Exploring ‘Art as Therapy’ and ‘Art in Therapy’

As I reflect on these vignettes the tree activity seems to me a good example of art ‘as’ therapy (Gray, 2019, p.24) since it was more about the process than the content, although I do feel that the content was important to a degree as I connected deeply with my tree, its form, trunk, roots, leave and blossoms and remember including rich greens, browns and pinky reds. The activity was simple, accessible and involved an easy process to create a product that did not really require any interpretation.

I appreciate that the house, tree person picture (Gray, 2019) can be used for diagnosis and interpretation and I have done this myself through my curative education picture diagnosis training and have seen motifs in my students’ trees such as knot holes.  This time however I don’t think this was needed, and would actually have got in the way, interrupted the flow.  In my own use of the activity, more than in the workshop, the ‘overall feel’ of the room, atmosphere, healing effects, the creation of a space that generates expressive engaging, played a role as well (Rubin, 2012, p.43).

I asked my students to stick their trees up on the back wall to make a forest and we stood around in a half circle and admired them, their diversity in particular. While  like the idea of the ‘group mural technique’ (from von Spreti, in Gray, 2019) and think it sounds like a wonderful way demonstrate projection but I do not think it would have been appropriate in this context with this group and this facilitator, highlighting the value of understanding the difference between art as therapy and art in therapy.

The second vignette with its rich and complex images, associations, and interpretations is clearly more located in art as therapy. I was surprised by how deep the activity went and how many connections I could make between them and across my life.  I now understood what Gray (2019, p.25) meant when he wrote about the significance of ‘what is actually there, what they have drawn from their unconscious and how that is then interpreted by the client, for what it is not what they think it is’. I was very taken by the clarity of the message from my unconscious in my two pictures. The communication was clearly there in front of me and I can see that while I was happy to do my own interpretation on my own it would have been enjoyable to do with someone else. This was such valuable learning to know from experience the significance of having a tangible product to look at together.

It is now obvious to me that having a representational form of previously unconscious material allowed for something else to look at than oneself or each other that was already less intense, less stuck, more dynamic and potentially transformative. (Gray, 2019) working almost like externalisation in narrative therapy and very useful for minimising defence mechanisms (Gray, 2019). I agree with Gray (2019) that this technique is ‘brilliant’ as working with the stories meant it wasn’t directly about me although of course on one level I did know it was, but the externalisation process meant that I approached the task in a very open kind of way, as a reader, a lover of stories, which in some ways relates more to art as therapy, with the art in therapy aspect creeping up on me!

I wanted to make my own associations and did not want anyone else to do this for me as recently happened with a Jungian psychotherapist who interpreted a dream, I shared with him as being about sex and death. This didn’t ring true for me and when he said it was ‘a most peculiar dream’ I didn’t find it helpful, but more of an intrusion or even invasion. As Gray (2019) writes, they may well have been his own projections.  There are clearly different ways of approaching drawings in art therapy and the main thing seems to be to endeavour not to project and muddy the waters with our own ‘stuff’ (Gray, 2019) though this seems impossible to achieve completely given we influence one another energetically and unconsciously.

In any case I much prefer what Gray (2019) and McWiliams (2011) and Rubin (2012 ) recommend which is to empower clients to tap into and nurture their own inner resources and wisdom  This aligns with my approach to mindfulness and my university  teaching in general where I want to support my students  to be empowered from within and this means I need to take seriously what they are telling me, their own perspectives about their experience of mindfulness which may be quite different to what is reported in large quantitative studies.

I was drawn to taking this particular art therapy course because it seemed to align with my personal and professional values, with a humanistic approach (Gray, 2019).  Both art as therapy and art in therapy do call in my view for a person centred approach in which we are attuned to the needs of the client. With regard to mindfulness teaching and research I too have wanted to go further than manualised programs with predetermined outcomes (notwithstanding university course and topic requirements) given there is so much in my work that is interested in the quality of individual’s unique experiences rather than controlling, measuring or instrumentalising them (Gray, p.14).

This is significant in mindfulness as most studies are outcome based quantitative studies (Burrows, 2016) involving self-report surveys. I wanted to understand how people experienced mindfulness so asked my research participants the simple question ‘What happens when you close your eyes for a mindfulness meditation’. I received some highly concerning responses about people experiencing dizziness, depersonalisation, dissociation, intense sadness, difficulty sleeping and increased thoughts and heart rates, responses which the editor of the journal ‘Mindfulness’ said in a personal communication ‘contradicted the findings of hundreds of randomised trials’ (see Burrows, 2017). I see so many similarities with mindfulness, as Gray (2019, p.14) writes in relation to art therapy:

Many art therapy books that mainly focus on art as therapy neglect the complexity of psychotherapy. There is a mystical belief inherent that art will do the job whether we understand the processes or not.

It does seem important to know about the difference between art as therapy and art in therapy and to be able to make decisions about which elements from each we may wish to include or not include, and to be prepared for unanticipated outcomes and to be able to go with flow. I now wish to share another vignette from my own experience, that I have been able to reflect on, understand and appreciate in new ways in the light of my learning in this art therapy course. It centres around an activity I facilitated some time ago, or rather my unconscious facilitated as I was surprised by the outcome, and I reflect on it often, still.  It connects very nicely with Gray’s (2019) writings on the mandala which quite clearly brings mindfulness and art therapy together so is a fitting vignette as I draw close to the end of this paper.

Vignette #4 Mandala Making: Art Therapy as a Continuum

I did my teacher training in a diploma of education (already having a BA) in my 30s in the mid 90s and I had a year 11 English class, a year 8 class and a special education class.  It was a small school in a country town and most of the students in the year 11 class of about 10- 12 students had been together since kindergarten. There was a young woman in the class who had leukaemia and she and the class knew that she was not long for this world and would not be in the class in a few months’ time. I had a lesson plan which I chose to abandon, much to my school and university supervisors’ alarm. I decided instead to bring a fairy tale, ‘The Handless Maiden’ and a mandala activity instead of what I had prepared, something I can no longer remember.

The students’ mandalas were amazing, the atmosphere in the room was amazing. I was in awe of their work and can still see two in my mind’s eye, a young man had made his circle represent the steering wheel of his car, and one of the segments contained a beautifully rendered whisky bottle.  The young woman not long for this world’s mandala in had a lush green tree with leaves reaching around the outermost circle and fiery orangey-red flames licking and leaping around the centre.

Years later I was walking down the main street of this town and someone called out to me, ‘Hey you’re that teacher that did that mandala thingy with us, aren’t you? That was the best thing I ever did at school’. Perhaps what I brought was a little risky given I was only a visitor for a term, not yet a teacher, though the year 11 teacher was present and I knew he was a lay preacher as well as a teacher, deeply cared for his students, and would be there for them after I had left and for the rest of the year. I did not get a high score for my teaching in this class it remains one of the most significant teaching experiences of my career.

In the light of my new learning about the value of conceptualising art ‘In’ and ‘as’ therapy I now see the mandala activity facilitation probably started out as art as therapy as it worked well in an English class since drawing from the fairy tale was not threatening as it was not directly about the student. It was very a very therapeutic form of mindfulness with a focus on process, for relaxation, calmness, group harmony and perhaps trust in the universe. Once again, though, the art in therapy aspect probably crept up on me, as the activity soon became a deep meditation, as a result I feel, of a combination of the young woman’s openness and spirituality due to her illness, my depth of meditation experience and practice, the close knit nature of the group, the openness of adolescents and the power of the fairy tale and the mandala activity itself. There was such great depth, even profundity in what the young woman painted, I feel it would have broken the protective magic circle (see the Handless Maiden story) if I had talked about it with her and encouraged her own (I feel unnecessary) interpretations, so in a sense this mandala activity came full circle and moved away from a full immersion in art in therapy. I suspect the open ended nature of this task frustrated the class teacher and my university teacher as they were looking for educational outcomes but I could not have been more pleased with how the lesson turned out. It lives inside me still, with its energetic quality.

It seems that in art therapy a flexible approach of ‘as’ and ‘in’ therapy, seems valuable and necessary as this balances process and product, relaxation and challenging, nurturing and stretching, as in Csikszentmihalyi’s (2014) notion of ‘flow’, which is not so challenging as to be anxiety producing or too intense but not so low key as to be boring and not fruitful.  Perhaps most importantly however, this requires discernment in order to tailor the activity for the therapist, facilitator or teacher, the student or client and the context whilst being open and flexible enough to make changes as necessary.  I feel I have been privileged to have been guided by my intuition on so many occasions in the past as regards informal art therapy and writing this paper has been a very worthwhile process eliciting much personal and professional growth as I move toward   a more formal approach to art therapy.