Problems We Address • 199she was even able to handle a public school (with good supports), which I could never have
imagined when I first met her.
When I was getting ready to retire from clinical practice, I referred Kitty to a child psy-
chiatrist. Her assessment was that the child was suffering from Asperger’s syndrome at the
high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum. Because Kitty was so distant and uncommu-
nicative, I doubt that she would have been accessible to therapy at age 4 without the creative
modalities of art and drama.
A Teenager With Asperger’s Syndrome Uses Puppets: EMILY (16)
Many years after I saw Kitty, an adolescent I knew who had Asperger’s syndrome was in the
hospital for a bone marrow transplant because of her leukemia. Although she was already
16, Emily functioned in many ways like a younger child. I brought in art supplies as well as
puppets, in my attempts to help Emily to express her feelings about what was happening to
her, which she was unable to verbalize comfortably.
Although the art supplies held no interest for her, she was able to work through a good
deal of the fear and rage she was experiencing by using the puppets, as did I in order to
interact with her in a nonthreatening fashion. Emily began to request that I come more
often, even though she had many loving visitors. It was clear that this adolescent needed the
symbolic distance provided by the puppets to be able to cope with her terrifying illness and
the effects of the treatment.
Four years later, after an almost miraculous recovery, I attended her graduation party
from the special high school she had attended. Much to my surprise, the first question Emily
asked me was whether I still had the puppets. She remembered the names she had given
them, as well as many of the dramas she had created.
That experience with Emily reminded me of a paper written years earlier by a colleague
about work with a retarded adult and how the symbolic function had been activated through
art making (Wilson, in Ulman & Levy, 1981). Whatever the explanation, there is no ques-
tion that individuals of all ages whose cognitive abilities are challenged in any fashion are
often able to use the symbolic avenues of the arts more successfully than ordinary verbal
language.
Living With Disabilities
Art therapy cannot give a retarded person comprehension, a blind person sight, or a person
who is crippled mobility. But art can and does give those with disabilities a stimulating
and pleasurable way to enjoy and to explore the sensory world. It gives them a way to be in
charge in a limited sphere, to master tools and processes within their reach, and to savor the
pleasure of skills honed through practice.
Art gives those with disabilities a way to “map out” a confusing sense of the body and the
world. It gives them a way to define themselves through choices and decisions, and creations
that are uniquely theirs. It gives them a way to create products of which they can be proud,
which can add beauty to the world and meaning to their lives. Through art, a person can
both escape symbolically, and come to grips with feelings—especially those about the dis-
ability itself, as Jimmy did in his Person and Self drawings (DVD 6.7).
While these benefits are available to all human beings, they have special value to the dis-
abled, for whom—like the elderly—there are many more problems and many fewer avenues
of expression. The same medical progress that extends more lives also saves more premature
babies, who are at greater risk for having multiple disabilities.