ABSTRACT
Nowadays, schoolchildren can have art therapy as a career in mind and follow a recommended path culminating in postgraduate training. In the 1940s to late 1960s, though, there was no such structure and many pioneers have said that they got into art therapy ‘by accident’. In the following section, I have drawn attention to the background and involvement in art therapy of a cross-section of founders, using comments from their interviews, from their own writing and from the impressions of others who knew them. There were thirty-two members of BAAT when it was formed in 1963 and I have selected the following because of their long-term commitment to art therapy, and based my comments on the interviews in which I asked the question ‘How did you get into art therapy?’ This account is not intended to be exhaustive as research into occupational choice in the case of art therapists is currently being conducted by Andrea Gilroy (see Inscape spring 1989). I was interested in the ‘chance encounter’ element mentioned by so many interviewees and by the fact that they were all searching for a meaningful role which did not seem readily available with an existing range of career options.
