The Arts Therapies

A Revolution in Healthcare

Phil Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135447731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

The Arts Therapies provides, in one volume, a guide to the different disciplines and their current practice and thinking. It presents: * A clear analysis of the relationship between client, therapist and art form.
* An exploration of research, practice and key contributions made to the field by practitioners internationally and within many different contexts.
* Discussion of how the arts therapies relate to established health services. The Arts Therapies: A revolution in healthcare is a unique book that provides a thorough and up-to-date overview of the arts therapies. It will prove invaluable to arts therapists, health professionals, and all those who wish to learn more about the field.

Part I
Introductions

As in Ecchoes by reflection…where we know the thing we see is in one place; the appearance in another. And though at some certain distance the real, the very object seems invested with the very fancy it begets in us; yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another.

T.Hobbes in Leviathan (1651:86)

1
An introduction to The Arts Therapies

This chapter introduces the areas covered by The Arts Therapies, and looks at the main topics and themes within each of the different sections.

Introduction to Part II

Chapters 2 to 7

From one perspective, the arts therapies are a continuation, a development of ideas and ways of working which have had different forms and manifestations over centuries. Looked at another way, though, the arts therapies mark a revolution in the way the arts and healthcare can be seen and experienced. This book will describe that revolution.

Despite an extensive prehistory of connections between the arts and health, the arts therapies have emerged as distinct, coherent disciplines and professions since the 1940s. In a number of countries art, music, drama and dance movement therapy have become recognised as formal disciplines and professions within existing health and care provision. The past half-century has witnessed a massive shift from a situation where there were virtually no arts therapists, with no professional identity, specific theory or established ways of practising, to one where there is a contemporary flourishing of practice, training, published research and theory with developing recognition by state medical providers in a number of countries. One of the very first academic professional trainings, for example, was established in music therapy, at the University of Kansas, USA, in 1946. The National Association of Music Therapy in the US followed in 1950. By the end of the twentieth century there were almost seventy degree courses approved by the National Association and its partner organisation the American Association of Music Therapy (Bunt, 1997:250). Now there are over 3,000 music therapists practising in the USA, with recorded music therapy initiatives occurring in over thirty countries. This is an example of the advance of the arts therapies from their comparatively recent beginnings. Part II, ‘The arts therapies: definitions and developments’, describes the different arts therapies and their aims. It looks at organisations and associations that oversee training and practice in many parts of the world, referring to arts therapists from the USA to Taiwan, from the UK to South Africa. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the process of definition, and each subsequent chapter deals with one of the main modalities: art; music; drama; and dance movement. Specific definitions of each discipline are given in Chapters 3 to 6, though examples of the ways the arts therapies are practised are also contained throughout the book. This book focuses on art, music, drama and dance movement therapy, as they are the main ways in which the arts therapies are currently offered. Other areas such as the expressive arts therapies, where all art forms are brought together, are referred to, however. The commonalities and differences between art, music, drama and dance movement therapies are described and looked at in terms of what they can offer to clients. Whilst Chapters 3 to 6 describe each discipline, Chapter 7 looks at the relationship between the different arts therapies, as well as that between the arts therapies and the arts-in-health movement.

Introduction to Part III

Chapters 8 to 10

A part of the arts therapies revolution in the use of the arts can be linked to developments in art, theatre, dance and music at the end of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century. These movements are wide-spread and vary enormously. They include the Surrealists, the revolt in theatre in the Soviet Union and Germany, through to the dance experiments of Laban, from Diaghilev’s and Nijinsky’s productions such as the Rite of Spring through to developments in jazz. Part III, ‘Backgrounds, histories and encounters: from the first happening to the shadow of logic’, describes and analyses initiatives from this period. It focuses on two specific examples, as a way of sampling many other similar occurrences. Chapter 8 looks at Black Mountain College in the USA, a place of experimentation and interdisciplinary discovery. Chapter 9 looks at one of the early meetings between those involved in the arts therapies, on 30 April 1960 in London.

The movements and experiments referred to above resulted in particular ways of viewing creativity, the imagination, the roles of the artist and of the art form. These arts movements examined areas of expression and experience which had hitherto been seen to be outside the range of what was considered suitable for artistic attention. Lyotard presents this as the central tenet of modern representation: ‘To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible’ (Lyotard, 1983:16). The movements often included an interest in artistic products of people with mental health problems, for example, and the use of techniques devised to free the imagination and to increase spontaneity.

The first performance in 1896 of Albert Jarry’s play Ubu Roi is an example of such work, reflecting these concerns in its conception and realisation. It was met by an audience uproar—almost bringing the production to a halt. The audience was in such a state of disruption that violence nearly erupted (Innes, 1993). Riotous arguments in the audience almost drowned out the players. This performance has been described as a seminal moment in modern culture, a formative influence on the twentieth-century avant-garde.

What was so disturbing? What caused people to revolt? A key to this lies in both the content and form of the performance. The central character, Ubu, is a manifestation of basic, repressed, amoral instincts: his character is an unleashing of parts of the self normally hidden or censored. The play combines obscenity, moral taboos crossed, actions performed by dreamlike, puppet-like characters.

In this world kingship means eating as many sausages as you want, wearing big hats, slaughtering at whim. As drawings by Jarry show, the figure of Ubu is not meant to be realistic: rather he is an abstract, a suggestive form, a king from a nightmare, rather than from a bourgeois drawing-room or royal castle. Part of Jarry’s intent was to explore ‘the power of base appetites’ (Jarry, cited in Innes, 1993:24). The plays in this cycle can be seen to be in line with Jarry’s ‘Pataphysics’, which he defined as a system devoted to unreason, ‘a science of imaginary solutions’ (Jarry, cited in Innes, 1993:26). On a theatre stage in Paris he was trying to break down the relationship between everyday perception and hallucination:

You will see doors open onto snow-covered plains under blue skies, mantelpieces with clocks on them swinging open to turn into doorways, and palm trees flourishing at the foot of beds so that little elephants perching on book shelves can graze on them.

(Jarry, 1965:77)

This concern was echoed within other experimental art forms of the time. These involved attempts to reach beyond surface reality, to explore through the arts what was thought of as ‘inner’ nature: dreams, the subliminal, the unconscious. The stage or gallery becomes a place for dreams to become concrete, for the mind to reveal previously hidden thoughts and experiences, for the concerns of the unconscious, rather than the rational, to be played out.

Taylor could have been referring to Jarry’s work when he draws parallels between the avant-garde in twentieth-century art and the kind of work produced in arts therapies, ‘During this period avant garde artists became able to do through the activity of painting what therapists today do with their patients—namely explore aspects of feeling that are often not accessible by other means’ (Taylor, 1998:21).

As this book will demonstrate, the arts therapies are much more than such a process of exploration. However, Taylor’s reference indicates one of the connections that created the context for the arts therapies to emerge: that of the fascination of the experimental arts with emerging ideas of the unconscious and extreme states of mind. As we will see later in this book, the work of groups such as the Surrealists, or the experiments at places such as Black Mountain College, described in Chapter 8, ‘The first happening’, were all part of this upheaval or experimentation. Their challenging of boundaries between different disciplines, such as psychology and the arts, would enable the arts therapies to emerge. Arts therapist McNiff has said that Surrealism may be the clearest link between the arts and arts therapy: ‘During the surrealist era many of the values that currently guide art as medicine began to take shape’ (McNiff, 1992:44).

The emergence of work from behind asylum walls has also been credited with helping to challenge and widen the notion of what can be described as ‘art’. Arts practice had occurred within hospitals for centuries. Pioneers such as Reil (1759–1813) had worked in an asylum setting, with staff acting out patients’ fantasies in staged plays seen as part of the treatment (Jones, 1996). Patients with what would now be described as mental health problems were involved in singing, music groups and art activities (Edwards, 1989:82). This kind of practice was not typical, however. In the twentieth century, interest and concern with such areas of the arts developed and increased dramatically. One of the most well-known examples of this concerns the initiative begun by Prinzhorn, a doctor in the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic, who collected art work made by patients in asylums and published them in Bilnerei der Geiteskranken (Prinzhorn, 1922). He believed that these pictures could be viewed as a new art form, previously neither acknowledged nor valued. As we will see, this opening of the asylum doors fed into growing concerns in the experimental arts through movements such as Art Brut and the Surrealists. However, the growing interest in the area was not only influential within artistic circles: over the next decades, it helped raise awareness of the ways in which arts products could assist in understanding, communicating with and, eventually, working therapeutically with patients and their conditions. For example, at the international meeting of psychiatrists in Barcelona in 1958, a section on psychiatric art raised such interest that an International Society for Psychopathological Art was established the next year in Paris (Pickford in O’Hare, 1981:279). Within the next two decades the flowing tide of interest had resulted in a surge of activity and the unprecedented rise of new organisations, ways of working, professions, training and benefits for users of health services. The International Society is only one example of the many initiatives that were beginning to link the arts and therapy. In Chapter 9, I will look closely at such a forming link: the speeches and ideas of people coming together for a Conference of the Society of Music Therapy and Remedial Music in 1960.

These experiments and developments enhanced the awareness of connections vital to the notion of the arts as therapy. They created some of the foundations that the arts therapies would develop from. Part III gives a flavour of the awareness of potential relationships between arts making and arts products, the unconscious and change which began to emerge in a way that made the idea of the arts therapies possible.

Introduction to Part IV

Chapters 11 to 13

The movements and meetings described in Part III can be considered as a foregrounding of particular concerns to do with the ways in which the arts and therapeutic change are related. They reflect the connections between the arts and discoveries and ideas emerging from sciences such as psychology, the fields of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and education. These connections are analysed further in Part IV, ‘Agents of transformation’. Here three of the main areas that are brought together by much arts therapies practice are looked at: the arts, the unconscious and play. They are, in some arts therapists’ eyes, key ‘agents’, or forces at work, within the arts therapies.

Artists’ fascination with the meeting points of the unconscious, the apprehension of their media and their own identity was accompanied by shifts in the ideas of what was suitable for artists to consider as subject matter and form. The unconscious came to the fore in all the arts. This, as described above, was accompanied by the increased appreciation of art produced by those previously disenfranchised from the public showing of the products they created. The hidden worlds of those whose minds and experiences were deemed invalid received more public exposure through their arts products than ever before. Many artistic movements of the early and mid-twentieth century gave credence and value to such experiences and voices, shifting them from the private worlds of asylum, dreams and nightmares onto canvas, stage, gallery and concert hall in an unprecedented fashion. Such innovations will be analysed in Chapter 12, ‘The sensuous encounter: the arts therapies and the unconscious’.

This was not just one-way traffic—of the arts as practised by patients in asylums affecting the general world of the arts, for example. The introduction of the arts into hospitals also led to discoveries about the ways the arts seemed to affect patients within the hospitals. The experience of the arts in mental health contexts, for example, led to people seeing that the arts seemed to impact positively on the problems being experienced by patients. In addition, the effects of these revolutionary exchanges between the arts and areas such as psychoanalysis were not confined to the arts practice alone. Crucial to the arts therapies are the ways in which the arts influenced and featured within the development of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, as well as changes in the field of education.

This book will review the varieties of arts processes within the arts therapies, and the ways in which the discoveries about arts processes being made have an impact on the development and formation of the arts in the arts therapies. In particular, Chapter 11, ‘The arts in the arts therapies’, will focus on this range. It will also, in Chapter 13, ‘Playing, development and change’, explore the interaction between fields such as psychology and education in the development and current practice of the arts therapies.

Introduction to Part V

Chapters 14 to 17

In her ‘map of major traditions in psychotherapy’, Clarkson identifies three major schools: psychoanalytic, behavioural and humanistic-existential (Clarkson and Pokorney, 1994). The dates she gives for the inception, or active development, of each of these are 1893, 1902 and 1908 respectively: the key founders being Freud, Pavlov and Moreno. Any such definition of psychotherapy’s areas of concern is notoriously complex because of the diversity and variety of its...