Carleen Bentley MA, MSc

                            Objects, Creativity & the More Than Human

​

                    Sometimes our stories are held in more than words

 

We tend to think of psychotherapy as something that happens through conversation.

Often it does.

But human beings have always made meaning through more than language.

We keep photographs. We attach significance to jewellery. We return to particular landscapes. A piece of music can transport us somewhere almost instantly. An ordinary object can become precious, comforting or strangely difficult to be around.

A smell can return us to a place we thought we had forgotten.

A colour can carry a feeling.

A room can feel safe before we understand why.

These experiences interest me deeply.

My work as a psychotherapist, artist and psychosocial thinker has led me to become increasingly curious about the relationships we form not only with other people, but with the objects, places, materials, environments and other living things that accompany our lives.

This is where my interest in the more than human begins.

​

What Does More Than Human Mean?

​

The phrase can initially sound unusual.

For me, it begins with a relatively simple question:

What might we notice about a person's psychological world if we looked beyond people and words?

Much of psychotherapy understandably concentrates on human relationships. We think about parents, partners, children, attachment, loss and the relationships that have shaped us.

But those relationships have never happened in an empty room.

There were homes and streets. Bedrooms and schools. Clothes, furniture, photographs and possessions. There were sounds and smells. There may have been animals, gardens, trees, buildings or particular places where we felt different.

The material world is woven through human memory.

Sometimes an object is simply an object.

Sometimes it has become part of a story.

​

Objects and Memory

Objects can acquire extraordinary psychological significance.

Something of little monetary value can become irreplaceable because of the person, place or period of life it represents. Another apparently ordinary object may evoke discomfort without us immediately understanding why.

Objects can become associated with belonging, safety, identity, grief, shame, love, survival or transition.

We can inherit them.

Lose them.

Keep them long after we understand why.

Or discover that we cannot bear to have them near us.

I am interested in what these relationships might tell us, while resisting the temptation to decide in advance what an object is supposed to mean.

Meaning belongs to the person who encounters it.

​

Creativity and the Things We Cannot Yet Say

I am an exhibiting artist as well as a psychotherapist.

Art has given me another language through which to think about psychological and social experience.

My creative work has explored identity, race, internalised racism, memory and the ways difficult experiences can become attached to bodies and material things. My exhibited work, The Pink Stink, explored internalised racism through visual and material expression.

Creating something can sometimes allow an experience to exist outside of us long enough for us to look at it differently.

That does not mean that therapy with me requires you to make art.

It does mean that I am comfortable when experience arrives in forms other than carefully organised sentences.

​

An image.

A metaphor.

A colour.

A dream.

An object.

A sensation.

A silence.

​

Sometimes these are not alternatives to language.

They are what comes before language.

​

Nature, Place and Belonging

​

I am also interested in our relationship with the natural world.

There are places in which people experience themselves differently.

A woodland, coastline, garden or particular landscape can sometimes provide something that is difficult to describe. Space. Perspective. Familiarity. Regulation. Solitude. Connection.

For some people, animals have also been significant companions through periods of loneliness, transition or difficulty.

​

A more than human perspective allows us to become curious about these relationships without reducing them to background scenery.

It asks what places, environments and other living beings may have meant within a person's life.

 

The Psychosocial World

​

My MA in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London deepened this interest by allowing me to explore the relationship between inner psychological experience and the social and material worlds in which we live.

​

It challenged the idea that the self can ever be understood entirely in isolation.

We are shaped through relationships, certainly.

But also through culture, institutions, histories, communities, environments and things.

My academic research explored human and object entanglement and considered what becomes visible when we look at experience from a more than human perspective.

These questions continue to influence my thinking as a psychotherapist and artist and form part of my

developing research interests.

 

What Might This Mean in Therapy?

​

It may mean nothing at all.

You may come to therapy, sit in a chair and talk with me. There is no expectation that you will make art, bring objects, walk through forests or analyse the contents of your home.

But if an object matters, we can wonder about it.

 

If a place keeps appearing in your memories, we can notice it.

If a smell, texture, colour or sound carries something difficult to explain, it does not have to be dismissed because it seems insignificant.

If creativity provides a language when ordinary conversation does not, we can make room for that too.

My role is not to assign symbolic meanings to these things.

It is to remain curious with you about the meanings they may already hold.

 

Another Way of Listening

Psychotherapy asks us to listen carefully to people's stories.

My interest in creativity, objects and the more than human simply asks whether sometimes we might listen a little wider.

To what surrounds the story.

To what has travelled through it.

To what was held onto.

To what was left behind.

And sometimes, to the things that have been quietly speaking all along.