Abstract
This paper advocates for an epistemic reclassification of the field of psychology to be considered not just as a science, but also as an art. I situate my vision of psychology-as-art within the burgeoning movement of the psychological humanities, and I perform a literary argument for this vision that embodies the psychological humanities itself. Through literary prose, I narrate my 15-year journey as a psychologist-artist-mystic, weaving phenomenological philosophy, Hindu cosmology, and depth and liberation psychologies with examples of my artistic projects to demonstrate how subjective lived experience—and the depths of the human soul—find expression best through psychological literature, poetry, paintings, and film. In the discussion section, I then conceptually elaborate upon four claims: (1) some forms of psychology are better understood as art rather than science, and artwork itself may constitute empirical knowledge; (2) some psychological truths may emerge through spiritual or revelatory epistemologies, legitimizing decolonial and non-Western ways of knowing; (3) reclaiming emotional, sensual, irrational, and passionate modes of knowledge can serve as a feminist corrective for psychology; and (4) embracing psychology-as-art is an ethical and social justice imperative in this current historical moment. Ultimately, an epistemic vision of psychology-as-art invites readers to reflect on what a more beautiful psychology might offer our wounded world.
Knowledge is not a matter of theoretical or intellectual truth, or the formal intellect alone. Knowledge as understanding is transformative or geistig—a matter of the depth of the soul, spirit, embodied knowing and being. (Max Van Manen)
The theoretical project of “human science psychology” has advanced a holistic, humanizing way of doing science that places subjective lived experience at the center of psychological inquiry (Dilthey, 1989; Giorgi, 2009; Van Manen, 1990). This movement has expanded science beyond the confines of positivism by legitimizing hermeneutic meaning-making, descriptive narratives, experiential insights, and lifeworld contexts as significant to psychological knowledge-production. As an alum of Duquesne University, a homeplace for human science psychology, I am indebted to this movement for inspiring me to develop “arts-based phenomenological research” as an innovative psychological method (Gupta, 2024). In this method, phenomenological research is disseminated to the public in artistic forms (poetry, painting, films) for community healing and social advocacy. I teach this method to psychology students at the University of West Georgia through a research lab called “The Phenomenological Art Collective.” It has been rewarding to devote my career to fighting for a future in which artistic expression is embraced as serious scholarship for psychology. Until recently, I have situated my work as a method of the human sciences, with appreciation for its embrace of descriptive storytelling to obtain wisdom from lived experience.
Over the past decade, a promising new theoretical project has been developing called the “psychological humanities” (Freeman, 2024; Sugarman & Martin, 2020; Teo, 2017), which enthuses me greatly. This project more deeply interrogates the basic ontological and epistemological claims of our field. It asks: Why must psychology be considered solely a science? What knowledge are we losing by limiting it to these confines? And what knowledge could we gain by pushing past them? According to Thomas Teo (2017), the psychological humanities invites a transdisciplinary approach to psychology that is inclusive of epistemologies from philosophy, political science, history, culture, theology, literature, and art. It is a project of epistemic humility—liberating knowledge from Western rationalistic gatekeeping to honor diverse methods and forms of psychological understanding. The psychological humanities movement does not seek to replace science. On the contrary, it invites us to honor how powerful and expansive the field of psychology can be, such that it can traverse disciplinary boundaries and make lasting contributions for both the sciences and the humanities.
As an arts-based phenomenological researcher, I am particularly inspired by Mark Freeman’s (2024) contributions to this movement. He advocates for psychology to conceptualize aspects of our discipline in explicitly aesthetic, poetic, and literary terms, because some psychological phenomena find better expression through art than science in retaining fidelity to the complexity of human experience. This argument suggests that the epistemic foundations of psychology—its legitimate ways of knowing—are not solely scientific but also artistic, which opens exciting possibilities for the discipline’s future. While not diminishing the significance of science in producing psychological knowledge, it nevertheless grants a “wide open sky” to expand our field to become more creative, inclusive, and beautiful than ever before (Teo, in Gozli, 2024). And for psychologist-artists like myself, it affirms what we have known to be true in practice—that art can serve not only as an important form of psychological knowledge dissemination, but as the primary epistemology by which we arrive at our empirical claims.
In this paper, I offer a literary argument to advance the artistic branch of the psychological humanities movement. This piece is titled: “Can psychology be an art?” The question is rhetorical; I argue that it can. And I perform my argument for psychology-as-art through art itself. Through the form and function of literary prose, I explore the following questions: What kinds of knowledge become possible through the epistemic vision of psychology-as-art? And how might a more beautiful psychology be necessary to meet the needs of this wounded world? I intend for this work to transform conventions of academic scholarship moving forward, so literary prose is received as acceptable and necessary knowledge for our field.
Can Psychology Be an art? A Literary Argument for the Psychological Humanities
The etymology of psychology is “psyche” and “logos”—the study of the soul. I entered the field of psychology as a graduate student in 2009 desiring to study, honor, and express the human soul. My hunger for a soulful psychology came from my pastime as a creative writer of nonfiction. In my early 20s, after my father’s sudden death, I joined a memoir-writing workshop to embrace the written word as remedy for my grief. There, I met my fellow wounded healers, beautiful stewards of the soul who deeply understood the medicinal gift of poetic prose.
The depths of the human psyche burst through our literary expressions as creative writers. And it was these very same depths that I found myself savoring in my first year training as a psychotherapist. Sitting in a session, I’d gaze at my clients awestruck as they free associated words into the air. The deeper they spoke from their mysterious inner realms, the more their speech sounded like poetry. After a therapy session, I’d find myself alone, weeping at the beauty of the human soul. Edgar Allan Poe defined beauty as anything that stirs the sensitive soul to tears. I thought to myself, how lucky I am to be choosing a profession that immerses me in such beauty. Decades later, I’d learn that this was the very call to psychology that James Hillman put forth—to remind psychologists that the psyche is intrinsically beautiful. And in his view, it is only beauty that will save the world.
During my master’s program, I was gifted the opportunity to fly across the world to India to deepen my study of the soul. I would be doing an art therapy internship with women and children at a domestic violence shelter in Rajasthan, helping them transform trauma into art. I spent a great deal of time with an 80-year-old auntie, who kept saying she was ready to die and become a God. And everything she painted, she said that it was God. The peacock was God. The sunrise was God. The self-portrait was God. Any artwork painted from the depths of the psyche was God. I didn’t understand this at the time, but now I do. In India, I discovered that a soulful approach to psychology will always, inevitably, bring me right back to God.
But when I returned from India to start the new school year, I found myself in a very different vibe. I was taking a research methods class at NYU, and it was, quite frankly, killing my vibe. I had no interest in psychological research, if it meant standard deviations and T-tests and something called ANOVA. I didn’t know what any of this meant and had failed calculus too many times to even try. In any case, ANOVA sounded like the name of a beautiful celestial galaxy. I had once signed up for an astronomy class, assuming I’d be studying the stars. When instead I found myself calculating algebra, I was quick to drop the course. I’ve heard that Jung said he didn’t see the purpose of mathematics for living a worthwhile human existence. I have never felt such kinship; I quickly discerned that psychological research was not for me.
But then, one fateful day in class, the gods paid a visit in the form of a book. Glowing in the halo of sunlight, the title read Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. And as I turned these pages, suddenly I fell in love. I immediately understood, through some intuitive time loop into the future, that I would spend my life becoming a psychological researcher after all. But not just any kind of research. The phenomenological kind. Instead of quantifying behavior, I could collect poignant, intimate stories of being human. Instead of statistical analysis, I could evoke profound insight into the meanings of existence. The author of this book, Max Van Manen (1990), described phenomenology as “a poeticizing project; it tries an incantative evocative speaking, a primal telling . . . an original singing of the world” (p. 13). He wrote that the point of phenomenology, in essence, is to “bring an otherwise sober-minded person to tears” (Van Manen, 1990, p. 132). Reading this, my heart lit up, like when I listened to the poetry flowing out of clients in psychotherapy. I immediately saw what I wanted my life to be—to do this very beautiful kind of research, which produces poetic knowledge to sing the world and bring the sensitive soul to tears.
My first research project in psychology was about the lived experience of faith (Gupta, 2020). I collected phenomenological descriptions from nine participants about moments of deep faith. I interpreted their stories hermeneutically, coded meanings line by line, and then clustered them into thematic insights that evoke the essence of faith. And then I became an artist, expressing my research findings beautifully, as a video montage spliced together with cinematic images and music. The work can be viewed at phenomenologicalart.com. And here is the poetic voiceover that I wrote to accompany the video, which attempts an incantative evocative speaking of the lived experience of faith: You kiss my world with the sun. I’m lifted from head to heart. You crumble the cage around me. I’m anchored by your breath. My tears whisper a “thank you.” You respond with the gift of expansion. My eyes squeeze tight to welcome your voice, this intimate dialogue that flows in and out, embracing me in our in-between. In my heart, I remember truth: that there is something, someone, There. That I am connected, protected, accepted, exactly as I am. That I am not alone. These primal needs that have always quivered from every crevice of my flesh, suddenly, easily, they become fulfilled. You sing to me a lullaby so that life and death make sense after all. But time is the force that vilifies faith. That cord which promised to never break is ruptured by life’s rollercoaster fate. Faith threatens to snatch my beloved away, to abandon me in a world that’s too large. Faith drives a wedge between me and the They; Pointed fingers condemn me to exile. Regulations recite that I’m bad and wrong. all in the name of you. Questions of identity tear me in two, betraying my certitude. Trust shatters. Days float by in a numb fog. (The loss, the loss, the loss, the loss . . .) And yet, somehow, in this space of unspeakable depth, in this unfathomable instance where grief becomes beauty, I turn to you again. Once upon a time I only knew of faith through lessons and language and rituals thrust upon me by those who were There. Then my time of reckoning arrived. I felt you There or not There. I made you mine or not mine. Where will our story lead tomorrow? If I’ve known your Thereness once, a part of me trusts that you will always return (and so will I).
So these verses were my research, the psychological knowledge I’d produced. I had done what Van Manen said to do—to sing the world of faith. And clearly this is art, I thought to myself. Yet Van Manen and others insisted that phenomenological research is science. A human science, they called it, which I’d never heard before. It felt bizarre to view this love poem to God as science. But it was produced by the phenomenological method, and faithfully so. So I shrugged my shoulders, applied to Duquesne University, and tried to become a human scientist in the name of my new love. Because I’d fallen in love with phenomenology; there was no going back. And we all make sacrifices for love.
At Duquesne I learned what it means to study psychology as a human science. The entire department was rooted in phenomenology, thanks to this creative guy who shaped it named Amadeo Giorgi. In the 1960s, Giorgi desired a more humanizing psychology, along with Maslow and Carl Rogers who resisted the objectification of natural science. At Duquesne during those years, the philosophy department was jazzed about the existential-phenomenology movement flourishing in Europe, where a guy named Husserl (1982) had insisted on a different kind of knowledge. One that turned “back to the things themselves”—to subjective lived experience—to produce insights about the essence of being a human being.
As a gift from Prometheus, a eureka moment struck. Giorgi saw the vision of bringing phenomenology to psychology. A research method was born, called the descriptive phenomenological method. A way of doing psychology that restored holism to humanity. A method that respected the wisdom of lived experience. A deeply empathic approach to psychological research for our field.
I thought this was cool of Giorgi, and probably I could get on board. Yet he insisted this method was science, though it really felt like art. The data was aesthetic—collecting descriptive experiential prose. The craft was so creative—like literary analysis for the soul. The descriptive phenomenological method was clearly art in essence! But Giorgi said no, the method is empirical, so it counts as science (Giorgi, 2009). Though I had never considered myself a scientist, I thought I’d give it a shot. It was like buying shoes that fit just a bit too snug but they’re the best you’ve got. So you might as well keep them on to walk the phenomenological path.
At Duquesne I got a crash course in phenomenological philosophy. I took a seminar with Eva Simms, who adored Merleau-Ponty. She showed us expressionistic paintings to teach his philosophy. I learned that Merleau-Ponty revered art as the ideal phenomenological language (Merleau-Ponty, 1948). For him, phenomenology was about expressing embodied experience. And artists are especially good at this, gifted with heightened sensory perception. They reveal the sensuality of the world directly, experientially, to animate our whole bodies. Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, artists were the OG phenomenologists! He was especially enthused about filmmaking, which was fun to learn about. He wrote essays on cinematic beauty and declared film to be the “new psychology,” because “a movie is not thought; it is perceived . . . it directly presents us with that special way of being in the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 58).
And after that I studied Heidegger, to learn this whole business of being-in-the-world. I had to decipher his Being and Time as poetry to grasp what he was all about (Heidegger, 1927/1996). But Heidegger himself was a die-hard fan of poetry. For him, the point of phenomenology is to illuminate experiential truth. And this is exactly what poetry aims to do. Heidegger (1964) wrote that “Truth, as the clearing and unconcealing of what is, happens in being composed, as a poet composes a poem. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry” (p. 70). For Heidegger, art allows truth about being-in-the-world to reveal itself and shine forth. In doing so, it makes existence beautiful. His own words drip with aesthetic beauty, such as, “Light of this kind joins its shining to and into the work. This shining, joined in the work, is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness” (p. 54).
So basically, I had joined Duquesne University’s PhD program to learn psychology as a human science. And yet, the education I was receiving cared so much about aesthetic beauty. Sometimes it felt like I was actually enrolled in a fine arts program, with Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger as my instructors offering invaluable criteria for what constitutes “good art.”
I wasn’t complaining. I was grateful for this instruction. Particularly when it came time to doing my dissertation, which was a phenomenological research study about the lived experience of being in the closet as a sexual minority. In 2013, India had recriminalized homosexuality, and the trauma of this injustice weighed heavily in my body. Trauma turned into rage. Rage turned into despair. What is the point of anything when the world is so horrible?
Witnessing my fall into fatalism, a friend plopped Pedagogy of the Oppressed into my hands. Paulo Freire’s (1968) words arrived when I needed them most: “As long as I fight, I am moved by hope. And if I fight with hope, then I can wait” (p. 92). The art therapist in me knew the only way to claw my way back to hope was to transform trauma into beauty—to transmute lived experience into a cry for poetic justice in this world.
So, for my dissertation, I collected phenomenological descriptions from five queer participants about moments of being closeted. I interpreted their stories hermeneutically, coded meanings line by line, and then clustered them into thematic insights about the trauma of the closet. And then I became a filmmaker, expressing my research findings with clear instruction from phenomenological philosophers on creating cinematic beauty. The result is a 20-minute film called Illuminate, with sensual cinematography that envelopes the body in compassionate truth about the LGBTQ closet . . . and reminds us that, somehow, there is still beauty left in the world (Gupta, 2022).
The film can be viewed at phenomenologicalart.com. But because all art is poetry, I will now share the voiceover that I wrote to accompany this film, which unconceals and shines forth the lifeworld of the closet: It begins with your truth. Maybe it’s a truth that you’ve felt all along. But you’re born into the lies that tell you it’s bad, tell you it’s wrong, tell you you’re not loveable, or that you’ll go to hell. So you do everything you can to protect yourself. But that means lying to everyone you love, and maybe even hiding yourself from yourself. Soon your existence is split in two. The debate becomes excruciating. The only world that feels safe is a world with no one else. How much you yearn to share your truth, and hear it spoken back with love. But speech is not allowed. Feelings are not allowed. Movement is not allowed. Love is not allowed. Freedom is not allowed. While they have all the freedom in the world to express their hate, you’re prohibited from the basic human right to express yourself. Sadness overwhelms you. You grieve all that you have lost, the future that can never be. Then grief become despair. The hatred from outside finds its way inside. It seeps and builds inside your bones, and all you can think about is getting it all out. But silence seals it all inside. Death seems like the only choice, ‘cause hell on earth feels somehow worse. What you need to stay alive is pure. It’s love, the sweetest kind. Love will be right there waiting, as you take your first steps out. Love will set your speech free, so you can share your world with the world. Love will remind you you’re worthy, exactly as you are. I promise you, my love, we are here. Let that anger in you burn to life. Let that anger fuel your fight for power. You’ll gain the power to shout your truth. You’ll gain the power to love yourself. You’ll gain the power to let go of the fear that controls you. The world will continue to hurt, and there is still so much left to be mourned. But there are personal worlds inside the whole wide world. Those are the worlds that can heal you, and those are the worlds you can heal. And when, some day, the power of love overcomes the love of power, that’s when this world will know peace.
So these verses were my research, the psychological knowledge I’d produced. I had done what Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger said to do: to illuminate embodied truth. And clearly this is art, I thought to myself. Yet Giorgi and others would insist that it is science. A human science, said my advisor, because my process was empirical. He urged me to call the film not just art but also rigorous science. According to him and many beloved mentors, the holy magic of my method was its marriage of art and science.
I mulled this guidance over in my brain. I understood its logic. My method was indeed empirical, rooted in participants’ data of lived experience. But phenomenologically speaking, Van Gogh’s Starry Night was also data driven. And documentary filmmaking too involves a great deal of research rigor. But no one that I know calls either of those science.
Can’t art be just as empirical as science, without needing to be dignified as science?
I kept this question to myself, continued to wear those too-snug shoes, and applied to the University of West Georgia to teach the human sciences to my own psychology students.
At West Georgia I was welcomed into a community of psychologist-hippies. The department was founded in the 1960s by Mike Arons, a disciple of Abraham Maslow. He brought peak experiences and humanistic vibes to the outskirts of rural Georgia. These were psychologists who celebrated the highest reaches of human consciousness. These were psychics and psychonauts studying psi phenomena and mystical states. They still positioned their work as a kind of human science. They brought me on from Duquesne for my expertise in the human sciences. And yet, like an oasis glimmering in the desert horizon, I began to glimpse new visions for what psychology could be.
My studies of the soul grew more advanced at West Georgia. Not only because of the program but also because of my heart. At the very same time that I began the tenure track, I was weathering deep heartbreak from the loss of a beloved. The truest teachings of the psyche happen in the darkest nights. My grief was a whirling dervish, no different than Rumi’s anguish. My pain was divine madness, akin to Jung’s psychosis. And in my grief, I understood the secrets of the mystics. That altered states create openings to receive the highest truths. Pain lifts the veil, allowing you to peer through illusions.
And you discover that the truest truth is this: everything is God, and God speaks through everything. This is what the 80-year-old auntie in India meant when she said her art was God. This is what Carl Jung (1970) meant when he spoke about Anima Mundi, the soul of the world. And this is what the great existentialist Martin Buber (1963) meant when he said “Living means being addressed, we would need only to present ourselves and to perceive” (p. 10). Living means being addressed. We need only open our eyes.
As my spiritual emergency turned into an awakening, I began a new phenomenological research study. Channeling my healing journey into vocation, my research question asked: “What is the lived experience of reclaiming erotic power among women from the South Asian diaspora?” For this study, I collected phenomenological descriptions from six Desi women about moments of reclaiming erotic power. I interpreted their stories hermeneutically, coded meanings line by line, and then clustered them into thematic insights about South Asian erotic power. And then I became a surrealist painter, expressing my research findings as colorful brushstrokes of acrylic paint onto large pieces of stretched canvas. The end result was six paintings filled with symbolic imagery that evoke essential truths about erotic power for each woman in the project (Gupta, 2024).
But my process of retrieving truth was like nothing I’d experienced before. It was magical and mystifying, and terrifying to admit. Still wearing those too-snug shoes, I felt pressure to prove that my process was scientific. But in actuality, it seemed anything but. Because these truths were being delivered in highly irrational ways. My canvas was somehow coming alive and telling me exactly how to paint it. And my dreams kept dropping imagery that demanded execution. My entire waking life started addressing me through endless synchronicities. Each one arrived as a gift from God bestowed with ancestral wisdom. So basically, my research findings were produced in collaboration with some divine creative muse who demanded my submission. She spoke to me through altered states, delivering visions, dreams, and synchronicities to guide me towards her truth.
The phenomenological paintings can be viewed at desieros.com. Most imagery for the artwork arose through synchronicities delivered by the muse. One painting, titled “Falling,” expresses the meanings of erotic power for a Muslim Desi woman, who described achieving a deeper intimacy with God through premarital sex with her lover. And here is the poem that accompanies her painting, pieced together from excerpts of her erotic storytelling: I am deep diving into an ocean cave. Training my lungs, my skin, my body to go deeper. Every time I close my eyes, deeper into my brain, my heart, my soul, my uterus, my music, my art, my religion, my mission. I want to fly away from here. But I cannot disappear, or save my village from the flood, or fly away with wings of gold whose jagged edges scrape the sky. My body is being baptized by oxytocin. I am surrendering in this pond of hormonal comfort hijacking my basal ganglia paralyzing my phantom wings, and I’m falling, falling in sin, falling in sin, sincerely in love. What do I do with this realization? What do I do with all this love that’s flowing through my veins? I unleash the truth which was treading lightly, to not awaken the beast inside. I learn how to squeeze back, I learn how to speak gently, I learn how to give although I owe nothing. Is this a quest for truth? I accept that the path of universal love is a lonely path to tread—to return to the never-ending dark-light of the earth’s womb, the place where you can hear light and see sound.
So these verses were my research, the psychological knowledge I’d produced. But where did these truths come from? Not science. Someplace higher. From moments of encounter with a divine intelligence—who speaks to us when ego dies, and our channel finally opens.
I didn’t know who to talk to about what had just happened. I feared my colleagues would say I was crazy and refuse to publish my work. So instead I turned to my mother to confess what I’d experienced. She nodded knowingly at my description of my mystical research process. Mom taught me the word pratibha, which in Sanskrit means “poetic intuition” or “divine revelation.” She explained that when Hindus meditate, this is the state of consciousness we are aiming for. To transcend our rational egos so that our soul, Atman, can reunite with Brahman, the divine creative energy of the universe. And in these moments, when ego disintegrates, we can receive truths about the nature of reality through poetic intuition. This is the point of all yoga practice—to realize truth by reuniting our souls with God.
I felt warm and fuzzy all over when Mom told me this. So I wasn’t crazy after all, I was just a Hindu mystic! And this is all I ever really want to be, not a human scientist. A mystic who uses art to channel truths about the soul. An artist who worships psyche through every brushstroke of paint. A psychologist whose method is poetic revelation from God.
But obviously I couldn’t admit this to other psychologists. I could only tell my mother, not my fellow academics. Or so I thought.
Because then, one fateful day at an academic conference, the gods paid another visit in the form of a guy named Mark Freeman. Glowing in the halo of sunlight, I heard him speak about something called the “Psychological Humanities.” He described his vision for a beautiful, poetic, ineffable psychology. He insisted that psychology can indeed be gentler, more loving, more humble, more open to the mysteries of being alive. He explained that there are many regions of human consciousness, like love for instance, whose truths surpass what science could ever claim to know. And if psychologists wish to be faithful to reality, then we must admit that some truths arrive in magical, mystical ways. Finally, Mark invited all of us to join the psychological humanities movement, where fellow travelers like Thomas Teo and Jeff Sugarman are envisioning a more expansive psychology. One that is science, yes. But not just that. Also art. Philosophy. It is culture. It is God. And it is love. It is a kind of psychology that brings the sensitive soul to tears. That reminds us that the psyche is beautiful in its vastness and its depth. And that human existence is infinitely meaningful and blessed with possibility—even at the precipice of unthinkable crisis.
As I listened to Mark’s poetic words swirl into the air, I felt like I could breathe. I felt less alone. And I felt like I’d found home. Because the psychological humanities is not just an academic movement. It is a resting homeplace, for people like me to do the work we love, as stewards of the soul, with full integration of our humanity. In doing so, we become the psychologists that we were born to be. We actualize our dharma, our sacred calling in this world. The shoe finally fits. For that, I am grateful.
So this is my coming-out story, as a joyful disciple of the psychological humanities. I bow to the sacred lineage of the human sciences, which has nurtured me as its doting daughter throughout my apprenticeship years. But now it’s time to dance across these enigmatic borders in the sky and into this kaleidoscopic sister-world that keeps calling me home.
In my own contribution to the psychological humanities movement, I would like to end by paying homage to our fellow Hindu mystic, Carl Jung, and his remarkable Red Book.
This was a man who plunged into the depths of the human psyche against his will. And in those depths, he had the courage to face the darkest regions of human consciousness. The truths that he discovered there could not be expressed by science; they only found form through artistic imagery. A holy art, that sung the soul, that helped him claw his way to hope—without which I likely would not write these words for you today.
And yet, while painting images to express his psyche, Jung asked himself, “What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?”
Whereupon a woman’s voice inside of him responded, “It is art.”
And Jung said to himself, “Obviously what I was doing wasn’t science. What then could it be but art? It was as though these were the only alternatives in the world. That is the way a woman’s mind works” (Jung, 1961, p. 185).
At the time, Jung was deeply ambivalent towards the voice of his anima. The voice of his inner feminine. Of his inner artist, inner mystic. The voice of his soul.
But I mean, clearly it was art. And perhaps the time has come for us to fully claim that.
To allow the anima to take her rightful place at the throne of psychology’s future, as the study of the soul.
Because in the end, it is only beauty that will save the world.
Discussion: A Conceptual Analysis of My Literary Argument
As a psychologist whose work has been deeply nurtured by the human sciences, it behooves me to come full circle and expand upon my literary argument for the psychological humanities through the voice of an academic theorist. After all, this work makes multiple bold claims that invite thoughtful discussion—that psychology should be considered an art (not just a science), that some psychological truths arrive as revelations from God, that the anima should sit on the throne of psychology’s future, and that beauty will save the world. So, let’s slow this down and unpack my actual positionality here, as a contribution to a theoretical movement in its formative stages. In this discussion section, I shall elaborate upon the conceptual foundations of my epistemic vision of psychology-as-art.
Before proceeding, I must mention that I dream of a future in which my art can stand alone in peer-reviewed publications without having to be explicated conceptually. It is my view that art is most powerful when it provokes without being explained. However, the purpose of this specific literary piece is to provide theoretical support for the artistic branch of the psychological humanities—a burgeoning movement still exploring its identity. With deep respect to this movement, its pioneering theorists, and my human science colleagues who have shaped me, it makes sense to spell out the conceptual underpinnings of psychology-as-art as clearly as possible. In doing so, perhaps literary prose can indeed be published as stand-alone artworks in psychology journals in the foreseeable future.
Claim 1: Psychology Should Be Considered an Art (Not Just a Science)
In arguing for an epistemic reclassification of psychology as both science and art, we must define art. Legendary art scholar Albers (1940) stated that art concerns itself with feelings and emotions that overwhelm discursive speech; its purpose is “to enjoy and to respect form qualities which reveal our emotional participation in life.” The artist’s goal is to feel their way into human life, and then create forms of expression that relay those feelings to others. In this sense, “art is revelation instead of information. Expression instead of description” (Albers, 1940). Art wants you to feel something; to jolt you awake. For instance, my literary argument for the psychological humanities relies primarily on poetic expression to evoke felt revelation about the topic at hand, which distinguishes it from a purely conceptual argument. Indeed, Albers declared the importance of art to be its representational form of expression, not merely its subject matter: “Art is concerned with the HOW, not with the WHAT; not with literal content, but its performance of the content” (Albers, 1940). Arts-based researcher Leavy (2015) agrees that performance is what distinguishes art as a representational form. Its evaluation lies not in how exhaustively it can explain its point but in how powerful its performance is to evoke new ways of grasping and experiencing human life: “The arts, at their best, can be emotionally and politically evocative, captivating, aesthetically powerful, and moving” (Leavy, 2015, p. 23).
This is why form, and the intentions of form, become central to understanding the distinction between psychology as art vs. science. Scientific forms of psychology intend to explain, discuss, analyze, conceptualize, and elaborate. Artistic forms of psychology intend to reveal, provoke, express, stir the senses, bring to tears. The psychologist as artist is free to become a playful provocateur, sacrificing explicit conceptual elaboration to craft compressed, hard-hitting truths about human reality that awaken people to feel psychological life in new ways: “the visionary strength, the genuineness of expression, the intensity of emotional effect, are what count” (Albers, 1940). Psychology-as-art, in its strongest performance, brings holistic awakening. It expresses the affective, embodied, and sacred dimensions of psychological life in ways that remain faithful to the “messy fullness” of reality as it is actually lived—which discursive text alone cannot capture (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Freeman, 2026). When a psychologist chooses artforms to convey meanings about lived experience, they are arousing not only the intellect but also the heart, body, and soul of those who encounter the work.
Some forms of psychological science may also do this. Many human science psychologists intend for their research to be both explanatory and evocative. Van Manen (1990), who identifies as a human scientist, states that phenomenological research is similar to artmaking; both are “a creative attempt to somehow capture a certain phenomenon of life in a linguistic description that is both holistic and analytical, evocative and precise, unique and universal, powerful and sensitive” (p. 39). Van Manen encourages human scientists to use poeticizing language that avoids intellectualization or abstraction and instead expresses our direct, embodied contact with the world. Similarly, McNiff (1998) positions arts-based research as a hybridization of scientific methodology and artistic expression, demonstrating how both work together to produce holistic knowledge about human experience. In this vein, I see how two of my arts-based phenomenological research projects—the faith and closeted studies (Gupta, 2020; Gupta, 2022)—could be perceived as a hybridization of science and art. Yet, alternatively, Leavy (2015) argues that since arts-based research is widely embraced by scholars in the arts and humanities who do not identify as scientists, it should be considered its own unique research paradigm that extends beyond the confines of science.
In a special issue on arts-based phenomenological research in Qualitative Psychology (Gupta & Zieske, 2024), I therefore propose a “spectrum approach” to the classification of psychology and its diverse ways of doing and expressing research. If we define “research” broadly as the discovery of knowledge (McNiff, 1998), then this model positions both science and art as equally valid routes to creating knowledge for psychology—in both form and epistemology. Rather than viewing art and science as two dichotomous, opposing camps, a spectrum approach would locate natural science psychology on one side, the psychological humanities on the other, and human science psychology in the middle. This spectrum would honor the many forms of psychology that hover in the middle as both art and science—human science research which aspires to explain and provoke, describe and reveal, conceptualize and awaken. But, core to my argument for psychology-as-art, it would also acknowledge psychological work that constitutes art and art alone—scholarship that belongs squarely at the “psychological humanities” end of the spectrum.
Alongside considering form of expression, categorizing psychology through this spectrum would also require us to consider our epistemological processes of psychological knowledge acquisition—the ways of knowing by which we arrive at our claims. Western psychology has historically embraced science as the superior epistemology, defined as the rational, systematic process of gathering data to produce knowledge through replicable, procedural methods. This spectrum suggests that a scientific process is not always necessary for producing valid, significant, and even empirical knowledge for psychology. Arts-based researchers emphasize that the etymological meaning of empiricism is “deriving knowledge from experience,” and insist that science does not have a sole claim on empiricism (Leavy, 2015; McNiff, 1998). Abiding by this etymology, I contend that artwork which expresses fidelity to psychological life, as it is directly and phenomenologically experienced, may constitute empirical knowledge for psychology without needing to follow a rational, systematic process.
This brings me to my second claim.
Claim 2: Some Psychological Truths Arrive as Revelations from God
If we define science as a rational, systematic process with replicable procedural methods of producing knowledge, we must acknowledge that this is not how all truths about psychological life come to be. Some truths are not reasoned but received. Some truths are not developed but downloaded. Some truths arrive in dreams, or in sudden synchronicities. Some truths arrive as visionary artwork in states of irrationality, when reason drops away and we find ourselves humbly submitting to the wisdom of a divine intelligence (Gupta, 2025).
Artists acknowledge that some truths arrive as revelations from God. Van Gogh, who painted vivid expressions of his lifeworld while in states of madness, conceived of all artists as instruments of the Divine. Rothko, whose artwork expressed the spectrum of human emotions like ecstasy and despair, described his creative process as distinctly religious. Julia Cameron, teacher of millions of artists worldwide with her book The Artist’s Way, said the creative process involves surrendering to God, such that artists “[forge] a creative alliance, artist-to-artist with the Great Creator” (Cameron, 1995, p. 2).
Psychologists also acknowledge that some truths arrive as revelations from God. Jung critiqued western psychology for its loss of soul, arguing that our field must take seriously spiritual ways of knowing. The soul revealed its truths to Jung not through reason but through spontaneous images that bombarded him as visions during a period of spiritual crisis. He related to these visions as transmissions sent by his numinous unconscious (i.e., the God-image of the psyche), and he believed they held generalizable knowledge about universal aspects of the human psyche. As a phenomenologist of inner experience, Jung devoted years to painting artwork to document these images (i.e., the Red Book)—and he later stated that his visionary artwork inspired the framework for his theoretical contribution known as Analytic Psychology: “The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life—in them everything essential was decided [. . .] It was the prima materia for a lifetime’s work” (C. G. Jung, 1961, p. 199). Jung’s words suggest that the epistemological roots of Analytic Psychology are not only scientific but also artistic . . . and also mystical, delivered from a spiritual source.
Cultures across history acknowledge that some truths arrive as revelations from God. As an Indian-American scholar, I have published a “decolonial-transpersonal” approach to psychological research which conceptualizes my arts-based phenomenological research process for the South Asian erotic power project through Hinduism’s theory of creativity (Gupta, 2024). Hinduism posits that the human soul (Atman) can access truth from the Supreme Creative Energy of the Universe (Brahman/God), when in states of ego-transcendence such as meditation and artmaking. Using Hinduism’s approach to knowledge creation (which influenced Jung’s model of the numinous unconscious), I demonstrate how I transcended reason as a researcher to enter a meditative state of awareness through the process of artmaking, from which my soul communed with God to receive intuitive truths about my phenomenon under inquiry. In my view, my process of discovering knowledge through primarily non-rational, non-replicable routes such as dreams, synchronicities, and mystical visions moves this particular project out of the epistemic category of “science” and situates it squarely in the “psychological humanities.”
Qualitative Psychology’s willingness to publish my transpersonal approach to research aligns with the recent movement towards decolonizing psychology (Gone, 2021). Decolonial psychologists assert that Western academia espouses a very narrow system of knowledge that fails to account for the “global treasury of knowledge” offered by epistemologies across diverse, ancient cultures (Hall & Tandon, 2017). This is the result of epistemecide, defined as the “killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a knowledge system” as a result of colonialism (Patin et al., 2021, p. 1). Decolonizing psychology asks us to repair this harm through epistemic justice, which involves “interrupting and healing from the harms caused by epistemic violence, in the ways violent structures/systems . . . categorize people in their capacity and credibility as knowers” (Dutta et al., 2022, p. 60). Epistemic justice involves committing to epistemic pluralism, which means being inclusive of spiritual ways of knowing revered across global knowledge traditions.
I am not alone in integrating mysticism into my research process, as transpersonal inquiry is gaining credibility among Western psychologists who center spiritual knowing (Braud & Anderson, 1998). Psychological research methods like intuitive inquiry and organic inquiry encourage researchers to conduct inquiry “in partnership with Spirit,” for which reason is suspended to intuitively access insights from a spiritual source (Anderson, 2019; Clements, 2004). Transpersonal researchers often incorporate artmaking to obtain revelatory knowledge, because it serves as “an inspirational medium of transpersonal awareness and spiritual freedom” in the research process (Netzer, 2014)
Transpersonal knowing can be considered “inner empiricism,” a term coined by Jacob Needleman to encourage Western academics to honor spiritual epistemologies like those from Eastern wisdom traditions: “let’s remember that all the teachings of the great traditions, the spiritual traditions, are based on experience” (Needleman, cited in Whittaker, 2012). Needleman’s notion of “inner empiricism” encourages academics to turn to our inner experience to access deeper wisdom about human reality than external empiricism alone can grant us. He connected the knowledge derived from inner empiricism to divine revelation from God: When they say, “it comes from God,” it comes from God into the God in man. And it’s due to the human receptacle that revelation appears. Revelation is another word for higher consciousness that comes and meets the instruments that we’re born with [. . .] So spiritual practice is a form of inner empiricism, in that sense. (Needleman, cited in Whittaker, 2012)
I view the psychological humanities as an approach that welcomes inner empiricism and takes seriously transpersonal knowledge derived from the spiritual realms of consciousness. My epistemic vision of psychology-as-art would invite psychologists to build knowledge, theories, and models grounded not only in empirical science but also in the inner empiricism of art. Psychology-as-art could also, then, be considered a decolonial epistemology, because it legitimizes non-Western ways of knowing beyond scientific reason—such as the mystical visions of yogis which have been honored by my Indian ancestors across history.
Claim 3: The Anima Should Sit on the Throne of Psychology’s Future
In calling on psychology to return to the soul, Jung referred to the soul as anima, a Latin feminine noun for soul, spirit, and the vital energy that animates all beings. Anima contrasts with animus, the Latin masculine noun for rational mind or intellect. The archetypal image of anima took the form of a woman in Jung’s psyche, towards whom he was deeply ambivalent: “I do not love her, I fear her. My knees tremble” (C. G. Jung, 2009, p. 183). Jung conceptualized the individuated Self as androgynous, akin to the yin-yang image of Shiva/Shakti in Hinduism where enlightenment holds masculine and feminine energies in perfect balance. Yet in his writings, Jung was transparent about his fear of his own anima—which he defined as the feminine, feeling qualities within a man, ultimately helping them connect to their own aliveness.
Jung’s reverence and fear of the anima mirrors psychology’s ambivalence towards the feminine, feeling qualities of our own field. Studying psychological life obviously includes the affective aspects of human experience. Yet mainstream psychology often produces stoic, hyperrational, dispassionate, scientific knowledge, stripped of soulful, lively, human emotion. Brent Robbins (2003) critiques mainstream psychology for its “instrumental rationality” which distances us from the felt, meaningful qualities of existence. He implores our field to employ aesthetic language to bring feeling back into our work: “without the cultivation of the aesthetic . . . our concentrative appreciation of the world’s meanings becomes stale and lifeless” (Robbins, 2003, p. 419). Likewise, I suggest we invite the anima to sit on the throne of psychology’s future—a playful, provocative way of saying we must reclaim emotion, sensuality, aesthetics, intuition, and even irrationality for psychological knowledge acquisition and dissemination. Centering the anima’s way of knowing serves as a reclamation of feminine epistemology for psychology (understanding “feminine” not as biological gender essentialism but as archetypal energy).
Among feminist psychologists, this reclamation would resonate with their advocacy to center the embodied, emotional, and relational dimensions of scholarship. For decades, feminist scholars have highlighted how patriarchal academic norms subjugate stereotypically feminine qualities as inferior: “the myth of dispassionate investigation has functioned historically to undermine the epistemic authority of women as well as other social groups associated culturally with emotion” (Jaggar, 1989, p. 151). Alison Jagger links the academic suppression of emotion to 19th-century British scientific positivism, which “stipulated that trustworthy knowledge could be established only by methods that neutralize the values and emotions of individual scientists” (p. 152). Shorter et al. (2025) emphasize how the academy marginalizes women and scholars of color by demeaning their ways of knowing as irrational: The Academy has supported supposedly scientific theories which rendered Black & Brown people and white women as less rational and less human than white men [. . .] positioning someone as irrational and emotional is a technique for dismissing their experience [. . .] Our research is embodied emotion work, and in doing so, [we] use our embodied emotions to collectively generate feminist knowledge (p. 2).
Since the purpose of art is to express emotional life (Albers, 1940), and the emotional knowledge of women’s bodies has historically been subjugated by patriarchal rationalism (Shorter et al., 2025), then I contend that psychology-as-art offers a feminist corrective.
Mark Freeman’s advocacy for the psychological humanities is restorative in this regard. He conveys great respect for aesthetic approaches that evoke the messy, complex, emotional intensity of psychological life. Freeman (2024) articulates his vision for this movement through deeply passionate writing himself: I suggest that psychology ought to become a gentler discipline, one that is more open to the mystery of being human; interpretively humble, reverential toward reality, in all of its fullness; attuned to the poetic dimensions both of human lives and psychological inquiry . . . faithful to the messiness and beauty of other persons [. . .] ready to tear down the walls that have hemmed psychology in; and to do so not in the name of violence but of love. (p. 1)
Freeman’s heartfelt manifesto is essentially calling for an epistemology of love, which some scholars suggest is the purpose of feminist research: “our work is animated by an affectual love and ‘its revolutionary power”’ (Elfreich et al., 2026, p. 128). Feminist scholars often position love not simply as an overwhelming, passionate feeling but also as rational ethical practice (Jaggar, 1989; Sadler, 2018). In this vision, an epistemology of love invites scholars to rationally channel our emotions into an “ethics of care” that guides our research, and to intentionally shape our affective scholarship to serve communal solidarity (Brannelly & Barnes, 2022).
While appreciating feminist scholars’ advocacy for ethical, rational love, I am more inspired by the idea that messy, passionate, irrational Eros can have a seat at the academic table. Though feminist theorists have attempted an “affective turn” in academic scholarship to reclaim emotionality, “they have left the phenomenon of passion as an embodied, socially embedded experience unexplored and undertheorized” (Davis, 2018). Reclaiming passionate Eros for psychology means allowing our work to drip with human subjectivity, including our strongest emotions, feelings, values, desires, convictions, and attachments. Psychology-as-art not only invites us to infuse sensual Eros into our forms of psychological expression, but also invites scholars to be transparent about the passionate forces driving our creations.
Perhaps what psychology-as-art welcomes, in embracing passionate Eros, is radical vulnerability of the researcher’s positionality. Patriarchal academic norms discourage researchers from writing themselves into their scholarship in the name of neutrality. What would happen if we gave ourselves permission to use that forbidden “I,” to let our words break our own hearts? A poignant example is Freeman’s (2021) book Do I Look at You with Love?, a work of literary scholarship about his experience of caregiving for his mother with dementia. While reading his work, I had the distinct experience of knowing him personally, and accordingly caring for his personhood, because of the passionate self-exposure pouring out through his poetic language. Radical vulnerability in psychological scholarship invites the reader to deepen their capacity to care, to love. This may be the most important function of psychology-as-art.
This is also the function of the anima for Jung—she taught him to love. The anima returns a man to his emotional life, from which he has become disconnected due to an overreliance on reason. The anima also returns a man to his creative life force, serving as a muse from which artistic imagination awakens (E. Jung, 1985). Psychology’s reclamation of the anima does not mean disavowing scientific reason, but rather balancing it with emotional, sensual, and even irrational modes of knowledge that connect us to humanity and each other. This is the realm of art. It is also the realm of Eros. The goal is erotic union between anima and animus: “When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love” (C. G. Jung, 1959, p. 338). The anima helps us fall in love; can psychology-as-art help psychology fall in love with itself?
This brings me to my final claim.
Claim 4: Beauty Will Save the World
In an interview about his life’s work, depth psychologist James Hillman (2015) critiqued the Cartesian worldview of science for deadening the world and turning it into a soulless product for human use. If humans view the world as soulless, nothing stops us from destroying it for our egoistic purposes. The job of psychology, according to Hillman, is to re-awaken humans to the beauty of the world—by aestheticizing it, helping us fall in love with it, and therefore motivating us to protect it from destruction: What would make you want to not destroy something? It would be your sense of appreciation of its beauty. If we start with the world as something beautiful, we would want to keep it around [. . .] Once we really appreciate beauty, we can fall in love with the world [. . .] And you only fall in love with it if you’re aesthetically alive to it.
For Hillman and Jung, psyche, soul, and the world are the same (Brooke, 2009). Hillman’s entire project was about re-visioning psychology through the lens of beauty—urging psychologists to see the psyche not simply as dysfunctional, but as intrinsically beautiful because of its soulfulness even alongside its pathology (Hillman, 1975). Yes, we have shadows. Yes, we have shame. But in the very same breath, we are sacred beings.
What definition of beauty makes most sense in a world of shadows? Not surface-level prettiness. An orientation to the world in which aesthetic pleasure and the sacredness of life is savored right alongside a reckoning with violence. Both aspects of psyche and world are true. Neither truth cancels the other. In times of personal and collective injustice, when it is difficult to see the world as anything but violent, attending to beauty becomes paramount. Reflecting on the role of art in a time of atrocity, art scholar Nancy Adler (2015) states that seeking beauty does not mean ignoring oppression. Rather, it means turning our attention to flickers of light and hope that prevail even amidst that ugliness. Adler asserts that this is precisely the artist’s task in an unjust society—to fill the world with reminders of beauty, and to inspire humanity to co-create the world in the image of that beauty. Most artists agree that beautiful art does not mean prettiness, and that “art that denies violence abandons its victims as if they are irrelevant to human life” (Ettinger, 2016). But human reality is nuanced and complex—constantly dancing between the shadows and the light. Beautiful art captures the wretched and the horrible, alongside reminders of the sacredness of life which make the world worth fighting to keep alive.
For my dissertation, I produced a phenomenological film called Illuminate about the lived experience of being in the LGBTQ closet. I wished to create a piece of aesthetic beauty that could capture the homophobic violence of the closet alongside images of pleasure, hope, and light. As an arts-based phenomenological researcher, my desire to create beauty was inspired by research participants’ descriptions of the closeted experience. One participant described the euphoria of being embraced by his same-gender lover, although this embrace was confined to secrecy. Another described his closet as a secret, glittering world of his own where he could freely express himself in all the ways that society forbids. Still another participant expressed gratitude and joy about discovering loving allies in his personal world who supported him unconditionally, even though the larger society still harbored its ugly prejudices (Gupta, 2022).
Participants’ descriptions of lived experience appeared as examples of subversive beauty in situations of profound oppression—kernels of hope that kept them alive. So, in the process of transforming phenomenological data into filmmaking, I felt an ethical responsibility to create cinematography that evoked moments of aesthetic pleasure—rainbow light dancing, music that lifts the heart, images of tender embrace. Particularly for queer viewers of the film who remained closeted, I wanted to illustrate that encounters with love and pleasure are still possible in homophobic contexts—and perhaps serve as critical interventions for healing and liberation from the closet’s oppression. While creating art in a time of atrocity, it felt necessary to avoid producing a dystopian film that would re-traumatize viewers and plunge them into despair. Somewhere deep inside, I experienced a conviction that illuminating beauty made a difference for whether a queer person chose to remain in the world, or to opt out.
(I wish you were here.)
Illuminating beauty is the task of the artist. It is also the task of the psychologist. Psychology-as-art can gift us with radical hope amidst personal and political turmoil. Psychology-as-art can express the full spectrum of being-in-the-world—pleasure and pain, awe and terror, shadows and light—without denying any of it. Psychology-as-art can inspire human beings to fall in love with the world, and therefore do everything we can to protect it.
In this current historical moment, we require a revelation of the beautiful. There is no choice; our lives depend on it. This is how we avoid succumbing to despair.
In this sense, psychology-as-art becomes an ethical imperative. Beauty is the hope we have for reimagining the future of the world in the precious image of our love.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.