ABSTRACT
From the minutes of these early meetings it seems as if a ‘struggle for ownership’ of art therapy was beginning in the arguments which developed between the occupational therapists and Irene Champernowne. It was always her aim to see art therapy established as separate from OT. At the December 1949 meeting at the NAMH, she suggested that OT was concerned with the ‘outside world’, designed to prevent the patient from ‘unhealthy brooding’, as suggested by Iveson (1938) among others, whereas art therapy was ‘an inner psychological process which could be brought to birth by somebody who understood psychological symbolism, as a healing method’. The minutes state that the occupational therapists present denied this and claimed that OT could encompass the whole field of rehabilitation, including art therapy.
