This post discusses the experience of a male art therapist attending a 2 day conference on art therapy and feminism. Some influence of gender on the profession and practice of art thearpy are also discused.

  Art used to belong to the people. It was made in caves out of compulsion and impulse based in a need to relay a narrative. Art`s creations continue to be things of beauty, testimonials of human experience and the embodiment of our very humanity itself. It soon became apparent that the value of Art`s [...]

    Back in the beginning, when i was doing my internship at a children’s hospital in Montreal, the supervising psychiatrist invited me and my wife to his home for dinner. My internship under him had been somewhat tumultuous over a period of about 8 months because i felt insecure about my competence and particularly [...]

  In any form of psychotherapy whether it be humanistic, cognitive behavioural, psychodynamic there is some high degree of importance placed on the establishment and maintenance of a therapeutic container or frame. The notion of a therapeutic container is taken in part from Winnicott who stressed the importance of the initial holding environment in the [...]

Anyone can pretty easily see that they are different from the person next to them. Look around and notice how the shape of your face is different from anyone else’s. Your eyes are also, unless you have an identical twin. The humanist in me respects those differences but chooses to focus on what makes us [...]

For a number of years i have been paying attention to a special kind of relationship. As you may know, relationships in general are a focal point of my attention as an art therapist. This particular interaction occurs between a teacher and a student. I have been intimately sensing in myself and in others what [...]

De kooning said that the goal of the painting is to make the invisible visible. Art therapy makes implicit memory explicit. There is a really interesting triangulation of data to be observed between the fields of art, psychotherapy and neurology. Painters study the brain from experience. They are accessing neurological information through the constant interplay [...]

As i read more in the area of neurology i sense something starting to happen. It is as though the very dry and taxinomical content of neurological text has some relationship to the bible or to some other great human narrative. It is as though the power of narrative is so strong in a human [...]

I discovered today, much against my expectations that it can be difficult to run on the tread mill while concentrating on an audio book. This experiential data runs contrary to what i would expect because as a painter, i am often painting while also being intensely focused on things like documentaries or audiobooks. I have [...]

A very good, and fair documentary about the failure of the war on drugs and the correctional system. Planned futility is how i describe the basis of our economic functioning because as one speaker in the documentary points out, you need unemployment in a capitalist economy. Without unemployment, there is no way to keep wages [...]

Hi folks guess you can tell I am in another creative phase. I have been making art enough for a few more weeks of tomartist updates. Not sure if you remember but a while back I was asking myself some questions about neurology and the painting process. I was curious to try and understand why [...]

My experience both personal as an artist and clinical as an art therapist tells me that art making is a reasonably effective way to stop perseverating thoughts dead in their tracks. It does not seem likely that a therapist or any individual could engage the art making process in the midst of a panic attack [...]

Some painters reveal the process of their work on the actual surface of the canvas. Someone like Pollock  is  a good example, Robert Motherwell is another. Picasso and Chagall and all the abstract expressionists also fall into the category of painters for whom the process is evidenced by the work. Then there are others like [...]

Freud referred to a certain power of observation as ”hovering awareness”. It is a kind of self outside the main self which is somewhat more objective, more able to step back and take some distance and perspective on what the rest of the self is doing. In CBT, this behaviour is called self monitoring towards an [...]

The first person view is of particular usefulness in the acount of how art therapy works. The race is on right now to put the huge body of knowledge which art therapy relies on, into scientific language. However, we must remember that experience and observation do have scientific value, if not validity. We must not [...]

With each coming revolution, each hike in oil prices, each dissolved illusion of the mortgage crisis, each budding conflict, the voice of art therapy grows stronger. Share

This is where you can find my favourite art therapy related books. This post is going to be updated regularly as i collect new books to put in it. Dr.David Burns Feeling Good Boris Cyrulnik Parler d’Amour au Bord du Gouffre. Baron-Cohen, 2009 Art Therapy and Clinical Neuroscience Share

What if spirituality as we know it, does not exist on the plane of scientific fields of enquiry? What if looking into spirituality with a scientific gaze is like trying to read Greek, knowing only Latin.  I think a lot of people are starting to agree that spirituality is socially constructed. That does not make [...]

It dawned on me like a slap in the face which somehow makes you feel great.  Psycholgy over emphasizes, over focuses on the negative experiences of human beings as a whole. The areas of research which get the funding are those that focus on solving problems. This trend is echoed in the pinacle of this [...]

A lot of the interest in the neurology of music seems to focus on a special kind of physical experience which people have in relation to music. That experience consists of what some call: “chills” which arrive as the consequence of listening to music which one finds very moving. I have personally experienced those “chills” [...]

I read a primer of Freudian psychology when i was about 15 or  so. It is what got me interested in the area of psychology. In particular, Freudian defenses struck me as particularly refined and accurate in their ability to describe our strange behaviours. Freud’s dream analyses were also quite interesting to me because he [...]

It occurred to me, upon reviewing the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia that most, if not all of the symptoms are various forms of experience which a painter can encounter while painting. Perhaps this observation could be generalized to all artists engaged in the creative process accross all modalities whether in drama, music or visual art. Delusions, hallucinations, [...]

The Emasculating Truth http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/emasculating-truth/ Global consciousness is really buzzing right now. It is stimulated by the internet like an individual in the midst of an enormous thought. This documentary is an indication of what i have just said. It is a remise en question of the nature of masculinity. Human consciousness is waking up. There [...]

I am tired world. Tired of having to fight to prove that art exists, that it has meaning, that it should receive its due. Tired of having to yell above the voices of more important people. Tired of feeling insignificant and marginal because i chose to spend hours on end staring at a blank canvas [...]

When the question of the Anxious client is “what happens if i get an anxiety attack?” the response of the therapist must literally or symbolically and invariably be “what happens if you don’t?”. Share