Spiritual Scribble

For artists and spiritualists alike, a scribble might be defined as ‘a line let loose’ and for them, bypass the usual inhibitors and allow for automatic writing, improvised, spontaneous invention. This chapter explores the psychoanalytic (post Freudian) perspective of D. W. Winnicott, who developed a ‘squiggle’ technique for his work with children. I engage with how scribble acts as a window into the unconscious, in relation to how we might represent those ‘inner things’ or inarticulate structures’ that lie beneath the surface, refracting with artists, teachers and thinkers’ spiritual and metacognitive practices, the automatic drawing of the Surrealists, and how scribble speaks through unconscious action. These are the oblique, liquid states of psychic content expressed in scribble for this chapter. By ‘psyche’, I mean the practices of fantasy and mind, unconscious, subconscious or conscious, and by ‘spiritual scribble’ I mean to explore scribbles operating on a mystical, metaphysical level, as a certain channelling of unconscious thought.