On the road to educating the creative arts therapist

Abstract

In the process of gathering my notes for this article I travelled back mentally over two decades. It became obvious that this road back called forth a revivification of an intense and gratifying trip that was also attended with some episodic, jarring bumps. The task facing me was to sort out that which was personally significant from that which was professionally significant. Certainly, there is often a fine line of difference between them. The format of this presentation allows for a personal examination of an issue. The focus here will be a personal view on the state of the arts vis-a-vis the education of creative arts therapists over the past 22 years. This panorama, albeit unavoidably subjective, is based on frontline, trenchant involvement in graduate education of art, music, and dance therapists. For those readers who, in 1967, were not yet members of our league, I shall recapitulate history briefly. In that year, Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital, now Hahnemann University, initiated a graduate training program in art therapy leading to a Master’s of Science degree on completion of one-year didactic and supervised clinical internship and of a thesis project that met the standards of the graduate school. This was the first program to accept and graduate students in this field. A graduate program in art therapy had been established at The University of Louisville some years before, but was not activated until after 1969 and the establishment of the American Art Therapy Association. Other graduate programs soon followed and their number has grown impressively to include seventeen approved graduate training programs. I had the extraordinary opportunity, privilege, and burden of being the coordinator and then Director of the Hahnemann program. When, in 1976, I was awarded a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant to establish the first program to train art, dance, and music therapy students under an umbrella degree, Master’s Creative Arts in Therapy (MCAT), my vista was considerably expanded. Required to guide three progam directors through a maze of divergent philosophies and requirements toward university and national organization approval, I became exquisitely cognizant of the educational systems in the creative arts in therapy. As I recently searched my files for notes and data I uncovered a paper I had prepared in response to an invitation to participate in a closing panel at the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) Conference in 1978. The topic was “Quality in Training” (Levick, 1978). In rereading this paper I was struck by the fact that some of the questions I raised then are still being posed today, that my answers have not changed over time, that some of my concerns then exist in the present. Travelling back, I begin this cerebration with the closing statement of that paper. In recounting the prophecy of one of our professors in the Department of Psychiatry who said that art therapists would “become the X-ray of psychiatry,” I