Art Therapy... Psych 101...

ART THEORY

The art of getting better

Art is an extremely expressive medium. It can help people communicate, aid in dealing with stress, and can let someone discover and study the different parts of their own personality. In psychology, art is used to improve a person's mental health and can even be used to treat psychological disorders. This is referred to as art therapy.

By integrating the creative process that is required to create art with psychotherapeutic techniques, art therapy can allow an individual to resolve their problems, decrease the amount of stress they face in their life, manage their behavior, improve their interpersonal skills, and strengthen their self-awareness and self-control.

Art therapy first began to emerge as a distinct form of therapy in the 1940s, when psychiatrists took interest in the paintings created by mentally ill patients and educators began to realize that developmental, cognitive, and emotional growth could be seen in the artwork of children. 

WHEN TO USE ART THERAPY

There are groups of people who have been shown to respond very positively to art therapy. Some of these groups include: 

• Adults that are struggling with severe stress
• Children that are struggling with learning disabilities
• People who have undergone a traumatic experience
• People that have mental health problems
• People that are struggling with a brain injury
• Children that are struggling with social problems and behavioral problems at home or at school
• Anyone suffering from depression, anxiety, or domestic abuse

What Art Therapy Isn't

Art therapy is not a recreational activity or a time to teach someone how to make art, and no previous experience in art is needed for an individual to partake in this type of therapy. Most importantly, art therapy does not involve the therapist interpreting the patient's artwork. Art therapy is about teaching someone how to heal through his or her art. 

HOW ART THERAPY WORKS

Art methods involved in art therapy include painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture. Once in an environment that makes the patient feel safe, an art therapist will either provide the topic for the patient to work from, or the patient will be invited to work without any direction. 

As the patient creates art pertaining to their life experiences or an event, the process of making art allows the patient to think about their experience on a deeper level and transform what is in their head into symbols and metaphors. By making these images on their own terms, which is an important part of recovery and self-discovery. The patient is the only person who knows and has the ability to explain what these symbols represent.

This process of taking and experience from the person's "inner-self" and putting it out into the world as a physical object helps the individual become distant to the experience, which in turn makes him or her fell safer about talking about their problems directly, which can be very difficult for them to do, they can talk to the therapist about the artwork they have made. Gradually, this process increases a person's understanding, self-acceptance, and self-awareness. 

OTHER BENEFITS FROM ART THERAPY

Along with increasing self-awareness and self-acceptance, there are many other benefits that an individual can gain from art therapy. 

• Being forced to actively participate in the process, which fights boredom, alienation, and feelings of apathy
• Decision-making and choices are encouraged
• Creativity is nurtured, and this can then allow an individual to react differently towards situations that may be difficult
• Catharsis, a cleansing of negative feelings, can occur
• Interpersonal and social learning can occur

Not Just Painting

There are also versions of art therapy in music, dance, writing, drama (known as creative art therapy), and even the performing arts (known as expressive art therapy).

What is truly exceptional about art therapy is that an individual has the ability to take an active role in the therapeutic process. By expressing thoughts through artwork and symbols, a person can recover and become self-aware on his or her own terms.

"Art therapy is about the creation and the discussion of the intent of the client. It's a different way of sharing. No matter how healthy, verbal expression is the hardest thing to do." - Kelly Roberts.

~Bella

The Book Of Symbol 12...

IRIS

A low bridge zigzags through a stand of blue irises with fresh green stalks. On a golden Japanese screen, the irises are are perpetually alive, a vivid reminder of both springtime's renewal and absent love. In the painting, the artist alludes to an episode in the tenth-century litterary classics, the Tales of Ise. After a failed love affair, the story's hero, accompanied by a group of friends, leaves the capital for the east in order to start life anew. At a bridge that passes through blooming irises, they compose a poem about nostalgia, love and loss (ARAS, 1:367).

Irises and Zigzag Bridges, by Ogata Korin, painted 

screen, ca. 18th century, Japan.

The iris is a genus of about 300 species of flowering plants that for millennia have been prized for their daxxling colors. The number of the iris' stunning natural varieties has been augmented by the extensive use of selective breeding. The flower ranges in color from near black to blue and violet through vermilion, orange, yellow and white, and is often variegated with strongly contrasting hues (Westrich,17). It is this multicolor display of the iris that is responsible for its appellation. Iris, meaning "reainbow" in classical Greek, was the messenger of the Olympian gods. Her emblem was the rainbow of many colors, the bridge by which she traveled between heaven and earth with her divine messages. Analogously, the "iris" is what gives the eye its color.

Lusty mysterious, this iris reflects the deep 

reproductive patterns underlying romance and life.

Black Iris, by Georgia O'Keeffe, oil on canvas, 1926.

United States.

Striking not only for its colors, however, but also for its sensual nature, the iris has phallic, sword-shaped leaves surrounding distinctive blossoms consisting of three erect petals and three larger outer petallike sepals. The latter suggest, as in Georgia O'Keeffe's Black Iris, the form and enticement of the feminine genitalia, even if the artist denied that she had such imagery in mind (Wright, 65). While the flower of the iris is not noted for its scent, "essence of violet" perfume is made from orrisroot, derived from the varieties of iris that grow, not from a bulb, but a rhizome, a creeping underground stem (Enc.Brit. 6:384).

Medicinal properties accompany the sensual pleasures of iris. On an Egyptian hieroglyph of an iris carved in stone 3,500 years ago was a list of medicinal plants. The ancient Greeks documented the flower's internal and external uses (Westrich, 9, 12). Traditionally, Japancelebrates an Iris Festival in May, when the flower is publicly displayed and men and women wear bulbs and take baths in which irises have been floating, in order to insure good health and virility (ARAS, 1:367). The iris is also believed to protect against disease and evil spirits (Baird, 85).

The goddess Iris was a messenger of the gods, and 

traveled on a rainbow between Olympus and the earth.

Iris was honored by the planting of her flower on the 

gravees of women, since it was she who led their souls to 

the Elysian Fields (Lehner, 64). The Niobides Painter,

5th century B.C.E., Greece.

The diverse, exquisite hues of "iris," reflected in flower, rainbow and eye, correspond, in the alchemical fantasy, to the "peacock's tail," the brilliant omnes colores that represent the integration of all qualities in the Stone. Just as Iris heralded the approach of the gods, so, psychologically, the show of "many colors" heralds the transcendent self in which the many facets of the personality, once opposing each other, are brought into a unity (CW 14:388ff).

Baird, Merrily C. Symbols of Japan. NY, 2001.

Lehner, Ernst and Johanna Lehner. Folklore and 

Symbolism of Flowers, Plants and Trees. NY, 1960.

Westrich, Josh and Ben R. Hager. The Iris:

The Rainbow Flower. NY, 1989.

Wright, Susan. Georgia O'Keeffe: An Eternal Spirit.

NY, 2009.

~Bella

The Book of Symbols 2...

Fog

This monumental Japanese painting- it is 260 feet long- invites us into the world of fog. Studying it from right to left, in the tradition of Japanese scroll viewing, we move from forbidding blackness through a somber middle ground to delicate tracery and translucency to what finally appears to be hazy light. The symbolism of fog is just as variable.

The darkest images arose in Scandinavia, where Niflheim, a mythical wasteland of freezing mist and fog populated by monsters, also included the realm of the dead (Orchard, 118). "[F]og in my throat" was Robert Browning's metaphor for approaching death (in Prospice). Fog may arise from the work of demonic beings in fairy tales or surround Shakespear's witches, who comment on the "fog and filthy air" (Macbeth 1.1.16). In Asian legend, it may represent strange moods in which spirits appear (Biedermann, 139). Widely, through, fog is taken to represent confusion, uncertainty, indefiniteness, a state between the real and the unreal. Here it is opposed to the brilliant light of certainty.


While fog seems vaporous, we feel it, because it is formed by the condensation of very small water droplets around microscopic dust particles in the air. Fog limits horizontal vision. Less dense, it is called haze or mist. Unlike clouds, its base is on or near the ground and its symbolism is associated not with the sky, but with the earth realm. Sometimes the fog is seen as unfolding, blanketing. T.S.Eliot imagined fog as a yellow cat that "rubs its back upon the window pane" and finally "curled once about the house and fell asleep" (Eliot, 4 ). Contemporary poet Nan Hunt refers to fog as, "The mummy wrap of soft white/ that hints of a resurrection."

Fog is not favorable to direct action. Ships, planes, and fast-moving humans are delayed or stopped. A slower, more cautious awareness arises. Symbolically, the world of clear rational thought gives way to dreaminess, ambiguity, a kind of knowing that is more nuanced, less absolute. This knowing is perhaps more valued in the East than in the West. Zen sage Keizan Zenji puts it :

Though clear waters range to the vast

blue autumn sky. How can they compare with 

the hazy moon on a spring night!

Most people want to have pure clarity,

But sweep as you will, you cannot empty 

the mind.

Maezumi, iii

Fog is the medium in which the elements of a classic Japanese nature study are obscured, and materialize. Forest, Senju Hiroshi, fusuma (sling door) painting. 2001. 

~Bella