هنر درمانی: ایجاد فضایی که در آن زندگی خواهیم کرد

Pergamon PII SO197-4556(97)00003-8 The Arts in Psychotherapy, Vol. 24, No. I, pp. 4549, 1997 Copyright 0 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0197-4556/97 $17.00 + 130 ART THERAPY: CREATING THE SPACE WE WILL LIVE IN CATHERINE MOON, MA, A.T.R.* In responding to Shaun McNiff’s article I start with the sentence of his that particularly struck me-“We can trust that the images will always take us where we need to go and show us what we have to see.” The task of allowing the images to take the lead seems more daunting when it is not the individual therapy session that is in question, but rather the whole of the profession of art therapy. Where are these images that would take art therapists “where we need to go and show us what we have to see” in terms of the future of art therapy? As I pondered this question I looked around the walls of the house I had recently moved into, as if some painting or collage or drawing would reveal its golden wisdom to me and inspire the writing of this article. But the walls were empty. The hundreds of paintings, stacked in the basement on moving day, waited for decisions to be made about which ones would be hung and where they would be placed. My initial reaction to the blank walls was to be aware of what was not there. I was gripped with a feeling of unsteadiness, having been confronted with the absence of my “familiars.” But when I allowed my concept of the guiding image to broaden beyond the familiar concreteness of the paintings, I saw the empty walls as a part of the image. They became expressions of openness, receptivity, readiness. The image enlarged to the stacked paintings in the base- ment and to the process of carrying them upstairs, trying them out on the walls, changing and adjusting them. I could now see the guiding image as a perfor- mance art piece, and the possibilities of how it would play out were endless. This seems an apt metaphor for envisioning the future of art therapy. Changes in health care have resulted in art therapy having lost a sense of the fa- miliar. Art therapy jobs once available in hospitals and other health care placements have been down- sized away. As a profession we are faced with the challenge of how we will respond to this. Will we focus on what is no longer there, or will we enlarge our vision to see what art therapy might become? It is clear that McNiff advocates for an expanded vision of what art therapy might be. He describes it as creative synergy and views it as the key to the current success of art therapy, This expanded vision is also likely to be the key to the future success of art therapy. Let me return for a moment to the blank walls in my new house. When it comes time to arrange the artwork 1 know I will be excited by the chance to see all the possibilities of what art might be hung and how it might be arranged. If I am truthful, I also know I will be tempted to hang the same painting in this new kitchen as was in the kitchen at my old house. I will be tempted to place it on the wall near the phone, just as it had been before. I will also get all caught up in thinking that I have to make the right decisions about what to place where, because they will be this way for a long time. This will make it much harder to hang anything at all. Only if I am able to remember that there is no arrangement so perfect that it is beyond the possibility of change will I be free to move forward and create the new space I will live in. The same is true for the profession of art therapy. Our guiding image is not a concrete, static art form. It is a performance art piece. We can choose to retrieve the “familiars” from the depths of who we have been