In tutorial, an art therapy graduate student expressed exasperation with her coursework. She was being rigorously schooled in the artwork of disturbed, psychiatric patients, but, having come from a lecture on psychopathology. to a studio painting class where her instructor exhorted her to loosen her formal style, to dispense with convention, to take inspiration from Spencer and Bacon by floating or disintegrating her figurative forms, she was perplexed. What had happened to the edicts of a well grounded, undistorted human figure‘? What about the figure as a barometer for emotional balance? The instructor in psychopathology had described adaptive or integrated art in ways that made it sound more like the fascist art of National Socialism than the work shown by intact artists in Chicago’s contemporary galleries! By its hybrid nature, art therapy is a fieid of provocation and contradiction. The marriage between the visual art process, human psychodynamic process, and therapeutic intervention is uneasy at best. Successful art therapy, however, demands that these contrasting and sometimes conflictual areas be effectively integrated. Through rational and creative integration emerges what art therapists consider to be a powerful therapeutic tool. Individuals who are disturbed, depressed, or oblivious are given the means for finding self-worth, productivity, and a measure of cathartic relief-regardless of the capacity to articulate their concerns through conventional verbalization. Art therapy is subjective and is caught between the even softer field of visual art and the harder fields of behavior modi~cation, art education, and human development. Subsequently, in order to survive, gain credibility, and develop as professionals, art therapists have had to enter into the realms of relative yet sometimes hostile disciplines. The maturational pains that the field has sustained in the first 30 years of its development are reflected especially within the universities that train art therapists. Each graduate program has had its own conflicts to resolve, depending upon the context in which it is housed within the university structure. Traditionally, training programs have been a~liated with public and private liberal arts universities, with a few attached to teaching hospitals. Within these settings, the art therapy program is at its most neutral-sharing a wide range of interdisciplinary coursework in the humanities, psychology, studio art, and special populations. In this context, art therapy programs appear to dovetail nicely with universities whose resources already include medical schools, education departments, and tine arts programs. This paper will describe the education of art therapists within the nontraditional setting of an art school. The School of The Art Institute of Chicago houses one of the few graduate programs in the United States within a professional school of art and so must address issues specific to its atypicai circumstances. Art schools are usually perceived as meccas for innately gifted, developing artists, who deal with expressly personal, abstract, ethereal and