Artefiletika – expresivní tvorba ve službě osobnostnímu rozvoji

Abstract

This text offers a brief account of the premises and some of the main features of artephiletics as an educational concept involving expressive art as its main edu- cational tool in combination with critical reflection via dialogue. The first part of the article sets out the intellectual starting points and historical conditions from which the conception of artephiletics has developed in Czech educational circles. It draws attention to the social climate in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which provided an impetus to openness of dialogue, advance beyond impersonal- ity or formalism, and the study of the position and moulding of subjective iden- tity within the community. This then led to educational interest in some of the conclusions and approaches of humanist psychotherapy. It was from this broad intellectual background, which had its roots in reform educational theory and the ideas of the artistic modern movement at the beginning of the 20th century, that the artephiletics or art therapy programme progressively developed. As a consequence of this whole trend artephiletics adopted the main principles of social or educational constructivism. Another of its inspirations was Broudy’s concept of the philetic model of education. The need for a deep theoretical under- standing of praxis and the exploitation of empirical research to achieve this led artephiletics to use the findings of the analytical approach in aesthetics or phi- losophy. This became the driving force of the study of processes of symbolisation and in particular the exploration of expression in the sense formulated by Croce and critically reassessed by N. Goodman. The second part of the article is devoted to analysis of some of the main principles of expressive symbolisation. It introduces and discuss the key concepts for the description and explication of educational processes in artephiletic praxis. For the interpretation of praxis artephiletics makes use of both the conceptual apparatus provided by N. Goodman’s typology of symbolisation and its own original artephiletic terminology of what are known as experiential components, which makes it possible to identify and analyse educational situations from the perspective of the first person, i.e. from the perspective of the pupil or student. In the final part of the text this approach is used to analyse and explain the connections between the artephiletic concept of expression and what is known as the model of mentalisation. The model of mentalisation was put forward at the start of the millennium by the psychoanalytic authors Fonagy and Target and it is based on distinguishing between and structuring what are known as psychological modalities (the modality of psychological equivalence, the modality of “as if ” – pretend, the modality of critical reflection). On the basis of analysis of themain features of the model of mentalisation, the author shows why expressive education can benefit from col-