ABSTRACT
Projective drawings have long been utilized as a window into individual’s psychological, intellectual, and developmental processes, as a means to understand various dimensions of the self. Psychotherapy with child and adolescent populations can be deeply challenging, stirring, and rewarding. Healthy personality development implies a smooth, flexible, and often nonconscious experience of shifting, multiple affect states—“the capacity to feel like one self while being many”. Multiple Self-States Drawing Technique (MSSDT) endeavors to accomplish just this. The MSSDT integrates this conceptualization as a clinical assessment tool, linked as well with a creative treatment method based upon the multiple self-states model. The MSSDT can facilitate the clinician’s understanding and clinical assessment, from a phenomenological perspective, of important personality variables and experiential factors and provide a framework for a subsequent, informed intervention path. Clinicians’ chosen treatment strategies may be formulated and adapted based upon expressed material throughout the process.
