My previous experiences in the health service had brought me nowhere near the level of concentrated disturbance that I was to experience both within Holloway prison and within myself in relation to the work. It is difficult to have a therapeutic relationship in a system that struggles and oscillates between control and containment.
For the past three years 1 have been working at Holloway, which is western Europe’s largest women's prison and houses a shifting and sometimes volatile population of about 500 women, mostly held on remand. A high proportion of women in prisons come from deprived and impoverished backgrounds. It was Mahatrna Ghandi who said that the deadliest form of violence is poverty.
Fire setting is a regular occurrence within the prison. Women often set fire to belongings in their rooms and require particular interventions from the institution. A high proportion of the women on the medical wings have been charged with arson and a third of all the women I have treated at the prison have had arson as their index offence. In a survey done by the Psychology Department (1998), it was found that arsonists made up four per cent of the sentenced population and two per cent of the overall population at Holloway. So many women with this charge are referred to Art Therapy and I have become aware that most of the women referred to me have also engaged in self-harm and have a history of sexual abuse.
One of the central themes that emerged while working in a prison is that chaos as a form of conflict is at times a defence against conformity. There is a mirroring of dynamics which at times links the defences of the institution to those of the individual. For example, women frequently throw all sorts of objects such as food, excrement, clothes and rubbish out of their cell windows on to the prison grounds while cleaning parties clear it away. It is a continual process.
In my view control in the prison can become a perversion of containment. An example of this is where staff react in an excessively disciplinary way to inmates' disruptive and violent behaviour such as fire-setting and self-harm. Prison staff lack understanding of the acting out behaviour which communicates particular individual and wider group and societal conflicts such as whether to treat or punish.
I believe self-harm and arson communicate different parts of the patient to different parts of the organisation. Self-harm involves control over the body whereas arson involves control over the environment. This is significant when considering abuse as the 'environment' is controlling the individual. A progression towards health would be for the abused person to move beyond the frustration of only communicating within the boundary of their body through self-harm and to move towards aggression directed at the 'other'. Punishing the other rather than the self is a major shift. Externalising the rage or conflict (through fire-setting) is an important step. At times the prison becomes the object of attack and represents the 'other' in the patients internal world. Many of the women I have seen usually set fire to their beds and bedding material which I believe is symbolically linked to the abuse dynamic.
As an art therapist working with arsonists there is a dilemma in seeing arson as a healthier progression from self-harm as both states are dangerous and involve an inability to think before acting destructively. Attacks on their own bodies as well as the body of the institution creates visible scars that disturbingly demand to be seen. Perhaps the body is also communicating something about that part that cannot be psychologically or physically imprisoned.
Generally patients who commit arson have a failure of symbolisation. The intrusive identification is acted out in a concrete way. Recurrent acts of fire setting bring to mind an image from mythology, the Phoenix. Fire-setters may have a similar powerful connection operating on an unconscious level, that of purification, of rising from the ashes, of being renewed. Perhaps self-harm carries this fantasy on some level - a reforming or transforming of the body, like plastic surgery. It is as if both acts hold destructive and creative urges.
When comparing suicide, homicide and arson one can say that arson may be an amorphous intermediate stage between harming one's self and aggression focused on the abusing other. In my experience, the arsonist actively avoids focusing aggression towards the abuser by dispersing their anger and directing it towards an object.