Aspects of Prenatal Aesthetics in Pictures Drawn by Patients with Somatoform Pain

The visual arts serve as a valuable means for accessing prenatal experiences, including the representation of traumas within the framework of prenatal aesthetics using the model of Laplanche’s fundamental anthropological situation and Lacan’s paradigm of the real, imaginary, and symbolic aspects of psychological reality. This study examines the drawings of thirteen patients suffering from somatoform pain through the lens of prenatal experiences. They participated in an art therapy group, creating various drawings, with psychoanalytical interviews conducted before and after the drawing sessions. The drawings were analyzed using Visual Grounded Theory, while the interviews underwent Content Analysis. Specifically, details related to the inner garden topic were examined under the category container-position relation (that reflects the relational position of elements within a container) to reveal insights into prenatal experiences, followed by a co-occurrence analysis to determine additional categories associated with these pictorial details. This analysis identified frequent supplying elements alongside others reflecting corporeality or bodily boundaries. Many of these representations were negative, portraying the container (mother) as a grave or coffin and the contained element (baby) as defenseless and dark in color. Fragmentation observed in the drawings suggests an expression of a fragmented body, with some details coded under trauma-related categories (e.g., position field). The findings indicate a potential link between pictorial references to prenatal traumas and the pain experienced by participants, which may inform approaches in both psychotherapy and art therapy.