ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic approach to art therapy, in the hands of a trained clinician, offers an extremely rich vehicle for change with many patients. The author conviction, shared by those trained in the Freudian tradition, is that classical analysis is neither appropriate nor necessary for most, but that the theory that informs it is still useful in understanding and guiding all therapeutic work, whether the clinician behaves in a supportive/ego-building or in an interpretive/uncovering manner. Having worked in a variety of modes with a variety of patients over the years ranging from strictly verbal adult analysis, to using art in adult analysis, to child analysis with art, to psychoanalytic art therapy with adults and children she is convinced that art can greatly enhance the analytic experience of insight. This is probably so because art is concrete and visual, in addition to its value in "uncovering" unconscious imagery and discovering unconscious fantasies and impulses.
