Clay-work involves associate degree intense and powerful tactile expertise of touching and tactile
involvement. Touch was known joined of the primary sensory responses to develop in humans
(Frank, 1957; Ashley Montagu, 1978). Tactile contact is really the primary mode of
communication that associate degree kid learns. For humans, the first stages of life area unit
dominated by oral and skin contact between kid and caregiver (Hunter & Struve, 1998). Thus,
clay-work involves an awfully primal mode of expression and communication. Touch in clay-work
also requires body movements in endless opportunities for touching and modeling.
Thus clay-work
makes possible an entire non-verbal language or communication for the creator, through which his
or her mental realm, emotional life, and primary object relations can be expressed.
The researcher chose to use concepts from attachment and object-relation theories to describe the
inner processes that are relevant to clay-work. The central assumption of attachment theory is that
humans form close emotional bonds with significant others (Bowlby, 1969, 1973, 1979, & 1980),
which facilitate the development of mental representations of self and different, or internal
working models (Pietromonaco & Barrett, 2000).
According to attachment theory, there are two
consecutive working models of attachment: an unconscious, fairly primitive model that a person
develops during the early years of life, and later a second model, which is more sophisticated,
linguistic and conscious. The two models operate simultaneously (Bowlby, 1979): mental
representations regarding self and others develop from procedural and sensorimotor
representations (Case, 1996; Crittenden, 1990) that have no linguistic coding because they were
developed within the pre-verbal part (Nelson, 1996). Our assumption is that non-verbal modes of
expression, including art, can function as a way of communicating these procedural
representations. This is especially true with regard to clay-work, which taps into primary modes of
communication and e.g. through bit) and is thereby joined to actual past recollections and feelings
that were encoded through touch and movement. In this respect, clay-work may perform as a
central window to those unconscious, non-verbal representations and will be particularly useful
with folks that notice it arduous to specific themselves verbally or who are very defensive. It is
advocated by many psychotherapists as one of the primary devices for helping clients to explore
difficult concepts and express fundamental emotions in a non-verbal manner (Freud 2006).