integration of Self Psychology and art therapy were achieved.
The findings of this research support this integration as a form of psychotherapy that is successful in treating women who can be diagnosed as having Narcissistic Behaviour Disorders. In the case of the abuse of alcohol, the abuse of food and the presence of sexual self-mutilation, this integration was found to provide patient-participants with the opportunity to use the art as external, healthy transitional selfobjects that could replace the external ersatz selfobjects of food and alcohol and the objects that had become sexualised as part of the perversion. In breaking from findings on treating addiction within Self Psychology, this research provided evidence to support the use of the transitional selfobjects in the form of art within the self-selfobject relationship with the psychotherapist-researcher. This finding backs the move to the use of transference and the self-selfobject psychotherapeutic relationship as the guiding context for psychotherapy, while moving away from the notion that people with Narcissistic Behaviour Disorders should use the psychotherapist for the purposes of healing. Instead, the emphasis in the current findings is that the art can be used within the therapeutic relationship, providing two forms of selfobjects for the patient, each with a different purpose.
This research has generated guidelines for psychotherapists and art therapists who wish to integrate art therapy and Self Psychology. An absence of literature in art therapy based on the paradigm of Self Psychology has made these guidelines a working model that will need further refinement and research. These guidelines are derived from the analysis of data that revealed how the integration of Self Psychology and art therapy articulated and manifested the diagnosis, understanding and treatment of three women with Narcissistic Behaviour Disorders in long-term art therapy informed by Self Psychology.
Prof. H.G. Pretorius