167CHAPTER 8
People We Serve
Just as art therapy can be done in an endless variety of ways for the purpose of diagnosis
or treatment, so too there seems to be no limit to those who can be served. Art therapy can
indeed be helpful to people of any age level, and with any degree of health or handicap. Its
uniqueness, however, lies in its ability to reach people who do not find other forms of help
accessible. Whether the condition is temporary, extended, or permanent, there are times
when art expression seems to best fill a need.
Art Therapy Is Especially Good For
Those Who Have No Words
Art may be the only communicative channel for those who cannot speak, whether because of
autism, deafness, retardation, brain damage, or dementia. Claire, a deaf-mute girl whose story
is told in Chapter 11, could only talk through her drawings. She was eventually able to learn
sign language, but never speech. Individuals who do not know the therapist’s language—like
recent immigrants—can always speak the universal language of color and form.
One of the roots of art therapy, you may recall, was the spontaneous art done by people
with incurable mental disorders, whose paintings and drawings were sometimes their only
intelligible communications (Prinzhorn, 1922). In a wonderful account of a long treatment,
the psychiatrist and the patient describe how art helped Mary Barnes (Fig u re 8 .1) to express
what she was going through during a massive psychotic regression (Barnes & Berke, 1971;
cf. also Barnes & Scott, 1989). Those suffering from chronic mental illness are still well served
by art therapy, though they are now more likely to be seen in partial or day treatment programs
than in long-term psychiatric settings (Schaverien & Killick, 1997). As one artist eloquently told
her interviewer, “art is all the feelings trapped inside.”^1
When I was co-director of a Creative & Expressive Arts Therapy (CEAT) program in a
psychiatric hospital, I was impressed by how successful the art therapists were with patients
who were admitted in acutely psychotic states. I think there are several reasons for this.
One is that creative individuals are likely to think in a more fluid rather than linear fashion.
Freud theorized that this was due to a “flexibility of repression,”^2 while more recent think-
ing has emphasized a reliance on the right (holistic) rather than the left (linear) hemisphere
of the brain. Whatever the reason, art therapists are more likely than other mental health