Free-expression painting studio in the context of suicide: affectivity as evidence of the therapeutic process

The present research implemented the Free-Expression Painting Studio as a technique to assist university students who had suicidal ideations or attempts. This technique was developed in France by the psychologist Michel Ternoy, in his doctorship referring to two decades of work with psychiatric patients, based on Minkowski\'s structural-phenomenon analysis method. The thesis proposes to present some cases followed in the Painting Studio, analyzed in the phenomenon-structural method, and discussed from Michel Henry\'s phenomenology of life, with the purpose of showing how affectivity proves the evolution of the therapeutic process. Psychology and phenomenology can create spaces for belonging and support, which allow the transformation of suffering through the experiences in the community. The phenomenology of life is a pure phenomenality of affection, which sees the phenomenality of life as giving itself as affection in the world, in a way that each individual experiences themselves and their own life self-affects and is affected by it in community. The Painting Studio makes it possible to experience the affection of the other as a potential of one\'s own possibilities, mobilizing the affective dialectical relationship, through which one can go from unbearable suffering to original fruition. The therapeutic process in the Painting Studio does not operate at the level of deductive thinking, but at the level of affective transformation. The affective resonances of the life of the other of which the aesthetic feeling is part are modalities of pathos-with or of the original pact between humans and non-humans effected in life. In this context, we seek to show, through narrating the experience in the Painting Studio, that art can be part of the therapeutic process as an alternative to the passage to the act of suicide, as it allows the expression of suffering and its modalization, in community, before it becomes unbearable (AU)