Art and Psychopathology: Coherent Deformation and the Aesthetics of Common Sense

Abstract This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between art and psychiatry that places them on equal epistemological terms. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of art as the creation of sensations, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied expression, and phenomenological psychopathology’s account of ‘sensus communis’ or common sense, I argue that art should be understood not merely as a representation of psychopathological experience but as an autonomous mode of thinking capable of reconfiguring shared sensibility. Central to this framework is Merleau-Ponty’s concept of 'coherent deformation': the idea that art can give compositional coherence to experiences that deviate from ordinary perception, transforming what might appear as mere distortion or deficit into a communicable style. This concept is developed in dialogue with phenomenological psychopathology’s account of common sense as the pre-reflective ground of shared sensibility. Where phenomenological psychopathology tends to approach art as a disclosure of disruptions to this ground, Deleuze and Guattari’s framework emphasizes art’s capacity to create new forms of common sense. The paper thus provides resources for understanding aesthetic practice in psychiatric contexts as a creative contribution to the constitution of what Guattari calls “new modalities of subjectivity”.