International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications
Vol. 9, No. 10 (2015), pp. 75-84
http://dx.doi.org/10.14257/ijseia.2015.9.10.08
Proposal of Jackson Pollock’s Art Therapy Recommendation
System for Depression
Eun-Mi Lee and Kang-Hee Lee
Department of Digital Media, College of IT, Soongsil University, Seoul 06978,
Korea
[email protected]
Abstract
Art therapy is a form of therapeutic practice that uses art in order to relax and cure the
symptoms of depression. In this paper, researchers propose an artificial art therapy
recommendation system based on an expert system to provide the customized art therapy
for the individual patient. Facts and rules about the unique abstract art painting
techniques of Jackson Pollock’s art therapy are collected to develop a knowledge base
and an inference engine for the expert system. The proposed system analyzes the
symptoms of a patient from the answers in the questionnaire and provides the most
appropriate art therapy to the patient. With the proposed system, the customized art
therapy program can be provided at an affordable cost without limitation of time and
place.
Keywords: Depression, Art therapy, Expert system, Jackson Pollock.
1. Introduction
Depression is a serious social problem that is one of the major causes of death and
suicide. Depression is a risk factor for all major disease-related causes of death; it is not
limited to cardiovascular disease mortality or suicide [1]. There are many medical
treatments to relieve or cure depression such as psychotherapy and medicine treatment.
Also, studies show that auxiliary therapy along with medical treatment is more effective,
and most patients are friendly to auxiliary therapy against medical treatments [2].
Auxiliary therapy includes music treatment, art treatment, sports and so on. Art therapy is
one of the most popular auxiliary therapies for depression. A wide range of studies
discuss the effect of art therapy for depression [3-6]
Art therapy is a form of therapeutic practice that uses art in order to deal with emotions
and issues. It is a therapy that empowers the patient through the use of art and creativity.
Common art therapy programs can be adopted for any patients with depression. However,
common therapy works well in the beginning phase of the treatment or in cases of patients
with light symptoms. Therefore, the art therapy program has to be customized to
maximize its effects, because each patient has a different gender, age, taste, state of mind,
and symptoms [7]. The number of experienced therapists who can customize the art
therapy program is very limited and the customized therapy costs much. The cost and low
availability of experienced therapists prevent patients with depression from benefitting
from the customized therapy. If we can build a computer system that can recommend the
customized art therapy program for a patient, the customized art therapy program can be
provided at an affordable cost without limitation of time and place.
We propose an artificial art therapy recommendation system for patients with
depression based on an expert system. The proposed system is specifically targeted to
Jackson Pollock‘s art therapy for depression. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jackson
Pollock worked with Jungian psychoanalysts to deal with his alcoholism and depression.
The therapists used Pollock's art as part of his treatment, and one of the resulting works
ISSN: 1738-9984 IJSEIA
Copyright ⓒ 2015 SERSC
International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications
Vol. 9, No. 10 (2015)
was "Male and Female." Pollock was drawn to the process of psychoanalysis as it related
to his painting; he felt that tapping into his subconscious gave his work more authenticity
and symbolism [2-4]. Jackson Pollock is not only great artist but also a great pioneer of
art therapy who suffered severe depression for the whole of his life. From Jackson
Pollock‘s art therapy for depression, we can be inspired to develop a general art therapy
recommendation system based on expert system.
2. Related Works
In this section, we review medical expert systems and Jackson Pollack‘s art
therapy.
2.1. Medical Expert System
In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the
decision-making ability of a human expert [11]. An expert system is an example of a
knowledge-based system. Expert systems were the first commercial systems to use a
knowledge-based architecture. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by
reasoning about knowledge of the experts, represented as if–then rules collected from the
facts and the expertise. Expert systems are computational tools designed to understand
and make the knowledge of experts in a field available. Medical expert systems have
appeared, as researchers in medical artificial intelligence continue to make progress in key
areas such as knowledge acquisition, model-based reasoning, and system integration for
clinical environments [12].
Table 1. Examples of Medical Expert System
Name
MYCIN
Description
An Expert System for diagnosing and recommending treatment of
bacterial infections of the blood, developed by Shortliffe and associates at
Stanford University
deDombal`s Leeds
Abdominal Pain
System
Help System
CADUCEUS
An expert system for acute abdominal pain, developed by F.T. deDombal
at the University of Leeds
INTERNIST-I
A hospital-based system, developed at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City
CADUCEUS was a medical expert system by Harry Pople, building on
Pople's years of interviews with Dr. Jack Meyers, one of the top internal
medicine diagnosticians and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
A broad-based computer-assisted diagnostic tool developed in the early
1970s at the University of Pittsburgh as an educational experiment
Today‘s doctors require decision support aids to help them cope with the management
of increasing amounts of medical information (records, research advances, new drugs),
make appropriate choices and even to substitute in an experts absence. Such aids exist in
the form of medical expert systems, which are complex computer programs that emulate
clinical reasoning [13]. An expert system consists of three sub-systems: the user interface,
the inference engine, and the knowledge base. The user interface is used to input the data
and to output the results. The knowledge base represents facts and rules. The inference
engine applies the rules to the known facts to deduce new and complex facts.
The knowledge base represents facts about the world. The world was represented
as classes, subclasses, and instances and assertions as an object-oriented
programming were replaced by values of object instances. The rules worked by
querying and asserting values of the objects. The inference engine is an automated
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reasoning system that evaluates the current state of the knowledge -base, applies
relevant rules, and then asserts new or combined knowledge into the knowledge
base.
2.2. Jackson Pollack’s Art Therapy
Jackson Pollock is an abstract artist known for his unique technique of what could be
interpreted as ‗an angry monkey randomly throwing lots of paint at huge canvases‘ [1]. In
1956, Time magazine named him ―Jack the Dripper‖ for good reason. Pollock was
fascinated by psychoanalytic readings of symbols, and had several courses of therapy.
Jackson Pollock is one of the pioneers that recognize the powerful and effective
therapeutic way through art therapy [5-6]. He had suffered from alcoholism, depression,
mental disorganization, and homosexual tendencies and cured himself by performing
action painting in his exclusive painting techniques. Carl Gustave Jung's analytic
psychology has influenced artists including Jackson Pollock. Jackson Pollock's art therapy
in Jung's analytic psychological perspectives is one of the most important origins in art
therapy.
Figure 1. Pollock, Jackson. Male and Female, 1942. Philadelphia Museum of
Art
―Male and Female‖ (Figure 1.) is one of the distinguished works of Jackson
Pollock that reflects Jungian psychoanalysis. Jung asserted that a person's
psychological make-up is always working on two levels: the conscious and the
unconscious. According to Jung, and widely held today, a person's 'psyche' (a
person's 'whole being') is represented by their conscious and unconscious parts.
Moreover, a person's conscious and unconscious states are in a way 'self -balancing',
that is to say - and this is significant - if a person's conscious side (or 'attitude')
becomes dominant or extreme, then the unconscious will surface or manif est in
some way to rectify the balance. This might be in dreams or internal images, or via a
more externally visible illness or emotional disturbance.
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Jung also asserted that at times in people, the unconscious can surface and
'project' (be directed at) the outside world, particularly other people. This
acknowledgement of the power of the unconscious features strongly in the thinking
of Freud and notably in the underpinning theory of Transactional Analysis (it's a big
section - take time to look at it separately). All things can be viewed as paired
opposites such as good/evil, male/female, or love/hate. Whenever the inferior
introverted sensation function is unconsciously organized as well as repressed, it
may become associated with the shadow and manifest as a complex. The shadow
represents an aspect of yourself which is somewhat more pri mitive, uncultured, and
awkward [15]. Comparisons between Jackson‘s Male and Female and Jungian
theory resemble Jackson‘s own life, that of being an uncultured and awkward adult.
The interpretation of Male and Female can be seen as two possible images that
poses the question, ―which is the male and which is the female?‖ The right side
imagery of a figure with a yellow diamond shape at the mid-section leads us to
believe that this is a female. The diamond shape is the iconography of fertility [16].
The left side imagery shows us a red figure with a circular red swirl at the midsection that may be a limp penis. On the contrary, the red figure shows us plump
protruding breasts and the right side shows us a premature ejaculation represented
by the creamy blue and white hues.
Art Therapy is a technique sometimes used to teach autistic or troubled children
or even adults, but it also has immense value for anyone because it reduces your
current inhibitions and breaks down any mental walls. Using art therapy is like a
visual primal scream. It‘s a great visual and mental stimulator when you‘re suffering
from depression.
3. Artificial Art Therapy System based on Expert System
Expert systems are designed to solve complicated problems by reasoning about
knowledge of experts, represented as if–then rules. Users input facts to evaluate through
the user interface. The knowledge base has facts about the problem and if–then rules, and
the inference engine evaluates the input, applies relevant rules and draws a conclusion.
For example, a user can input the answers to the questionnaire about the symptoms of the
patient, then the expert system can recommend a specific part of Pollock‘s art therapy
which is most appropriate to the answers by the knowledge base and the inference engine
(Figure 2).
Figure 2. Artificial Art Therapy System based on Expert System
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International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications
Vol. 9, No. 10 (2015)
In this paper, we represent an artificial art therapy system based on the expert system to
recommend Jackson Pollack‘s Art Therapy. In the expert system, users exchange input
and output through user interface. A simple user interface is to provide a questionnaire to
a user and to input the answers. From the answers, the expert system draws an art therapy
that is most relevant to the symptoms. Also, the inference engine can provide some art
therapy to help the user relieve depression. The proposed system selects art therapy most
suitable to the symptoms and gives a chance to find facts and rules to select art therapy.
To design an expert system, conceptualization and formalization is essential to
define facts and rules. Table 2 shows the results of formalization according to the
key symptoms of depression and painting techniques in Jackson Pollock‘s abstract
art. The painting techniques including portrait, performance art, all over painting,
action painting, and dripping are related to the key symptoms of depression. Based
on the formalization, we derive the rules for the inference engine. Based on
literature analysis of Jackson Pollack‘s art therapy, we classify art therapy into 5
therapy groups and define 15 rules to build the knowledge base and inference engine
of the expert system as shown in Table 3 [6-10].
The first concept to derive the rule is dignity that is related to self-regard of the
patient. Low self-regard is one of the main causes of depression. In this case,
drawing self-portraits is a good art therapy to reevaluate himself or herself. The
second concept is activeness. Inactiveness is a cause as well as a symptom of
depression. Drawing based on performance art is very helpful to activate the patient.
The third concept is aggressiveness that can be relieved by drawing all over painting
that requires patience and endurance. The fourth concept is stability. For unstable
patients in depression, action painting is good art therapy because it requires not
only to be static but also to be dynamic. The last concept is extremeness, which is
one of the most dangerous symptoms of depression. By drawing based on dripping
techniques, the patient can relax and relieve stress.
Table 2. Formulization
Concept
Relation
Dignity
The symptoms of the dignity that is closely related to drawing
portrait of Jackson Pollock‘s art therapy.
The symptoms of the activeness that is closely related to
performance art of Jackson Pollock‘s art therapy.
The symptoms of the activeness that is closely related to drawing all
over painting of Jackson Pollock‘s art therapy.
The symptoms of the stability that is closely related to drawing
action painting of Jackson Pollock‘s art therapy.
The symptoms of the extremeness that is closely related to drawing
with dripping technique of Jackson Pollock‘s art therapy.
Activeness
Aggressiveness
Stability
Extremeness
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Figure 3. Jackson Pollock, Self-Portrait, c. 1930-33 (around Age 20)
Figure 4. Janine Antoni, Loving Care, 1992 Performance. Courtesy: the
artist and Luhring Augustine, Nova York. Photo: Prudence Cumming
Associates
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Table 3. Knowledge Base for Jackson Pollack’s Works
Condition (IF)
Conclusion (THEN)
Shame.
The recommendation is portrait.
Sense of inferiority.
The recommendation is portrait.
Inferiority complex.
The recommendation is portrait.
Feeling of helplessness.
The recommendation is performance art.
Sense of loss.
The recommendation is performance art.
Feeling of the futility of life.
The recommendation is performance art.
Aggression.
The recommendation is all over painting.
Self-destructive drive.
The recommendation is all over painting.
Suicidal impulse.
The recommendation is all over painting.
Anxiety.
The recommendation is action painting.
Nervousness.
The recommendation is action painting.
Impatience.
The recommendation is action painting.
Extreme thinking.
The recommendation is dripping.
Indecision.
The recommendation is dripping.
Inactiveness.
The recommendation is dripping.
Figure 5. Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950. (All over Painting)
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Figure 6. Jackson Pollock in Action Painting
Figure 7. Jackson Pollock in Dripping
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4. Verification and Evaluation
By examining all the cases of firing rules, the proposed knowledge base and inference
engine have verified that there is no conflict and contradiction in applying Jackson
Pollock's art therapy. Since the number of rules in the proposed knowledge base is
relatively small, every case of answers could be verified manually. The proposed
knowledge base and inference engine are derived from the common and representative art
therapy of experts. Therefore, characteristic and unique art therapy of an individual expert
is not included. Because of this, although the proposed system does not provide the whole
possible art therapy program based on Jackson Pollock‘s art therapy, we expect that the
system can be a guide for ordinary patients to relax and also to cure the symptoms of
depression.
To evaluate the performance of a medical expert system, strict clinical testing is
required. However, the clinical testing is out of scope of this paper and existing studies
show the performance and effect of Jackson Pollock‘s art therapy for depression.
5. Conclusion
We propose an artificial art therapy recommendation system based on an expert system
of Jackson Pollock‘s art therapy. The proposed system is specifically targeted to the art
therapy of Jackson Pollock, who is not only a great artist but also a great pioneer of art
therapy and suffered severe depression for the whole of his life. The knowledge base and
the inference engine for the expert system are developed by facts and rules about his
unique abstract art painting technique. The proposed system analyzes the symptoms of the
patient from the inputs and provides the most appropriate therapy to the patient. The
customized art therapy program can be provided at an affordable cost without limitation
of time and place by the proposed system. The proposed system is limited to depression
and Jackson Pollock‘s art therapy. However, the system can be extended to a more
general art therapy recommendation system for general mental illness with the extended
knowledge base and inference engine.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded
by the Korean Government (NRF-2013S1A5A8020988).
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Authors
Eun-mi Lee received her B.S. degrees in fine art - painting from
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, in 2003 and received her
M.S. degrees in art education Hongik University, Seoul, Korea, in
2008. Since 2013, she has been a Ph D student in Department of
Digital Media, Soongsil University. She is a committee member of
Korea Fine Artist Association. Her current research interests include
the areas of convergence of contemporary art and information
technology, artificial intelligence system to understand abstract art
and knowledge-based reasoning system. Contact her at
[email protected].
Kang-Hee Lee received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D degrees in
electrical engineering and computer science from Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea, in
1999, 2001, and 2006, respectively. Since 2006, he has been a Senior
Engineer in Digital Media & Communication Research Center,
Samsung Electronics Company, Ltd., Korea. He has been a
dispatched researcher in the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon
University in 2008. Since moving to Soongsil University in 2009, he
is with Global School of Media, Soongsil University, Seoul, Korea.
His current research interests include the areas of ubiquitous robotics,
evolutionary robotics, emotional robotics, media robotics, cognitive
task planning system, and knowledge-based reasoning system.
Contact him at [email protected].
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