Content area
Full Text
It is always hard, sometimes impossible, to find the ideal name for any complex and subtle discipline. The title "art therapy" can easily be dismissed as inadequate or inaccurate, but I have not found a better one. Doubtful implications can only be resolved by careful, evolving definition. The purpose of this paper is an opening move in that direction.
"Art therapy" is currently used to designate widely varying practices in education, rehabilitation, and psychotherapy. Directors of special schools, psychiatrists, and even (in at least one case) the United States Civil Service Commission, refer to certain professional and volunteer workers as art therapists, even though no similar educational preparation, no set of qualifications, nor even any voluntary association binds these people together. Possibly the only thing common to all their activities is that the materials of the visual arts are used in some attempt to assist integration or reintegration of personality.
Yet competing and mutually exclusive definitions of art therapy have already been published by art therapists. At least one psychiatrist, objecting to the looseness with which the term is used, has attempted to tighten up its meaning. Psychiatrists also have suggested various combinations of new names to designate special uses of art materials in psychotherapy.
Art therapy is the only one of the many activity therapies to attract this kind of attention from psychiatrists. This, I believe, implies something important about the peculiar nature and potency of our medium. There is a considerable body of literature describing the therapeutic use of patients' graphic and plastic projections in psychiatric practice.1 A number of these books and papers antedate the important publications of such art therapists as Naumburg and Kramer. Since art therapists have begun to publish, some psychiatrists imply that the term is being used to denote territory that belongs rather to themselves.
Direct attempts by art therapists to define art therapy demand first consideration. Whatever its deficiencies, our two-word title at least indicates the two main trends in existing practice and theory: some art therapists put the emphasis on art and some on therapy. The art people tend to exclude procedures where completion of the creative process is not a central goal; the therapy people often explain that preoccupation with artistic goals must be minimized...
