ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how art therapy can offer sex addicts a way to access and contain painful feelings and memories through the process of sublimation and projection, while remaining within the relative safety of the metaphor, symbol or image. The author argues that art-making gives adults permission to play without serious regression, thereby nurturing the child within and providing opportunity to accomplish as adults what they could not do as children. Art also creates a place where the sex addict can become visible, actively confronting the secrecy of the addictive system.
‘The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.’
Pablo Picasso (Ranzoni,2012: 4)