Professional Issues • 247clinicians, art therapists need to face their “dark side”—the rejected parts of themselves.
Therapists cannot help patients to deal with their “shadows” if they have not made peace
with their own. Experienced workers know about the powerful effect on the art therapist of
confronting her own “dark side” as well as the patient’s.
Art therapists also need to deal with their grandiosity and their own inevitable narcis-
sistic reactions to idealization, as well as to devaluation. Art therapy, like any other kind
of psychotherapy, can be stressful. Making art is a fine way to reflect on a difficult session,
patient, or colleague.
Images of Supervision
As a supervisor, when frustrated by my inability to communicate with a blocked supervisee,
I would sometimes imagine a sow’s ear actually turning into a silk purse. Happily, helping
most neophytes to become good therapists does not require such an impossible transforma-
tion. My own favorite metaphor for the hazardous shoals of supervision is a book from my
childhood, Epaminondas and His Auntie. It is a tale about how foolish it is to apply sugges-
tions that are appropriate for one situation to another one where they don’t fit. Here is the
gist of the story ...
Epaminondas went to see his auntie every day, and she always gave him something to
take home to his mother. The first was a big piece of cake, which the boy put in his fist “all
scrunched up tight,” and “by the time he got home there wasn’t anything left but a fistful
of crumbs.”
After his mother yelled at him for being so foolish, she told him that “the way to carry
cake is to wrap it all up nice in some leaves and put it in your hat.” So when his auntie next
gave him a pound of butter, Epaminondas wrapped it in leaves, put it in his hat, and put
his hat on his head. Since it was a very hot day, the butter melted. His mother again gave
Epaminondas advice about how he should have wrapped and carried the butter. As you
might imagine, that is how he handled the puppy dog he got the following day, with equally
sad results.
The message of the book is relevant for any supervision that suggests what could or should
have been done at any particular clinical moment. Most supervisors do not give direct advice,
preferring to explore the situation in question with the trainee. It is clear that learning how
to figure out good answers is much more useful than knowing any number of them. The
wish to have a “recipe book” or a “script” is understandable, and is even common among the
creative people who become art therapists. Fortunately, there are some art therapists who
genuinely enjoy supervision, like Arthur Robbins (Figure 11.6), who has conducted regular
supervision groups for many years (Robbins, 1988, 1997).
Promoting Creativity in the Art Therapist
The creativity of the therapist is critical to any effective therapy, including art. Many have
been concerned about “the search for the formula” among art therapists, and have suggested
that a clinician needs to be able to use her artist self in a flexible, yet disciplined way. But
promoting inventiveness in the context of self-discipline is far from simple.
In fact, the notion of creativity is almost as slippery as catching fish with your bare hands.
In a satire on education, The Saber-Tooth Curriculum (Benjamin, 1939), about a stone-age
experimental institution called the School of Creative Fish Grabbing, the dean of Teachers’
College wrote: “ The creative part is the heart of the whole movement—just to catch fish—
That’s nothing—but to grab fish creatively—Ah! That is something!” Happily, despite the