What Is Art Therapy? • 31Art Therapy and Art for People with Disabilities (DVD 2.3)
Educational and Recreational Settings
The distinctions between art therapy and art education are especially likely to be blurred in
the area of art with the disabled. Two professionals with a foot in each field once diagnosed
both disciplines as suffering from “a shared identity crisis.” The crisis was a territorial one:
Who was the best kind of person to offer art activities to people with disabilities? On the DVD
you can see a program led by an art teacher I supervised at an institution for children with
physical disabilities (A) and an art therapist helping a deaf child at a school in Kansas (B).
Although the kind of art therapy provided to disabled individuals often has a psycho-
educational orientation, the two are overlapping but not identical. There is not only room,
there is also a need for both teaching and therapy through art with this group. For example,
when I visited the Jewish Guild for the Blind in New York City in 1969, Yasha Lisenco (1971)
taught art and Edith Kramer (1958, 1971) did art therapy—with similar sensitivity, but dif-
ferent goals.
While there will always be more teachers in schools and more therapists in clinics, it
would be foolish to assume that the optimal division of labor would be in terms of where the
work is done or who is being served. As noted earlier, what is done may look very similar, but
why is the critical variable. When the need, for example, is for psychological understanding,
a therapist is the art giver of choice. Only a trained clinician knows how to use art for assess-
ment, or to identify the conflicts causing symptoms. When the goals of a given art interven-
tion are social or emotional, a therapist—who understands interpersonal and intrapsychic
dynamics—is equipped for the job in more ways than an art teacher.
Art therapists are trained to assess and to treat those problems that interfere with peo-
ple being able to benefit from education—including learning art. Because of their clinical
expertise, art therapists are often more comfortable than art teachers in working with the
most severely and profoundly impaired students, like the boy on a ventilator seen on the
DVD (C). As art has become more widely available to people with disabilities, art therapists
Figure 2.6 A mask from an art/drama therapy group.