Places We Practice • 229One year later, Christopher asked to come in again. This time he symbolically repre-
sented his mother’s suicide in his drawing: a pink person “falls” off a road (I) as she had
“fallen” off a bridge. Later, he dramatized with clay and clay tools a crash, an emergency,
and an operation in which he, as the doctor, magically but unsuccessfully tried to restore the
injured patient. He accomplished a great deal in his second hour too.
Making art gave Christopher a way to release his overwhelming anger and frustration.
It also gave him an opportunity to clarify the event, and to cope with the painful reality he
needed to accept. Thirty years later, a grown-up Christopher called and asked me to send
him a copy of the book in which I first told his story, since the pain had been so great that
he was having trouble remembering his mother’s death and how he dealt with it. I found
it fascinating that, having needed to repress so much of what happened to him, he remem-
bered the art sessions and wanted to relive them as a way of trying to reconnect with his
tragic loss.
Bereavement is a particular kind of personal crisis, in which art can be therapeutic.
Making art can also be therapeutic when there is a crisis in the community.
Art as Therapy in Times of Crisis
War and Combat
Art as solace in times of anguish is older than the field of art therapy. Some events are so
devastating that words fail, and images become the best way to say what presses for release.
In a Nazi concentration camp, for example, children made art to imaginatively escape from
the terrible place in which they found themselves (Volavkova, 1962; Jewish Museum of
Prague, 1993). They were taught by pioneer art therapist Edith Kramer’s mentor, an artist
named Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (Makarova & Seidman-Miller, 1999). On the DVD (10.6),
you can hear Kramer talking about Friedl and what she learned from her when both of them
offered art to refugee children coming into Czechoslovakia (A).
While the children’s poetry and art has few images of terror and many wishful ones
(B), the adult artists who were kept busy making propaganda images for the Nazis dur-
ing the day secretly drew pictures at night to record the truth of what was happening
(Figure 10.9). These pictures, some of which survived the war, are extremely powerful
(Green, 1969) (C).
Two Jewish adolescents in hiding before dying in the Holocaust left their journals for
posterity. One is Anne Frank’s famous diary—a word portrait. The other is A Diary of
Pictures by art student Charlotte Salomon, a series of paintings she made to deal with the
unthinkable events that were happening in her family and in her world (Felstiner, 1997).
Her paintings and writings also survived the war (D), and have been exhibited at many
museums as well as being published in a book, Life? or Theater? (Salomon, 1998).
Since the State of Israel was born in 1948, both Arabs and Jews have lived in a constant
state of strife. Children in shelters drew pictures while bombs burst outside during the Six
Day War (E) (Kovner, 1968). For many years, Julia Byers, while chair of the Expressive Arts
Therapy Programs at Lesley University, has traveled to the West Bank and Gaza to help Arab
and Israeli children through art therapy.^9
During the First World War, the faces of many soldiers were badly disfigured by chemi-
cal warfare. I will never forget hearing a plastic surgeon tell the moving story of a sculptress
who carefully made masks of the soldiers’ pre-trauma faces from photographs. In an era
before reconstructive surgery, wearing the masks allowed these maimed men to function in