You are currently browsing the daily archive for July 31st, 2009.
Rose starts our chapter 8 quoting Piccasso, “We all know that Art is not Truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize Truth, at least the Truth that is given us to understand.” I find this to be a valid statement by Picasso and probably he didn’t know anything about art therapy or maybe he did. But anyway, it’s an excellent statement that can apply to the use of art in therapy. And also helps us art therapists to describe how art is used in therapy as a bridge to deeper memories, to deeper thoughts, to give voice to the ineffible.
I must not have read this chapter when I got this book in my graduate school days. I think it’s been that long. I might have gotten bogged down with some of the Freudian case studies. But this chapter I find fascinating and agreeable to my thinking. Rose points out the trend with psychoanalysts to disregard the artistic part of their work and their role in order to not be rejected from the scientific community, even describing it as a feeling of dread of being “disconnected from truth and order” He gives voice to the fear that we had of being dismissed as victims of illusions and fancy. I still feel that truth out there, that science wants to drive their reality as the only one, that their attempts of bringing order to the world are the only valid ones. But I agree with Rose that science is but a part of the world, that science can only explain or describe a part of the world. Science, I believe is another search for God, for meaning, for attempts to understand who we are and who we want to be and how we interact with nature and each other. Art is also such a means to understand and find ourselves.
In my career as an art therapist, therapist, program developer, and administrator; I have ridden through the variations on how one should treat individuals with “mental illness” and trauma victims. We have gone through the medical model, taken God and spirituality out of therapy, removed or downgraded creative expression as a mere time-filling task and now we are back at incorporating art, metaphor, the act of creation, and the access to repressed memories in our vision of therapy and the best therapeutic response to trauma and mental illness. It is fascinating to be in a career this long and see such change, to go from someone who entered an obscure field that few people understood to a method/modality/treatment modal that is now in demand. And yet science still fights us. Fights viewing us as a valid viewpoint of the world and a necessary one to get a complete picture of the world. We should be in tandem with science in our explorations for God, meaning, and the future.
