ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Sigmund Freud’s iconic consultation room to the art studio-atelier, where artist-patients meet in a group with the art-psychotherapist to create art, while exploring their lives with cancer and its treatments. The art therapy space and art studio is an agent for transformation for artists with cancer and cancer survivors. The consultation room and the art space encompass psychosocial life, connecting the enclosure of particular spatial aesthetic to seeing, hearing, talking and creating. Both the consultation room and the art studio are enveloping spaces, rooms of self-representation that reach a unique depth of vision. Art making in a creative studio, like free association in a psychoanalytic consultation room, can facilitate the binding together of fragments of memories of the recent or distant past, within a spiritual, physical, artistic and psychological framework. The studio plays on the opposition of public and private. Its deliberate barring of information from the outside world can estrange patient-artists from routine perceptions of themselves.
