148 • Introduction to Art Therapy
tried the method on himself, students, and patients, to surprisingly good effect. He hypoth-
esized that there was a neurological effect that was salutary (Ault, 1996). On the DVD (G),
you will see Layton’s story (1), as well as a therapy group where Ault used contour drawing
(2) and the book he wrote about it (3).
Stimulating Materials and Methods
Using the element of speed, psychiatrist Wilhelm Luthe (1976) suggested a structured
approach based on what he called “autogenics.” His Creativity Mobilization Technique con-
sisted of producing a series of 15 painting exercises in a 30-minute period—four times a
week for six weeks.
Sometimes stimulating media are used deliberately, as in the treatment of Gloria, a young
widow in her twenties who came for weekly art therapy.
Regressive Media Help in Dealing with Shame: GLORIA (29)
Gloria had vocally expressed her disgust at the finger paints, always noticing but never using
them. I had asked if she could describe her feeling of revulsion, but she found it hard to
define. I then wondered if we might not find out more if she were to try the paints, despite
her negative response. She was willing to do so in an openly experimental way; and it was
quite a powerful session, referred to many times in succeeding months.
She began by feeling and expressing disgust, but gradually got more and more into it,
exclaiming with glee, “Ooh! What a pretty mess!” After a tentative beginning, she took large
gobs of paint, and eventually used both hands and fingers with a high degree of freedom
DVD (H). Her unexpected discovery was that she liked it, that it was not unpleasant as she
had anticipated, but that it was actually fun. She related this surprise to her initial anxiety
about getting her daughter out of school for morning appointments, and her discovery that
it was neither uncomfortable nor harmful as she had feared.
Her associations to the first painting (1) were that it was a series of “Roads” that led to
various places, and that she had to decide where she was going, a fairly accurate description
of where she was in her life at that time. The second she described as “like Hell, a Storm with
Lightning and Turmoil,” (2) and ended up talking about her own feelings of sinfulness and
guilt over sleeping with a man to whom she was not married. The shame she felt about being
“dirty” was stimulated by the medium itself, as well as by the images she projected onto her
finger paintings, which were nonrepresentational.
Mental Imagery
The evocation of visual imagery has been used by many clinicians, beginning with Freud,
to stimulate memory, fantasy, and awareness of feelings. It has also been used to facilitate
art activity. I became interested in spontaneous mental imagery during my psychoanalytic
training, and began reading the rapidly mushrooming literature on the topic.
As with studies of drawing development, imagery was long dormant in psychology,
largely because it is so introspective and hard to quantify. Due to its frequent use in behav-
ior therapy techniques like desensitization, however, during the last quarter of the 20th
century the study of mental imagery once again became a lively arena (Watkins, 1984).
This interest is reflected in the existence of the International Imagery Association (Journal
of Mental Imagery) and the American Association for the Study of Mental Imagery
(Imagination, Cognition, & Personality). Clinicians who use mental imagery in therapy
sometimes invite people to draw what they have seen in the mind’s eye, like psychiatrist
Mardi Horowitz (1983).