160 • Introduction to Art Therapy
Film animation, while more complicated, involves art in a very direct way (DVD 7.7).
During the 1960s at a hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland, two psychiatrists invited a group
of inpatients to make animated cartoons using a 16-mm camera. During the 1970s, I became
fascinated with simple animation techniques using a Super 8mm camera. I tried them out
with several individual children in art therapy at a clinic, as well as with some youngsters
who were in “art-awareness” groups in preschools and in a summer program at an elemen-
tary school (Figure 7.9). During the 1980s, art therapist Judith Rothschild worked with a
group of outpatient adults with chronic mental illness to draw on 16mm film and create
animated stories.
On the DVD you can see some students setting up (A), doing (B), and filming (C) ani-
mation. In addition, there is an excerpt from “Dreams So Real” (D), made by filmmaker
Oren Rudavsky while he was a student at Oberlin College, about an animation program for
patients at an Ohio mental hospital.
Shaun McNiff was one of the first art therapists to explore the usefulness of videotaping
group art therapy sessions and playing them back to the group. Jerry Fryrear pioneered as
well in bringing media arts like videotherapy (Fryrear & Fleshman, 1981) and phototherapy
(Krauss & Fryrear, 1983) to the attention of art therapists.
As with viewing the art created in therapy, photography is another way for a person
to gain both aesthetic and psychological distance. In art–drama therapy groups at the
Pittsburgh Child Guidance Center, we often used slides and films taken by ourselves or the
members (Figure 7.10) as a way to re-view and reconsider (E). A film about an adolescent
group, The Green Creature Within (Irwin & Rubin, 2008), is composed of such photographic
records (F). They were also used in the therapy, viewed and discussed like the art, and film
was especially useful for recording dramas. But the film needed to be developed, so the
visual feedback was necessarily delayed for a week.
Figure 7.9 Filming for animation.