Previews • 5week with clay, the next with paint, then with collage, and with the final week’s product—
for me, a painted portrait of my mother.
I was not aware of “thinking” in the usual sense, but of allowing myself to be led by the
materials and my impulses. Each image came quite naturally, almost always with height-
ened emotion. There was a feeling of activity and internal tension, though “absorption”
fits it better, and a sense of being “done” at the end. I did not feel particularly involved in
the products as art; indeed, I found them unappealing aesthetically. But I did feel intense
involvement in what may have been a kind of “visual thinking” process.
Most significantly, perhaps, I found the entire set of experiences to be extremely helpful
in the work of mourning. Instead of the class being a burden as I had feared, it became a
welcome respite for me, a chance to deal wordlessly with my grief. I believe that the use of
media provided much more than a catharsis. Of course it wasn’t the whole story; I remained
involved in a grieving process for some time after that class, but I was frankly surprised at
how helpful it had been.
Such personal experiences of the power of art in my own life are no doubt what led me to
feel so at home in art therapy, and to want so much to make the healing benefits of creative
endeavor available to others.
Art Helps a Psychotic Boy Return to Reality: RANDY (12)
My first experience of working therapeutically in art was with children in long-term treat-
ment on an inpatient unit at a psychiatric hospital. Although their diagnostic labels and
probable mode of treatment would be different today, they were, and would still be, in con-
siderable psychic pain. What follows is the story of Randy, the most verbal and high func-
tioning of the group (DVD 1.8).
Randy suffered from an embarrassing symptom, soiling his pants, then and now known
as encopresis. Although superficially in touch, he was inwardly unsure of the difference
between reality and fantasy. Over a seven-month period, Randy had 23 individual art ther-
apy sessions. He began by creating realistic images, like a zebra (A) and a fox (B). At his sev-
enth session, Randy announced that he didn’t want to paint that day, usually his first choice.
Instead, he used markers to draw a picture of outer space, with a red planet—“Mars.” He
added some small yellow “pieces,” explaining that they were bits of stars that had exploded.
Some were “constellations,” specifically “The King” and “The Queen” (C). This drawing led
to the creation of a book, Our Trip Through Outer Space, which Randy worked on steadily
for the next five sessions, making a series of pictures about a Martian and myself in outer
space (D).
He then shifted gears for the next four sessions and painted a variety of other topics, such
as a castle (E). The following week, Randy told me about how people at his school teased
him, and painted a picture of fantasized revenge, setting his “School on Fire” (F), then his
“Enemies” and finally a Dinosaur with a “Volcano” (G), an apt metaphor for his messy,
explosive symptom.
At his next session Randy returned to his space book. He made a cover, pointing out the
“new earth,” with a portrait of “you wearing one of the newest space hairdos,” “your old pal
the Martian,” and “me [Randy] wearing the newest style in space suits” (H). The following
week he painted the Sierra Nevadas with an “ice-capped mountain.”
Randy’s last five sessions were devoted to an “Earth Series,” similar to his “Space Series,”
but more “down to earth” (I). His oedipal wishes for some sort of romantic relationship with
me became clearer in this less-disguised sequence. The Martian dropped out of the stor y early,
and the rest of the book was about our travels around the world. In “Our Visit to Egypt” Randy