Thinking About Transformation: A Counselor Educator and an Artist Speak of Creativity, Art, and Therapeutic Change

Abstract

This article presents a dialogue between a counselor educator and a distinguished artist that grew from the meeting of these two during an opening show of the artist's works where they found striking parallels between the creative process that Elias describes and the successful/unsuccessful healing process in A Shining Affliction; A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy (A. Rogers, 1995), a work being used in a graduate counselor education course taught by Dimidjian. Two paradigms are proposed for the parallel creative and healing processes, and the article closes with a poem composed by a student in tribute to Rogers.