ABSTRACT

Art therapy is often imagined as a kind of creative playground. The therapist supervises a process that is quite therapeutic in its own way, but it often has little bearing on concrete outcomes. Art therapy however, can be much more than that. It can alter core beliefs or schemas that often underpin lifelong troublesome ways of being in the world. When art therapy was in its infancy, around the time of Adrian Hill, who first began using art therapy with hospital patients, psychoanalysis and analytical psychology were enjoying a kind of heyday. S. Freud’s great frustration might have been one of the contributing factors in the development of art therapy. Art therapists have creative techniques as their strategy, but they are sometimes missing the understandings from psychological knowledge. Once art therapy has fostered the client’s insight into deep psychological problems, cognitive behavioural therapy may provide a method to rebuild thinking and behaviour.