Previews • 21about his interests, none involving her or the children (T). While at first defensive, Mr. T.
finally agreed that she had a point, and remembered how he had placed himself far away
from the others in his family drawing a year earlier.
Six months later, a good deal of work was accomplished by drawing together without
talking during a number of sessions. In such a process, communication issues can be expe-
rienced and discussed in an affectively charged manner (Figure 1.16). Since both Mr. and
Mrs. T. tended to intellectualize often and did it well, art was extremely useful for getting in
touch with their feelings.
Art and Writing Help in Adjusting to a Painful Reality: MARJORIE (45)
Even when one is helpless to change a painful reality, art can still help in the healing of
a wounded soul, as in the following story about a woman with whom I worked and who
taught me a great deal. Marjorie was grappling with the loss of the unrealized potential of
her gifted son, recently hospitalized after a severe mental breakdown. Her handsome, bril-
liant boy had been forced to drop out of college, move back home, and was struggling to
function. She feared he might be permanently crippled by the invisible damage of mental
illness. A normally optimistic and competent woman, Marjorie was coping with the loss of
hope, and much of the time, the loss of her usual power to help.
She was reluctant to waste her valuable treatment time doing art, and had a pressing
need to talk about her pain. She wrote in a journal between her sessions too, mainly to deal
with her internal anguish. But Marjorie was curious about art therapy, and wanted to try
it out. So she began to experiment with materials at home, following my advice to “just
fool around” with a medium and get to know it. After trying several media, she found one
she preferred, and began to spend more and more of her spare time using it, surprised and
delighted by how rewarding it was. Creating art took on a life of its own, and became a val-
ued fringe benefit of her psychotherapy.
Figure 1.16 Two adults drawing together without talking.