student Essay

Clay-work involves associate degree intense and powerful tactile expertise of touching and tactile

involvement. Touch was known joined of the primary sensory responses to develop in humans

(Frank, 1957; Ashley Montagu, 1978). Tactile contact is really the primary mode of

communication that associate degree kid learns. For humans, the first stages of life area unit

dominated by oral and skin contact between kid and caregiver (Hunter & Struve, 1998). Thus,

clay-work involves an awfully primal mode of expression and communication. Touch in clay-work

also requires body movements in endless opportunities for touching and modeling.

Thus clay-work

makes possible an entire non-verbal language or communication for the creator, through which his

or her mental realm, emotional life, and primary object relations can be expressed.

The researcher chose to use concepts from attachment and object-relation theories to describe the

inner processes that are relevant to clay-work. The central assumption of attachment theory is that

humans form close emotional bonds with significant others (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1979, & 1980),

which facilitate the development of mental representations of self and different, or “internal

working models” (Pietromonaco & Barrett, 2000).

According to attachment theory, there are two

consecutive working models of attachment: an unconscious, fairly primitive model that a person

develops during the early years of life, and later a second model, which is more sophisticated,

linguistic and conscious. The two models operate simultaneously (Bowlby, 1979): mental

representations regarding self and others develop from procedural and sensorimotor

representations (Case, 1996; Crittenden, 1990) that have no linguistic coding because they were

developed within the pre-verbal part (Nelson, 1996). Our assumption is that non-verbal modes of

expression, including art, can function as a way of communicating these procedural

representations. This is especially true with regard to clay-work, which taps into primary modes of

communication and e.g. through bit) and is thereby joined to actual past recollections and feelings

that were encoded through touch and movement. In this respect, clay-work may perform as a

central window to those unconscious, non-verbal representations and will be particularly useful

with folks that notice it arduous to specific themselves verbally or who are very defensive. It is

advocated by many psychotherapists as one of the primary devices for helping clients to explore

difficult concepts and express fundamental emotions in a non-verbal manner (Freud 2006).