Assessment • 141think the situation will CHANGE?” IF THE ANSWER IS YES, then ask the client to find a
picture illustrating the change or tell WHAT will make it change.
The rationale for the series as well as for each task is clearly delineated. One advantage of
the approach is that people of all cultures can easily find photographic images with which
they can identify.
Face Stimulus Assessment
As part of her doctoral dissertation,^13 Donna Betts developed a projective drawing assess-
ment that was initially designed for multicultural and disabled youngsters. The task ulti-
mately involves selection, completion, and creation of a face using crayons on 8.5" x 11" paper
aspect of the task. Like most art therapist–designed assessments, it is highly inventive, but,
as Betts notes, it is not yet tested for reliability and validity (www.art-therapy.us/FSA.htm).
Finally, a fairly comprehensive review of evaluation in and through each of the creative
arts therapies was published by Feder and Feder in 1998. It covers many areas, including
projective techniques and art therapist assessments.
Concluding Thoughts
By now it should be clear to the reader that many varied approaches to understanding
human beings through their art are alive and well in art therapy of the 21st century. While
art therapists continue to probe and to work to refine their “third eye” (Kramer, 2000) in
becoming even more sensitized to graphic language, they are also striving to be more objec-
tive. There has been a consistent attempt over time to be more systematic in the presentation
of tasks as well as in the evaluation of data.
Although art therapists are sometimes the only clinicians with whom a regressed patient
can “speak,” the language of color and form is, like poetry, very difficult to quantify. And
even if that can be accomplished, the whole is still greater, deeper, and much more mean-
ingful than the sum of its graphic parts. Messages contained in artwork are received in the
context of all associated behavior—before, during, after, and in response to images.
Despite the popular myth that art therapists can “see through” people by looking at their
creations, the majority view the artist as the most knowledgeable expert about his or her own
symbols. Most art therapists question formulaic approaches to understanding, and resist
the temptation to be clever interpreters. They see patients as complex human beings, and
many have trouble with the kind of labeling involved in psychiatric diagnosis. Nevertheless,
art therapists are often called upon to assist in such tasks, and do have some unique tools.
Any time an art therapist can tell something from artwork that is not available in other
ways it is potentially useful. For example, Rawley Silver (1978) saw a gifted artist in a deaf
boy called Charlie. Edith Kramer (1958) found artistic talent in a delinquent named Angel
(Ulman & Levy, 1981). I discovered that a deaf-mute named Claire was not profoundly
retarded (Rubin, 2005b). Similarly, the DDS, a popular art therapy drawing battery, is said
to help in predicting treatment course—like identifying the prefusion of “alters” in dissocia-
tive identity disorder (Kluft, 1993).
As part of the process of developing the certification examination, the Art Therapy
Credentials Board (ATCB) surveyed registered art therapists. While agreement about most
areas was impressive, there was so little consensus about assessment that a separate com-
mentary was published in the AATA Journal:
Although the general public often views art therapy as dealing with the use of draw-
ings in a diagnostic manner ... within the field of art therapy little consensus has