2 • Introduction to Art Therapy
therapy depends on the inherently therapeutic power of art, which is available to anyone
who paints or draws or sculpts. It is likely that most people who decide to make it their life’s
work have personally known its healing potential, and I am no exception. For this reason,
the initial vignettes recount my own experiences. They describe how making art at critical
moments helped me to cope with my anguish after the death of a friend when I was a teen-
ager and of my mother when I was an adult.
The second vignette tells about my initial discovery of the power of art to help severely
disturbed youngsters in my very first experience as an art therapist, in 1963. Since I had not
yet had any formal clinical training and worked in a nondirective manner, I was astonished
by the power of making art in an accepting, nonjudgmental environment to help youngsters
with childhood schizophrenia express and work through their conflicts.
The clinical psychologist who was supervising me was equally astounded, as was the staff
on the unit where these youngsters were hospitalized. I was invited to present my work in
Grand Rounds at Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic where the special treatment unit
was housed. Harvard Professor Erik Erikson (1950, 1977), himself a painter prior to becom-
ing a psychoanalyst, commented on all of the presentations about the case being discussed.
He had no hesitation in suggesting that it was primarily in art therapy that the child was
making progress in coming out of her psychotic isolation, a story that will be told in Chapter
9 (Dorothy, DVD 9.3).
The third group of vignettes is about my own children because, as our family grew, my
beginning-art-therapist self became aware of how useful art expression was for them as a
way of dealing with feelings and impulses that were difficult to manage. These personal
discoveries about the helping power of art are followed by some examples of work with indi-
vidual children, adolescents, and adults in an outpatient clinic and in my private practice.
They are included here to indicate, despite their brevity, how work in the context of a trust-
ing relationship with a (by then) trained art therapist can promote change. Like the “short
cuts” from a film, they offer a taste of what art therapy is all about. Although the names have
been changed, the stories are true.
Figure 1.1 Congo painting.