Yayoi Kusam is an artist who sublimated her psychiatric problem named obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD into art and maximized the healing powers of arts. Her innumerable paintings, drawings, sculptures, installation works, engravings, pottery, and the publication of 20-odd novels and a collection of poetical works, are attributed to her OCD. For Kusama, art activity is self-therapy
itself.
Kusama immersed herself in her artworks to render the hallucination she saw, and to overcome her anxiety and fear thereof and get free from that. Kusama, however, did not stay depict the hallucination and symptoms of OCD as they were, but did create comfortable and familiar images using her imagination and did elevate those into artistic symbols which have universal and spiritual significance. She also persisted in laying herself open to the fear for hallucination by using the method of repetition and accumulation in the work course, and thus attenuated the jitters. Meanwhile, the cause of the fear dissipates by making phalluses, an object of hatred and fear, soft sculptures, and then she becomes a creator who produces and dominates those. The Kusama's art, finally, beyond individualistic domain, wins the social meaning such as free rein, love and peace, which helps heal the wounds of the public in modern society.
Kusama rather used OCD working to her as shortcoming so that she detached herself from the suppressive reality artificially comprised of. She embraces and sublimates into art many things that can not be accepted in the real world, and so cures herself and heals others. As her expression, Kusama's work is 'art-medicine'. Through this study confirming the process of healing done in Kusama's artworks, I can reconfirm the fact that arts have deep affinity with mind, body, and spirit, and that we can cope with the problems and conflicts related to the realm of all those three through art activity.