Studio Art Therapy: Cultivating the Artist Identity in the Art Therapist

341 Pages·2001·1.86 MB·English

by  Catherine Hyland Moon

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.