What Kandinsky Knew About the Inner Life

Have you ever stood in front of a painting and felt something shift without knowing why?
Not a thought. Not an opinion about whether it was beautiful or whether you understood it.
Something quieter than that. A recognition. As if the painting knew something about you that you hadn't quite put into words yet.

Wassily Kandinsky believed this was not accidental.
He spent his life arguing that colour and form speak directly to the inner life bypassing the analytical mind entirely and making contact with something deeper. Something that already knows. Something that was there before the words were.

He called it the inner necessity. The idea that art, at its most honest, doesn't decorate the world. It reaches into us. He laid this out in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) a book worth reading.

I think about this often in my clinical work.

Because so many of the people I sit with have learned usually early, usually under circumstances that gave them no choice to distrust that inner knowing. To treat their own felt sense of things as unreliable. To look outward for confirmation of what is real rather than inward.
When you have spent years being told, directly or indirectly, that your perceptions are wrong or your feelings are too much or your needs are inconvenient you learn to go quiet. You learn to mistrust the very part of you that knows.

The inner life doesn't disappear when we stop trusting it.
It goes quiet. It waits.
And it speaks when it speaks at all not in sentences but in the language Kandinsky was reaching for. In colour. In sensation. In the quality of heaviness in the chest on certain mornings, or the particular way light looks on a day when something has shifted without your knowing what.

A client once described it to me as feeling like there was a room inside herself that she had never been allowed to enter. Not because it was locked. Simply because no one had ever told her it was there.

That room is what I think of when I think of Kandinsky's inner necessity. The place in us that already knows. The place that speaks in colour and image and sensation long before it can speak in words.

This is why I use colour, image and landscape in my work with clients.
Not as decoration. Not as metaphor alone. As a direct language one the psyche already speaks for making contact with what is already there. The inner knowing that learned to be silent. The sense of self that went underground when it became safer to disappear.

You don't have to understand it for it to work.
You don't have to believe it will work.

You simply have to be willing to let something in the way you might let a painting find you at exactly the right moment.

​That is where we begin.