The Basics • 85concern to anyone aiming at objectivity. Many art therapists, stimulated by the demand for
accountability, are working creatively at developing reliable and valid modes of assessment,
some of which are noted in Chapter 6.
Why Art Therapy?
The chapters that follow this one deal with the many approaches to doing art therapy, the uses
of art in assessment, the rationale for and range of possible technique(s,) and an overview of
the people we serve and the places where we serve them. Before getting into the what, how,
who, and where of art therapy, however, this chapter would be incomplete without a brief
look at the why: some of the basic reasons why art therapy works. While other good reasons
could be added, I believe that most art therapists would agree with the following rationales.
Knowing the rationale for art therapy can be helpful when explaining or justifying what
they are doing or want to do. This is true whether the audience is an administrator, a col-
league, or the individual(s) they want to motivate to create. Of course this means putting the
arguments in a form that will make sense to the particular audience.
One I have not listed below is the possibility that adding art to verbal therapy may shorten
the length of the treatment. This hypothesis has yet to be tested experimentally, and given
the many variables involved might never be able to be investigated. It is not difficult to
explain to a family, however, that engaging in an art evaluation will help you get to know
them more rapidly than talking about the situation alone, especially when young children
are involved (DVD 4.6).
Art Involves the Whole Person
Even though other modes of intervention can be very effective, and probably more so for
certain problems, there are still many persuasive arguments for the special therapeutic value
of art. Some are as old as the Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, and embody the notion that there
is a unique way of being that only Art as Experience (Dewey, 1934) can provide. In truth, the
art process offers one of the few ways we human beings have found to utilize and to synthe-
size all of ourselves—body, mind, and spirit. In the words of Saint Francis of Assisi: “He who
works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”
The cognitive aspect of this idea is implicit in some of the recent studies on cerebral
hemispheric dominance. They suggest that what Freud called the “primary process” is not
inferior to “secondary process” thought, but that they are complementary modes of infor-
mation processing, each developing throughout our lives. These studies also support the
idea that an integration of the two kinds of thinking represents an optimal cognitive state.
Perhaps that is what psychiatrist Sylvano Arieti (1976) meant when he proposed that cre-
ativity utilizes a unique form of thought, which he called the “tertiary process.” At a physi-
ological level, while our understanding of cerebral functioning is still relatively primitive,
we do know that both the right and left hemispheres of the brain are involved when people
are creating, and that they must interact effectively in order for art-making to occur. Recent
advances in clinical neuroscience are further supportive of the relationship between brain
physiology and the creation of art (Hass-Cohen & Carr, 2008).
Much of Our Thinking Is Visual
We have abundant evidence—from such normal phenomena as dreams and such abnormal
ones as hallucinations—that much of what is encoded in the mind is in the form of images. In