Studio Art Therapy of related interest Spirituality and Art Therapy Living the Connection Edited by Mimi Farrelly-Hansen ISBN 1 85302 952 X Art as Therapy Collected Papers Edith Kramer ISBN 1 85302 902 5 The Artist as Therapist Arthur Robbins ISBN 1 85302 907 6 A Multi-Modal Approach to Creative Art Therapy Arthur Robbins ISBN 1 85302 262 4 Medical Art Therapy with Adults Edited by Cathy Malchiodi ISBN 1 85302 679 4 Medical Art Therapy with Children Edited by Cathy Malchiodi ISBN 1 85302 677 8 Contemporary Art Therapy with Adolescents Shirley Riley ISBN 1 85302 637 9 Art-Based Research Shaun McNiff ISBN 1 85302 621 2 The Changing Shape of Art Therapy New Developments in Theory and Practice Edited by Andrea Gilroy and Gerry McNeilly ISBN 1 85302 939 4 Studio Art Therapy Cultivating the Artist Identity in the Art Therapist Catherine Hyland Moon Foreword by Mildred Lachman-Chapin Jessica Kingsley Publishers London and New York All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, England W1P 9HE. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher. Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution. The right of Catherine Hyland Moon to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd, 116 Pentonville Road, London N1 9JB, England and 29 West 35th Street, 10th fl. New York, NY 10001-2299, USA www.jkp.com © Copyright 2002 Catherine Hyland Moon Foreword © Copyright 2002 Mildred Lachman-Chapin Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 85302 814 2 Printed and Bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear Contents FOREWORD 7 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 13 AUTHOR’S NOTES 15 1 Introduction 17 2 How We Conceive of the Work We Do 30 3 The Process of Cultivating an Artist Identity 47 4 Creating the Studio Space 67 5 Responding to Clients through the Poetry of Their Lives 99 6 A Relational Aesthetic 131 7 Influence of an Artistic Perspective on Therapeutic Work 156 8 Role of the Therapist as Artist 197 9 Communicating with Others about the Work We Do 239 10 Art Therapy and Social Responsibility 278 Epilogue 309 REFERENCES 311 SUBJECT INDEX 329 AUTHOR INDEX 339 Foreword This is a time of the interdisciplinary. Boundaries of each of the sciences and arts have become permeable as it becomes clear there are fruitful insights that can come from working with two or more fields together. They cross-fertilize each other. I did my undergraduate work in economics, but I was also interested in psychology. I wondered why economists didn’t delve into the psychological processes by which people act to make significant economic decisions. And why not add the insights of cultural anthropology as well? This is beginning to happen now, to everyone’s enrichment. The profession of art therapy is such a combination: the artist joins with the mental health professional, becoming the art therapist. This new pro­ fession, roughly six decades old, has blossomed, growing in size and use by the public, with many graduate training programs throughout the country, and many graduates out there doing very fine work. The basic principle here is that art (visual art in this case) can provide a way to reach people in their deepest areas of self: their creative drive and their “desire.” To be competent to work alongside the established helping pro­ fessions, such as counseling, social work, psychology, and psychiatry, training in art therapy was designed to develop the necessary clinical thera­ peutic skills. However, art therapists were adding something unlike what other disciplines were providing: experience and training as artists. That the use of the arts can be helpful – if not also sometimes healing – is now widely accepted by many artists, art educators, and healthcare pro­ fessionals. What needs now to be articulated are the special gifts art thera­ pists, as artists, bring to clinical practice. Lest our contributions be con­ sidered solely in terms of techniques, both in treatment and assessment, the time has come to broaden the horizon of what art therapists can do, how art therapy can work, and what more can be offered by the profession. In order 7 8 STUDIO ART THERAPY to do this, the definition of art therapists working as artists needs to be defined. Cathy Moon has done this in her book. Our field has needed it. She has, for the first time I believe, seriously probed for definitions of the artist self in relation to work done with clients, and to consider the problems and particulars of such a relationship. Happily, this is not “clinical” writing. She is not out to prove or convince through data. She convinces through showing, as the best writing does – showing here what happens with her clients and herself (hardly “case histories”). She relates her own rich inner experiences and thoughts about these interactions. She tells stories, and she tells them well. Her long training and experience give her the requisite therapy skills to perform as a healthcare professional even as she chooses to work more directly through artistic means. One thread of my thinking as I read this book was: how does this differ from what other highly skilled therapists do, or for that matter what artists or art educators untrained as therapists can do? I have witnessed and experienced both therapists and art teachers who bring to their clients the kind of acute sensitivity and empathic response that Cathy does. But these are the rare and gifted ones who go beyond their specialized training. Verbal therapists might use art in their practices, but this is not the same as the art-based model the author describes. Art educators do start with art, but rarely focus on the inter-personal in the way a trained therapist would. The two basic tenets of the author’s approach are aesthetics and the relationship between client and therapist. They must, she holds, be used together. Artists and art educators know about aesthetics; healthcare pro­ fessionals know about working with their relationships with clients. But Cathy Moon shows that, in being aware of both together, the art therapist works in a special way. She calls her method a “relational aesthetic.” It begins with her acknowledging the aesthetic side of herself, defining it in terms of her body senses, her awareness of sights, sounds, smells, touch. As they combine and are sharpened by her giving credence to what they tell her, she senses the “poetry” of what is happening around her and in her. Opening to the power (sometimes overpowering) of these poetic antennae, she can produce her own artwork and invite the client to do the same. Faced with the stranger who comes to her for help, she can acknowledge the poetic and artistic visions of this person. As she says, an art-based model of FOREWORD 9 art therapy highly values the artistic identity in both the therapist and the client. It is at the crossroads of the artistic vision of both client and therapist that the relationship bears fruit. What is this thing that everyone is credited with having, something that Cathy Moon calls “artistic vision?” Dave Hickey, an art critic, calls it “desire” in its French sense of deep personal longing; Wallace Stevens, a poet, calls it the life of the imagination; Winnicott, a psychoanalyst, calls it the transi­ tional space that is the primary experience of the infant in turning one thing into another, making a metaphor (without which ability, he says, sane adjustment to the world can not happen). Artistic vision is, as we see it, an attribute of being human that does not necessarily manifest itself in an art product. It becomes the mechanism to find the repository of ultimate personal truth – something barely articulated by most of us. But when personal pain is experienced, it is here that the therapist and client search. Meaning is what they try to find, plus a way of manifesting this unique and personal meaning in the world through their own creativity. And it is here that both client and therapist, making or using the arts, seek for an approxi­ mation of personal meaning. While most other therapists, using primarily verbal means and rational, conscious dialogue, are on the same quest, the approach of the artist to the “artistic vision” is direct, going where the pain is, where the creative drive is, and using the poetry of the arts as the basis for dialogue. While this has been more or less the basic premise of the field, the author has added to it in several ways. She has made it the governing principle of her practice, making for subtle but pervasive differences in the way she works. Through beautifully written accounts of interactions with clients (and people in her own life) we live with these persons as we would in a play or novel, getting inside them as we observe through her. She speaks of this multisensory observation–or aesthetic attunement–as if she were watching performance art. That is, the very behavior of clients (as well as the art they produce) become art experiences that she, as an artist, responds to as a fully aesthetic experience. She trains her students to do this as well, reproducing in the book some of their attempts to write about what they experience in this heightened way. It helps when she gives concrete examples, which she does throughout the book.