ABSTRACT
Making art can remind a person what it is to be absorbed. When someone is troubled it can be hard to escape an uncomfortable or even miserable selfconsciousness. Whether a therapist adopts a gently supportive approach or a more challenging one, an important task of therapy is to enable clients to become creatively absorbed in what they are doing and in their lives. We seem to have a basic need for periods of absorption. They can provide the opposite of alienation. When children play, they are not often self-conscious, but they are absorbed.
