119CHAPTER 6
Assessment
The use of any combination of verbal, written, and art tasks chosen by the professional
art therapist to assess the individual’s level of functioning, problem areas, strengths, and
treatment objectives.
American Art Therapy Association, General Standards of PracticeArt and Diagnosis
It has already been noted that some of the threads that became part of the fabric of art
therapy came from wanting to understand people through their art expression. The goal
may be to identify exactly what is wrong, or to get to know the person better in a more
general way. Even when a diagnostic label is not the purpose of an assessment, finding out
where an individual is on any dimension relevant to treatment can be extremely helpful.
Just as there are many different ways of classifying the information obtained, so there
are also multiple methods of gathering data using visual means. This chapter will offer
an overview of the many ways of understanding people through art as they have evolved
over time.
Projective Techniques
As noted in Chapter 3, projective testing—both responsive and expressive—flowered in clin-
ical psychology for several decades, especially during the 20th century. Although no longer
as widely used, its history is relevant because the many variations developed over the years
greatly influenced the training and work of art therapists. Like most early theories underly-
ing art therapy, it was based on the work of analysts regarding the universal human need to
project (or find) meaning in the world.
The assumption behind all such approaches is that the individual is revealing impor-
tant information that—because it is unconscious and therefore unknown—is not accessible
in more direct ways. This is true whether a person is responding to some kind of visual
stimulus with his ideas, or is creating something himself using art materials. Psychologist
Lawrence Frank termed this the “projective hypothesis.”^1 On the DVD (6.1), psychologist