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Front cover: In a Spin, by Mary Fletcher
Mary Fletcher is an artist who lives in St Ives. After teaching art for twenty years, she trained as an art therapist in Sheffield and works part-time in NHS adult mental health.
In a Spin is a sugar lift etching drawn spontaneously on the plate. It expresses how Mary felt arriving in St Ives.
(click for a larger image)
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Volume Nine No. 1 2004
Contents
Editorial
The Making of Mess in Art Therapy: Attachment, Trauma and the Brain
by Frances o'Brien
Art Psychology and th eUse of Psychiatric Diagnosis Assessment for Art Psychotherapy
by Jane Dudley
Art Therapy and the Concept of Internal Cohabitation
by Tim Wright
Reviews
Read my Lips
by Jana Novotny Hunter
Art Therapies and Progressive Illness: Nameless dread
edited by Diane Waller
Development and Diversity: New Applications in Art Therapy
edited by Doug Sandle
Art Works in Mental Health
(Touring Exhibition)
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Editorial
This issue contains three articles on diverse topics, one looking at the relationship between art activity and neuroscience, another at psychiatric diagnosis, and the last at an intra-personal relationship - the felt presence of an alien other within our bodies and within our minds.
Perhaps the diversity represents something of a zeitgeist in art therapy, reaching as it does outside itself into other disciplines, challenging norms in psychiatry and adding to psychoanalytic discourses.
Frances O'Brien, having developed her ideas from the experience of working with a severely abused child, asks whether art making can actually have a role in changing brain function. Here she adds to the burgeonoing material on the relationship of emotional experience to brain development, the particular contribution art therapy can make in reversing detrimental effects on the brain derived from damaging developmental experiences. It is the proverbal experience with tactile materials that results in mess that is the dynmic medium for repair.
Informed by her many years of experience working in adult psychiatry, Jane Dudley's article raises concerns regarding the use of psychiatric diagnosis and terminology by art psychotherapists. Focusing mainly on the assessment of patients for art psychotherapy, her article argues for an individual appraoch to each new referral as free as possible from preconceptions arising from diagnostic labelling. The limitations imposed by such labelling are explored in relation to a wide range of issues, including the partners's ethnicity, gender and sexuality, social and cultural background, in addition to their approach to image making. With the increasing status and acceptance now afforded to art therapy / art psychotherapy, Jane's article asks what consequences the uncritical acceptance of the language of psychiatry and psychoanalysis might have for the profession.
Tim Wright makes use of a controversial idea in his attempt to help adults who are disabled by psychotic processes. The idea that it could be possible for two minds, inhabiting the same body, to live a separate life from birth is carefully presented by Tim, who shows through his thoughtful presentation of case material how this difficult notion can represent a useful tool in art therapy with adults who can only account for or understand actions through this concept. An inaccessible "Other" present to the clients, in art therapy, and contained in the artwork, obliges the therapist to recognise that the unity of mind and self cannot be taken for granted. Tim's stimulating article raises questions about selves, minds, and persons that should be of interest to all our readers.
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