Contemporary Practice in Studio Art Therapy

Christopher Brown, Helen Omand, Christopher Brown, Helen Omand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000532401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Contemporary Practice in Studio Art Therapy discovers where studio practice stands in the profession today and reflects on how changing social, political, and economic contexts have influenced its ethos and development.

This is the first UK volume devoted to studio art therapy, and the writers explore what is meant by a studio approach and how they are adapting art-based practices in radical new ways and settings. It comprises three parts – Part I: Frames of reference explores how particular social, cultural, and political contexts have led to the discourses within practice; Part II: Models of practice gives accounts of current studio art therapy practice, describing rationale for working methods and providing a resource for practitioners; Part III: Curating, exhibiting and archiving considers how the display and disposal of artworks, particularly relevant to studio approaches, may be thought about and implemented. The book includes chapters from North American authors who illustrate a trajectory of practice that has the potential to point to future developments.

The book will be essential reading for practitioners and students who are interested in taking a fresh perspective on art therapy and will be encouraged by new ways of thinking about the studio approach in today's changing world.

Part I Frames of reference

1 Historical perspectives

Christopher Brown and Helen Omand

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095606-3

How to define art therapy in the UK has been a somewhat vexatious question from the beginning of its history, which makes it all the more difficult to pin down exactly when it started; Adrian Hill coined the term in 1942, but as Hogan points out in her history of art therapy (2001), art was being used as part of psychiatric treatment in the nineteenth century.

The reasons for this perplexing issue of definition lie in the specific social, cultural, and political contexts in the UK, in which the early pioneers developed their practice. There was a good deal of variety within this practice. From the latter half of the twentieth century, two divergent approaches emerged – one that emphasised making art as therapeutic, the other with art as mediator of the therapeutic relationship. In this chapter, we explore the tension within this apparent dialectic and consider its impact on the studio art therapy approach. We draw on existing published histories of art therapy and early art therapy texts, which tend to take different positions on this divide and emphasise the influence of either art or relationship on the profession’s development (Waller, 1991; Hogan, 2001). Using original source material from art therapists who came after the early pioneers, we examine whether there was a ‘psychoanalytic turn’ away from studio practice during the development of the profession. In exploring this, it becomes clear that things are more complex, and practice more nuanced, as different ideas were integrated.

We acknowledge that we are writing from a UK perspective, and our focus is on what has happened to studio practice between the establishment of art therapy and the present day in this country. The context would be very different in other places. Gilroy and Hanna have this to say:

The establishment of art therapy as a profession in various countries around the world requires attention to several different areas: to issues within the ‘interest group’ as it develops into a professional community; to the nature of mental health care and to relationships with allied professions; and to the broad social, political and cultural context of the country in question.

(1998: 269)

The very notion of what art therapy is will vary from place to place and over time. Kapitan (2008), drawing on Vick’s comparison of community studios in the US and Europe, points out many European studios did not consider themselves to be doing ‘art therapy’ at all, although they shared many of the same aims as US studio art therapists. Kapitan notes there are many ‘not art therapy’ endeavours happening globally: ‘When a whole community embraces the idea of art as a healing technology and applies it to suit its own particular needs, a thousand permutations become possible on how art therapy may be defined’ (2008: 2). When practice is on the innovative margins there are shades of grey between arts in health, community arts, healing arts, art as therapy and art therapy, which will shift according to history, context, and prevailing narrative.

Early influences

Early therapeutic art practices are complex to track (see Hogan, 2001; Waller, 1991), and we take up the story in the 1940s with the idea of making art as therapeutic in itself as epitomised by Adrian Hill and Edward Adamson. Both developed their practice in studios in hospital settings, working with tuberculosis and psychiatric patients respectively. Hill believed in the healing power of art, which took it beyond being an occupational activity, although that was often how it was presented to his patients and the medical establishment. Like Hill, Adamson was against any kind of interpretation or use of psychodynamic theory with patients. In his forward to Adamson’s seminal book, Art as Healing, Anthony Stevens, a psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, conveys the essence of Adamson’s approach:

Intuitively he knew there to be a connection between creativity and healing, and he understood the importance of providing a sanctuary – a space, a temenos¹ – in which this connection could be made. His genius lies in his ability to create the enabling space.

(Stevens, 1983 in Adamson, 1984: vii)

Here, the main ingredients for an art therapy studio are made clear – a ‘safe haven’ that offers an alternative to the constrictions and demands of a world that may feel unsafe or threatening and a therapist’s mind that offers non-intrusive engagement.

The different idea of art therapy being part of a primarily psychotherapeutic treatment was there from the beginning in both the UK and the US with Irene Champernowne and Margaret Naumberg. In 1942, Champernowne established Withymead, a therapeutic community where use of a communal art studio was seen as an integral part of the work – the work being Jungian analysis – with an emphasis on a natural healing process. Naumberg developed her art therapy practice within a framework of Freudian psychoanalysis but preferred to allow the patient to discover symbolic meaning rather than offer interpretation (Hogan, 2001). The relationship between art therapy and psychoanalysis continued through the interests of pioneers such as Marion Milner and Ralph Pickford, who used art both in their personal analyses and subsequent work as psychotherapists. However, Diane Waller, in her book, Becoming a Profession: The History of Art Therapy in Britain 1940–82, makes clear that the subsequent early pioneers in the UK tended to be artists, some involved in art education but all drawn in some way towards mental health settings and the art made there. These pioneer roles were often defined as ‘artist’ in order to avoid being aligned to occupational therapy and rehabilitation. She suggests that the role of artist was more attractive because of it having a higher status in the institutional hierarchy of mental hospitals (1991: 88/9).

As the emergent profession began to establish itself, the question of a more clearly defined role and identity became a preoccupation. Locating art in a medical world had its problems; art, and those who work with it, may be either distrusted or idealised by a medical establishment. Furthermore, the libertarian emphasis on subversion of psychiatric control and institutionalisation, which was prevalent in art therapy even before the antipsychiatry movement that emerged in the 1960s, did not sit well with the establishment. Eventually, there was a moving away from this position towards identification with more acceptable psychological models (Hogan, 2001). This move suggests a certain tension between the outsider position of artist and the need to fit into established medical paradigms.

During the 1950s and 1960s, when the aims of art therapy were being developed, Alexander Weatherson, a pioneer art therapist at Springfield Hospital, promoted the idea that art therapists should engage in exploration of both process and content. That is to say, being involved in the spontaneous making of the artwork through provision of a dedicated studio space, discussion about the artwork produced there, and interpretation of its content (Waller, 1991). Previously, these aspects tended to be separate, with the making process guided by the art therapist and the interpretation of content being the realm of psychiatrists or psychotherapists – seen as the higher function. In order to become more directly involved in the psychotherapy of patients in this way, some form of training became necessary (for a detailed account of the development of trainings, see Waller and James, 1984). There had always been those who had trained in either analytical psychology or psychoanalysis making use of art in therapy, but once formal training for art therapists began in academic settings during the 1970s, the need for theoretical underpinnings became pressing. The influence of these trainings on the direction that the profession took has to be acknowledged too. These reflected and perpetuated shifts in alliances; moving from arts education and social justice to teaching psychodynamic concepts, as tutors brought their own experiences of psychodynamic trainings to the courses.

Alongside the establishment of a professional organisation – British Association of Art Therapists in 1963 – and the development of training courses was the lobbying for recognised pay scales for art therapists during the 1980s. With these moves to become an autonomous profession came a desire to be seen as separate from occupational therapy and equated with those with higher status, such as psychology and speech therapy (Waller, 1991). It seems that this desire to be a discrete profession, and not merely an adjunct to another, impacted upon the so-called ‘open group’ model, which took place in large, open studios where the emphasis was on the patient’s relationship to their artwork and less on their relationship with the therapist and other patients. The closing of many asylums in the 1980s and 1990s and the opening up of opportunities for art therapists in other care sectors (e.g. schools, day centres, social services, prisons) may well have contributed to a turning away from such open group models towards an interest in closed group and individual work, which in turn led to more encounters with transference phenomena and psychoanalytic ideas about how to manage them. Psychoanalytic trainings became desirable in order to fulfil individual desire for more knowledge and self-awareness, as well as a marker of status. However, this turning away from studios was only partial and there is anecdotal evidence that the practice of open studio groups continued to be a mainstay of practice in some settings.

From the 1970s to the present day, there have been numerous changes in the social, political, and economic climate that have affected the way art therapy practice has developed. Amongst these is the loss of spaces and places where studios could operate (see Wood, Chapter 3; Brown, Chapter 7), particularly within the NHS. While the importance of the physical environment is not to be underestimated, this loss has ultimately led to other innovations which have applied the ethos of studio practice to new spaces (see Lloyd and Usiskin, Chapter 8; Pratt, Chapter 11; Richardson, Chapter 18). Another change was the debate in the UK about what title practitioners should use, which emerged from negotiations with government bodies leading to State Registration in 1997 and the adoption of an equivalent protected title of ‘art psychotherapist’ to sit alongside that of ‘art therapist’. It is not hard to imagine how status may also have played a part in the development of a potential two-tier terminology with its elitist implications, certainly there is plenty to be curious about in terms of how the idiosyncrasies of a particular social context shape a profession.

Reflecting on practice

This idea that there may have been a ‘psychoanalytic turn’ away from the studio, with its focus on the art, towards a practice of art therapy as a specialised form of psychotherapy appears in both Waller’s history (1991), where art therapists are seen pragmatically adapting to changing circumstances,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Frames of reference
• Part II Models of practice
• Part III Curating, exhibiting, and archiving