Art therapy: Reminiscences, suggestions and hopes

Abstract

Practice of Art Therapy is usually a required course for art therapy students. But it is one thing to read and study the history and practice of our profession and quite another to be a part of that history. In the early 1950s only a handful of people called themselves art therapists in the United States. The most prominent was Margaret Naumburg. The medical director of the department of child psychiatry of what was then known as the Houston State Psychiatric Institute, and is now the Texas Research Institute of Mental Sciences, told this author he had read Naumburg’s book (1950) and was fascinated with it. He and I were involved in art and in psychology. We knew that anything that would help us reach some of our unreachable patients would be of value. Studying Naumburg’s book and everything else we could find on art and therapy persuaded us to introduce art therapy to patients. We also learned that pioneering in this field had begun many years before we learned of it. In the nineteenth century Cesare Lombroso (1895) saw a correlation between the symptoms and artistic productions of psychotic individuals, and he concluded that the pictures expressed ideas which their originators were incapable of expressing verbally. Noland D. C. Lewis (1925) published the findings of his investigations of the symbols in the art of schizophrenic patients, concluding that these could be understood only in terms of Jung’s collective or genetic unconscious. Lewis was the first to describe the analysis of art productions as an adjunct to psychotherapy. The first report of analysis of paintings of neurotic patients was published by E. P. Mosse (1940). He asked his patients to free-associate to their drawings in attempts to discover the alterations affected by the censorship and the superego and to uncover the basic theme. For me, twenty years ago, the question was how and where to prepare myself to practice art therapy. I knew art and the use of art media. I had degrees in psychology, but now much more was needed. Since the psychiatrist with whom I worked practiced dynamically oriented psychotherapy, he decided that art therapy, as we would employ it, would be dynamically oriented. This art therapy student, needed didactic training in psychiat~. For three years I audited-psychiatry lectures at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. During that time, we began to experiment with art therapy techniques with patients in the day hospital of our institute. It may be that, at first, we worked more as occupational therapists than as art therapists, but that stage was brief. We wanted to offer our patients a chance for expressing feelings, anxietites, frustrations, and fears that they could not translate into words. The patients’ desire to have such an avenue of expression made our task even more rewarding. Actually, it could be said that our patients helped to teach us what art therapy is. We encountered many obstacles. The occupational therapists complained that now, when tasks were given during O.T. sessions, patients wanted to do “their own thing” or something they were now