248 • Introduction to Art Therapy
complexities and challenges of the work, doing art therapy is much more creative and infi-
nitely more satisfying than grabbing fish.
Becoming an Art Therapist: Professional Identity Formation
Making the transition from training to practice can be hard. One recent graduate dealt with
her frustrations by writing a book (Makin, 1994), and another experienced clinician offered
advice to beginners (Schroder, 2005). It is fortunate, despite the cost and time involved, that
postgraduate supervision is required for registration, because it is essential to growing as
a therapist.
The support and feedback of a study or peer supervision group with other [art] therapists
can also be immensely helpful. For example, when dealing with severely abused clients,
all therapists are at risk for “vicarious traumatization,” and boundary violations are both
tempting and confusing.
Establishing and consolidating a professional identity takes time in any profession. It
may be especially difficult in art therapy, because of the inevitable tug of war between the
clinician’s artist-self and therapist-self. Even if the issue of their relative importance in one’s
clinical work has been settled, there is still the pragmatic problem of finding the time and
energy to make art.
This has been a source of discontent, personally as well as philosophically, from the incep-
tion of the field. Robert Ault, art therapist at the Menninger Foundation who had continued
to do his own painting, put it quite simply in a talk in 1976 (AATA Conference Proceedings).
Figure 11.6 Arthur Robbins supervising a student.