200 • Introduction to Art Therapy
Art gives people with disabilities a way to safely smear and pound, and to symboli-
cally express feelings like anger—which is especially hard to do because they are neces-
sarily so dependent on others. This was poignantly clear for Jane, a girl I met when I
did a demonstration program at the Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children
in 1970.
A Therapeutic Art Program Helps a Partially Sighted Girl: JANE (11)
Jane was legally blind, although she had more useful vision than most of her schoolmates.
Still, like them, she was angry about being blind, and resentful of the sighted adults on
whom she was dependent. Jane didn’t know the intensity of her retaliatory rage, but was able
to express it symbolically in a story about her painting (Figure 9.4).
“This is a building which is a hospital, and in this hospital—there’s just one patient in this
hospital ... The one patient is Mrs. Rubin ... She had an accident. She bumped into another
lady’s car and ... she punctured her eye.” When asked what would happen, Jane said with a
grin, “It’s going to blind her!” She went on to explain how Mrs. Rubin would then be unable
to work with children in art (DVD 9.6).
When asked how she herself felt about it, she asserted with a sly smile, “I don’t feel any-
thing. My sight’s coming back!” Having verbalized this wish, she went on to deny her dis-
ability completely, a fairly common phenomenon. “I can see just like a regular person!” In
the course of group art therapy, Jane was eventually able to accept her disability—as well as
her feelings about it—a necessary task for every blind individual.
Figure 9.4 Jane describes her painting.