Psychology of art therapy
Art therapy (therapy with the help of different types of art) is a relatively new method of psychotherapy. The effectiveness of the use of art in the context of treatment is based on the fact that this method allows you to experiment with feelings, explore and express them at the level of symbolic images.
Symbolic art goes back to the cave drawings of primitive people who used symbols to identify their place in the universe and search for the meaning of human existence. Art reflects the culture and social characteristics of the society in which it exists. This is confirmed in our time by the rapid change of styles in art in response to changes in cultural trends and values.
From the very beginning, art therapy reflected the notion of psychoanalysis, according to which the end product of the patient's creativity, whether something drawn with a pencil, painted, sculpted or constructed, is regarded as an expression of unconscious processes taking place in his psyche.
Art therapy is a mediator in the communication between the patient and the therapist on a symbolic level. Images of artistic creativity reflect all kinds of subconscious processes, including fears, conflicts, childhood memories, dreams, that is, those phenomena that Freudian orientation doctors explore during psychoanalysis.
We experience the dream mainly in visual images; at the same time, feelings are possible, thoughts can also be intertwined, as well as sensations in other modalities, but nevertheless, the dream is primarily images. The difficulties of its comprehension lie precisely in the need to translate the language of images into words.
Art therapy techniques are based on the assumption that the inner self is reflected in visual forms from the moment a person paints, draws or sculpts spontaneously. Although Freud claimed that the unconscious manifests itself in symbolic images, he himself did not use art therapy in his work and did not explicitly encourage patients to create drawings. On the other hand, Freud's student Carl Jung persistently suggested that patients express their dreams and fantasies in drawings, considering them as one of the means of studying the unconscious.
Traditionally, specialists involved in art therapy did not have an independent status and were used as assistants to psychiatrists and psychologists in cases where drawings, pictures of children and adult patients in hospitals could help both in establishing a diagnosis and in treating a disease.
Art therapy is currently being used not only in hospitals and psychiatric clinics; it is used in other conditions as an independent form of treatment and as an adjunct to other types of group therapy.
