Advances in Psychiatric Treatment (2009) 15: 137-145. doi: 10.1192/apt.bp.108.005751
© 2009 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
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Form and mental state: an interpersonal approach to painting{dagger}

Jonathan Green

Jonathan Green is Professor of Child Psychiatry at the University of Manchester, and Honorary Consultant Child Psychiatrist to Manchester Children’s Hospitals Trust. His research interests within child psychiatry centre on social development and psychopathology; and include studies on autism and attachment disorder, as well as clinical trials. His research has also included work on children’s doll play and the systematic analysis of young children’s drawings. In addition to medical training, Professor Green has a Part II Tripos in the History of Art and had a period of art school training in Paris and Winchester. He continues to paint and contributed to the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ ‘Art on the Stairs’ scheme.

Correspondence: Correspondence Professor Jonathan Green, Psychiatry Research Group, Room 4.319, 4th Floor (east), University Place, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Email: jonathan.green{at}manchester.ac.uk

This article is based on the idea that paintings carry much of their cultural power by being ways of embodying states of mind in physical material. It follows that the understanding we have of how people infer mental states in others can also be used to address how we respond to visual art: our facility for inferring mental states can help us understand paintings. In pursuing this argument, I discuss first how artists make meaning in paintings by a process that embodies mental states within a formal structure. Second, I support the notion of a link between the formal structure of art and mental states with evidence from my studies of children’s drawings. Third, by analogy with the way we relate to another person’s mental states, I look in more detail at the process by which we ‘read’ a painting and in consequence develop an aesthetic relationship to it.


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