Navigating Art Therapy

A Therapist's Companion

Chris Wood, Chris Wood

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317835127
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psicología
• Sous-sujet: Psicoterapia

From Art-making as a Defence to Works of Art, this anthology will help you navigate your way through the ever growing world of art therapy.

Art therapy is used in an increasing range of settings and is influenced by a range of disciplines, including psychotherapy, social psychiatry, social work and education. Navigating Art Therapy is an essential companion for both seasoned art therapists and those new to the field as it offers a comprehensive guide to key terms and concepts.

With contributions from art therapists around the world, entries cover:

• forms of interpretation
• processes of adaptation
• history of art therapy
• the inspiration provided by artworks and popular culture

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This book is an ideal source of reference as the concise, cross-referenced entries enable easy navigation through ideas and terms integral to the discipline. As such, it is invaluable for anyone working in the art therapy field.

Entries

Absorption in art-making: CW

Making art can remind a person what it is to be absorbed. When someone is troubled it can be hard to escape an uncomfortable or even miserable self-consciousness. Whether a therapist adopts a gently supportive approach or a more challenging one, an important task of therapy is to enable clients to become creatively absorbed in what they are doing and in their lives. We seem to have a basic need for periods of absorption. They can provide the opposite of alienation. When children play, they are not often self-conscious, but they are absorbed.

After a period of distress, it can be difficult to feel absorbed when alone. Art-making can lead to reverie and a benign sense of absorption. Artists’ studios throughout the centuries have contributed to the environmental circumstances and often the company that make absorption possible.

Alienation; Bachelard; Psychosis and; Reverie; Studios; Time disappears

Abuse: The creation of discontinuities of experience: CC

In the sessions she longs to make something ‘nice’ but each time there is a downward spiral of barely containable mess, clay goes to slimy, smeared water, paints to murky brown/black mixtures. She is not able to bear the pain of looking at the damage and distress inside, felt depressed, despairing and suicidal under her insistence on ‘nice pictures’, denying what was actually being made. In the session she flits from one rushed activity to the other, is on the tables, at the windows, out of the door, leaving the room in chaos at the end so that my ‘insides’ feel tipped upside down or inside out. This evokes the sense I have from her that her world was turned inside out and upside down by the abuse. She no longer knows what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, who is to be trusted, what is ‘real’ and what is ‘not real’

… A space has developed in the session where she can be ‘still’. There is the possibility that I can think about her, rather than often feeling left behind in the tail of a tornado as she leaves the session. She enjoys the sensation of being in my thoughts though it is hard to trust that I will not lose interest if she is ‘not entertaining me’ in some way. She communicates a lot through song and in this session is able to let me know her fears that she will always be a soiled, abused child, the ‘ugly duckling’, and wish to be a ‘pure swan’, a girl to whom abuse has not happened.

(Case, 2000: 40–47)

Boundaries; Reparation using Herman; Therapeutic frame; Violation of body boundaries

Access to art: CW

Art therapists often work with people who have little access to the kinds of art found in theatres, galleries, opera houses, and literature. They use wide definitions of art and include many things that touch the imagination, including much from the media, popular culture, and even football. Some might keep a selection of books about the work of artists, photography, etc. in their studios as a way of trying to broaden access, although others might consider that this alters the nature of the therapeutic frame in ways that are unacceptable.

Melvin Bragg (2004) points to a quartet of themes – accidents of geography; not feeling educated enough; psychological fear and poverty that keep many people without access to art and the way it describes the human situation – although he celebrates the ways in which some TV is improving access.

Artists; Beuys; Blake; Comic strips; Football; Film Studio; Internet; Popular culture; Ritual; Social inclusion; Television

Act of painting: CW

… not about paintings, but about the act of painting, and the kinds of thought that are taken to be embedded in paint itself. Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter’s movements, a portrait of the painter’s body and thoughts. The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter’s muddy humours, and its brilliant transformations are the painter’s unexpected discoveries. Painting is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and [colours] and the artist responds in moods …

(Elkins, 2000: 5)

Paint; Painting

Acting out: DN

‘… conceived by Freud … to describe feelings from the past that are repeated within the transference: the patient “acts it” before us, as it were, instead of reporting it to us’ (Freud, 1938: 176, in Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988: 6). Acting out also extends to outside of the transference relationship: ‘We must be prepared to find, therefore, that the patient yields to the compulsion to repeat’ (Freud, 1915: 151, in Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988: 4).

Acting out is a two-fold notion of putting outside of oneself something that should be kept inside and dealt with psychologically. In acting out the tension is drained, so that no trace of the internal conflict remains. The commonly held psychoanalytic view is of the acting out as an attempt to attack or to break off the therapeutic relationship.

Many of the people referred for art psychotherapy act out their feelings in extreme and life-threatening ways. However, once a therapeutic alliance is established it is possible for the patient to express their feelings more creatively, link those feelings to thoughts, and ultimately to understand them and be understood. Their acting out behaviour gradually lessens and sometimes disappears.

Alienation; Images used to convey the ‘action’ of violence; Therapeutic alliance

Action painting: Impact on art therapy: LR

Action painting was contemporary with Surrealist experiments with ‘automatism’, and Tachiste adventures in mark-making. In New York during this era, Caroline Pratt (herself influenced by psychoanalysis) and Margaret Naumberg (one of the originators of American art therapy) both founded progressive schools promoting emotional development through spontaneous creativity and self-directed learning. Florence Cane taught at the Walden School from 1920 to 1930. Her approach, influenced by abstract expressionism, used art-making, which combined physical movement, play, work, and discipline, to enable pupils to find their ‘essence’.

Whilst some people relish the freedom and physicality of action painting, others associate it with loss of control and catharsis. This can elicit fantasies of using the whole room as the canvas, obliterating the space and all in it with paint. Whilst some fear it might involve complete disinihibition, others express grievance about an ostensible absence of craft, viewing the genre as fraudulent.

For Pollock (Cane’s contemporary), who made a dance of throwing paint onto the canvas with sticks and hardened house-paint brushes, process was key: ‘I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk round it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting’ (Hughes, 1980: 313). The American critic Rosenberg described the birth of this form of abstract expressionism:

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined.

(Rosenberg, 1952: 45–46)

Rosenberg distinguished these enactments from autistic soothing, and from catharsis, by characterising them as ‘dramatic dialogues’ between painter and canvas.

Mise-en-scene; Process; Process model

Active imagination: EW

Active imagination is the opposite of conscious invention … it uses a different energy described as dreaming with open-eyes … A new situation is created in which unconscious contents are exposed in the waking state … previously unrelated contents become more or less clear and articulate …

The process of active imagination itself may have a positive and vitalising effect but the content (as of a dream) may also be painted as well.

(Samuels et al., 1986: 9)

Colours and active imagination

Acute states: CT

I have found the term ‘acute states’ broad enough to describe and encompass contact with service users suffering from borderline developmental, affective conditions, and behavioural disorders. Art therapists have often been seen to work beneficially in public services settings with people on the margins of receiving treatment, the more difficult clients or patients whose mental states are often acute, heightened, severe, or delicate. Yet, as art therapists, we consistently need to promote and monitor the implications of working with such emotionally toxic material within rather than beyond the call of duty. For this reason, art therapists in the UK produced guidelines for working in prisons (Teasdale, 2002).

Clinical guidelines; Clinical guidelines in art therapy; Distributive transference and teamwork; Unhelpful counter-transference in forensic work

Adamson, Edward (1912–1996): CW

When working at Netherne Psychiatric Hospital (Surrey) in the late 1970s I was interested to meet some of the long-term ‘patients’ who remembered ‘Mr Adamson’. He was one of the art therapy pioneers in Britain. He established studios at Netherne from just after the Second World War in 1946 and then worked as a ‘hospital artist’ for 35 years (Adamson, 1984: 4). The studios and the gallery he had established were still in existence when I was there. The equipment he offered each person who came to a studio was always the same: an easel, a chair, and a frame with two shelves for the same range of art materials. In this way, everyone was offered a small self-contained area in which to work without feeling overlooked.

People who remembered working with Adamson all mentioned the quietness of the studio and his respectful presence. Ironically, it may be that, because of instructions from medical colleagues to avoid interpretation (Waller, 1991: 54), Adamson provided powerful therapeutic containment. His way of inviting people to begin was simple and broadly similar with everyone; he would ...