Art Therapy for the Art Therapy and the Return to the Image: Preverbal Trauma in the Age of Neptune in Aries (2025–2039)
In the unfolding psychological climate of the mid-2020s, the return to image-based therapy is not only timely—it is necessary. We are moving toward a period marked by intensified affect, collective instability, and a growing inability to metabolize experience through verbal means alone. In this context, art therapy—particularly in its psychoanalytic and developmental formulations—emerges as a vital modality for working with preverbal trauma, dissociation, and symbolic disintegration.
Beginning on March 30, 2025, Neptune enters Aries, initiating a 14-year transit that will last until 2039. Astrologically, Neptune governs the nonverbal, the symbolic, and the porous. It rules dreams, unconscious material, and the dissolution of boundaries. Aries, by contrast, is the archetype of birth, drive, instinct, and unfiltered emergence. The combination of these energies points to an era where symbolic content demands embodiment—where what has been unspoken, or unspeakable, finds form through impulsive, creative, and non-linear means.
In this planetary environment, art therapy becomes less of an adjunct and more of a primary channel for psychic integration.
The Problem of Language in Early Trauma
As Cathy Malchiodi notes in The Handbook of Art Therapy, many clients—particularly those with developmental trauma—struggle to articulate their internal states. This is not a resistance to talk therapy, but a structural absence of symbolic language for the events in question. When trauma occurs in early childhood, or in utero, it often becomes embedded somatically and affectively, but not narratively. These are experiences not yet linked to words, and therefore not fully accessible to language-based psychotherapy.
This is the domain of preverbal trauma—and it is precisely here that art therapy operates most powerfully.
According to the text, art therapy allows clients to externalize implicit memories, affect states, and relational imprints through visual language, often without requiring premature verbal processing. In psychoanalytic terms, it offers a space for symbolic substitution and reorganization—a transitional space where unintegrated fragments can be held, seen, and eventually symbolized.
This becomes all the more important under the astrological influence of Neptune in Aries, which emphasizes unconscious material bursting into conscious awareness. In such a climate, the psyche does not wait for linguistic refinement. It demands immediacy—gesture, color, form, and instinct.
Astrological Clients and Archetypal Sensitivity
Certain individuals will be particularly attuned to this shift. Those with natal Neptune in Capricorn or Aquarius (born approximately between 1984–2003) may find that Neptune’s ingress into Aries acts as a trigger for unconscious material that has been long repressed or intellectualized. These individuals, often raised in rationalist or performance-oriented environments, may suddenly experience symbolic floods: dreams, intrusive images, psychosomatic symptoms, or a collapse of the language-first self.
Clients with strong Cancer or Pisces Moon placements, or a stellium in the fourth or twelfth house, are also likely to respond somatically and symbolically to this era. These are placements often tied to early affective sensitivity, enmeshment, or pre-verbal emotional states. For such individuals, art therapy provides a reparative symbolic function, allowing the emergence of psychic content in a manageable, non-intrusive way.
Clinical Function of Art in the Symbolic Field
Art therapy, in this frame, is not recreational. It is a technique of symbolic scaffolding. It supports ego cohesion when traditional language structures are either undeveloped (as in early trauma) or under psychic siege (as in complex PTSD or regression). As The Handbook of Art Therapy outlines, the nonverbal nature of image-making offers a therapeutic container for internal chaos, allowing affect to be metabolized slowly, safely, and symbolically.
The process of creating—whether through drawing, painting, or mixed media—is not simply expressive, but reorganizing. It engages both hemispheres of the brain, supports sensory regulation, and allows for projection, distancing, and re-internalization in new form. It is no coincidence that in times of psychological fragmentation, the hand reaches for a material before the mouth reaches for a word.
The Coming Years: A Clinical Forecast
As the Neptune in Aries transit unfolds, we can anticipate a collective uptick in symbolic agitation. This may present as increased anxiety, impulsivity, disorganized affect, or unexplained regression—particularly among individuals with unresolved early attachment wounding. Traditional talk therapy will continue to play a critical role, but many clinicians may find their clients arriving without words, without clear narratives, and with a kind of psychic static that resists linear interpretation.
In this context, art therapy provides a necessary clinical counterpoint—a way to meet the client where they are: in the image, in the affect, in the space before language.
The era we are entering is not simply about global crisis—it is about psychic overload. With Neptune in Aries from 2025 to 2039, we will witness a collective confrontation with material that has remained unformed, preverbal, or buried beneath social and internal defense. Art therapy, as both technique and philosophy, offers a crucial response—not only for trauma survivors, but for anyone navigating the dissolution of old symbolic systems.
In a world where language fails or fractures, the image remains.