Technique(s) • 149Working at the Menninger Foundation, Don Jones developed an assessment (the Don
Jones Assessment), which combined guided imagery with drawing. The patients, in a relaxed
state, are invited to imagine a journey, stopping at four key points. At each point, they are
asked how they would proceed, and are told that they will be drawing a picture of their
answer. Each situation is carefully designed to represent a different kind of universally
stressful problem. They are then asked to draw a picture of what they imagined. Both exer-
cises are followed by a series of structured questions. Like Jones, most clinicians using men-
tal imagery along with art request drawing or painting an image after it has been “seen.”
Jones and his colleagues, who studied the protocol, found it to be as useful in treatment as
in assessment.^3
Art therapist Vija Lusebrink (1990) discussed the relationship between art therapy and
mental imagery, and Aina Nucho (1995) devoted an entire book to the topic of mental imag-
ery. Art therapist James Consoli ( F i g u r e 7.1) used a combination of hypnosis and mental
and graphic imagery to help a survivor of childhood sexual abuse recover and work through
her traumatic memories. On the DVD (I), you can see excerpts from the videotape he made
about his approach, which he called psychimagery (Consoli, 1991).
A Series of Images
Making a series of images is another evocative technique, one used by art therapists in a vari-
ety of ways. Bernard Stone, who worked with hospitalized adults, reported on a sequential
graphic Gestalt, where the client was asked to rapidly draw a series of pictures in response to
his own painting (Jakab, 1975). Psychiatrist Mardi Horowitz (1983) invited patients to do a
series of six drawings, beginning each time by staring at a dot in the middle of the page until
they saw an image. On the DVD, art therapist Trude Wertheim-Cahen (D) demonstrates
how a series of drawings beginning with a scribble helped one of her patients.
Stimulated by my analytic training, I experimented with a similar idea using various
media, which I called free association in art imagery (1981 AATA Conference Proceedings).
On the DVD (J), you can see some workshop participants doing this exercise, and then
exploring together the ideas stimulated by the sequence of images each has created.
Figure 7.1 James Consoli, Psychimagery.