Childhood trauma in art

This thesis examines the effects of childhood trauma on individuals and how art makes them visible. Childhood trauma can negatively impact individuals' emotional, cognitive, and social development, leading to long-term psychological and physiological problems. Childhood trauma leaves profound scars on an individual's emotional, physical, cognitive, and social development; these scars often persist as repressed narratives. Art enables the aesthetic expression and representation of traumatic experiences. Various art forms, such as painting, literature, music, and cinema, provide a basis for representation by reshaping individuals' traumatic experiences. In this context, art stands out as a tool that traces childhood traumas, objectifies them, renders ruptures in memory visible, and facilitates understanding of these effects. This study explores the effects of art on individuals by identifying them with childhood traumas. Given that artistic expression can vary based on individual differences, quotations from works of art and descriptive analyses of these works explore how art's formal diversity and expressive power connect with an individual's inner reality. The research is structured around the visual arts, specifically exploring childhood trauma within historical, cultural, and individual contexts, and is structured within a theoretical framework. Through the pictorial representation of trauma, it reveals how an individual's experiential ruptures transform into an aesthetic form on the artistic plane, and how this transformation integrates with individual expressive strategies. The individual studies section explores how the traces of an individual's inner world are reflected in childhood trauma on an artistic level, through examples selected from art forms such as painting and sculpture, examined intersemiotically.