Art Therapy

There was a point when I was asked, among the various treatments that were being recommended, to try art therapy. The very ideal galled me. I was certainly not going to draw pictures for therapists to analyze, dissect and discuss as meaningful. When I was nine, I had been assigned to see a court appointed psychologist during my parent's divorce and she asked me to draw my ideal family. I was thoroughly annoyed at such an obvious ploy. I remain so.

Thus it was much to my surprise when a friend explained recently that he has not seen a therapist because he can always make pictures-it's a kind of therapy, he said. Later that week, another friend who is going through a bad time bought herself a new watercolor pad so that she could paint during her visit. Pastels, she reminded me, are toxic and not really the thing to bring to someone else's home. And given her current difficulties, she continued, she was not going to be without her ability to express herself.

Certainly The Artist's Way, among those books on freeing your creative spirit, and many psychology books encourage attempts at the visual arts. Painting, pottery, quilting all seem to be on any in-patient mental health program, and can be found at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as a way for the patients to create even as their life is destroyed. I appreciate that this is useful to some and would hardly stand in the way of its implementation, but it is too easy a step from there to biographically analyzing all art–a step that I find is not always appropriate or, more significantly, interesting.

I wouldn't want to suggest that art therapy does not reveal some truths the patients might not otherwise express, but that does not mean to me that art must always reveal some therapeutic element. Or, I guess I might qualify that by saying, even if it does reveal such is it truly necessary to discuss it? Wouldn't we learn more about ourselves and the work if we sought beyond the personal and thought about the worldly qualities that it imparts instead? At any rate it seems a worthwhile challenge to look at art without trying to instigate a biography of the artist, even if many of life's actions (painting, sculpting and quilting included) are another therapeutic attempt to overcome the past.