ABSTRACT
Creative response therapy takes its history from a long tradition of progressive artists, educators and therapists who can be traced to the turn of the twentieth century. Kramer's requirements of what constitutes art are again conceived with flexibility, sometimes as an unattainable ideal. Aesthetics is a philosophy which explores the boundaries of art and its merits, which has a place in analyzing client therapeutic work. This chapter suggests that there exists symbolism, but what an element actually means is most often impossible to say. The author discovered this early on in his career when a teacher brought one of her second-grader's paintings to him concerned that she always painted towards the bottom of the paper using muddy colours. Bexley's breakdown from an otherwise sunny theme and Tonya's weaponized gang-inflected art demonstrate that art can be both destructive and cathartic.
