The Basics • 73Knowing Artistic Products
As with the other elements of “the art part,” there is essential agreement about the centrality
of the product, along with a variety of opinions about its place in art therapy. Although the
person being served is always more important than either product or process in art therapy,
the very existence of a concrete product makes art therapy unique.
In addition to helping the artist to see himself in a new way, creative products often
enable others on the treatment team to understand a patient better. They can also be useful
with family members and other clients. They are a silent but eloquent form of education,
whether displayed in the treatment setting or at a gallery. And at the end of the therapy, art
products offer a vivid way for participants to review—to relive and to assess what happened
during the therapeutic journey.
Those who emphasize the art in art therapy are more likely to view the quality of the
product as related to the success of the therapy. This group includes those who espouse an
art as therapy approach, as well as those who find special value in the image, and who come
from a wide variety of theoretical orientations.
Those who emphasize the therapy in art therapy are less likely to be concerned with
quality, and more likely to focus on the communicative value of the artistic product. They
too are interested in the image, but primarily for what it says rather than how well it speaks.
Janie Rhyne (M) (1995), who studied line drawings of feeling-states based on George Kelly’s
“personal construct” theory, described such creations as “visual languaging.”
All art therapists value authentically expressive work, whether crude and primitive or
sophisticated and refined. This is true regardless of whether they stress art or therapy in how
they define the work. Margaret Naumburg, for example, though she wrote primarily about
the value of art as “symbolic speech” emanating from the unconscious, encouraged and val-
ued powerful visual products. This is apparent in the vivid images she selected to illustrate
the case studies in each of her four books.
In all art products, there are two elements that can be identified and understood—form
and content. Some art therapists focus more on one or the other; most value the importance
Figure 4.3 Observing the process—art therapy student.