ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the power of law and images in supporting discourses of the body—the normative, deviant, or pathological—as they were used in the eugenics movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and subsequently inherited by the field of art therapy. It locates the origins of art therapy within the movement identifying deviant and pathological bodies, as part of psychology's "re-humanization" mission in the early twentieth century. The chapter argues that theories emerged in the twentieth-century eugenics movement as a way to make meaning of bodies that were principally viewed within a social and cultural context. It outlines a brief history of mental health and how it was shaped within discourses of popular culture that reinforced the normative versus deviant body. To conclude, as part of providing services in mental health care, art therapists need to examine the historical conditions that have produced reductive narratives of non-normative identities in order to imagine change.
