124 • Introduction to Art Therapy
in which the person made a series of eight drawings of the human figure, each one based on
the previous one—as seen through a sheet of onionskin. The instructions were: “Change it
in any way you like.”
Perhaps inspired by such tasks, art therapist Harriet Wadeson used a similar technique
with couples. She invited both members of the pair to draw a portrait of the other, after
which each had an opportunity to modify their partner’s picture as they wished (Wadeson,
1980). Robert Ault also included such a task in his assessment battery for couples, to be
described later. On the DVD you can observe Wadeson instructing a couple in how to do
this task (DVD 6.5).
Variations on drawing themes have been extensive. These include other self-represen-
tations, like a tree, a house, or animals. Sometimes the topic is designed to evaluate the
person’s ability to cope with stress, such as drawing “a person in the rain” or the Most
Unpleasant Concept Test—“draw the most unpleasant thing imaginable.” References to
such efforts can be found in the books by clinical psychologists (Hammer, 1958, 1997; Oster
& Montgomery, 1996; Oster & Crone, 2004) and by art therapists (Brooke, 2004; Malchiodi,
1998a; Rubin, 2005b).
Though many other topics have been proposed, the drawing of the Human Figure—or its
symbolic extension in the House-Tree-Person test—remain the most popular themes with the
majority of clinicians, including many art therapists. The H-T-P is either done with a pencil
(achromatic) or a set of eight crayons (chromatic). Along with the hypothesis that an individ-
ual projects core personality traits in drawing behavior, there is also the related assumption of
an internal schema, the body image. This idea, originated by psychiatrist Paul Schilder (1950),
is one reason for the continuing popularity of the person drawing and other themes that, like
the tree or house, are assumed to also represent an individual’s sense of himself.
Its only close competitor, clearly superior for getting a picture of the interpersonal situa-
tion, is the Family Drawing, described in 1931 by psychiatrist Kenneth Appel (see footnote
2, this chapter). Appel suggested adding activity, an idea later popularized by Burns and
Kaufman (1970) in the widely used Kinetic Family Drawing (KFD). The instructions are:
“Draw a picture of everyone in your family, including you, doing something.” Burns went
on to suggest other ideas, like the Kinetic House-Tree-Person Drawing (Burns, 1987) and
the Family-Centered Circle Drawing (Burns, 1990).
One of the variations on the family drawing theme proposed in Burns’s 1990 book was
called the Parents’ Self-Centered Circle Drawing. In 1970, art therapists Selwyn and Irene
Dewdney asked some of their patients to draw a mother and child (Ulman & Levy, 1981).
In 1994, psychologist Jacqueline Gillespie suggested the diagnostic use of Mother-and-Child
Drawings. Since I had been asked to review that book, I tried the task with several adult
patients, whose mother-and-child representations were surprisingly helpful in their therapy.
Although the family is the first and most dynamically significant group, others become
increasingly important in the course of normal development. In the 1940s the inventor of
psychodrama, Jacob Moreno, suggested making pictorial diagrams of interpersonal rela-
tionships, with names like Social Atom and Sociogram.
The latter is used in teaching art therapists by Charles Anderson, who was trained during
an era when projective drawings were extremely popular. In his classes, Anderson advised
the use of such techniques because, given the time pressures in contemporary mental
health, they are very rapid ways of gathering useful information (Anderson, 2000, 2003).
These methods are quite similar to the Genogram, which is popular among family therapists
(McGoldrick & Gerson, 1985; Kerr et al., 2008). Anderson can be seen on the DVD, teaching
the Sociogram to his students (DVD 6.6).