Interactive Art Therapy: No Talent Required' Projects


Buy It Now!

Practical help given but book has problems
(August/September 2007 Issue)

“Interactive Art Therapy:
‘No Talent Required’ Projects”
By Linda L. Simmons
Haworth Press New York, N.Y., 2006

By Paul Efthim, Ph.D.

For therapists who want to incorporate drawing into their clinical work but who are artistically challenged, a locally-produced book offers some practical help.

Psychologist Linda Simmons of Lexington, Mass. has developed a simple drawing technique to augment talk therapy. Her 157-page guidebook, "Interactive Art Therapy: 'No Talent Required' Projects," describes how paper-and-pencil sketches can concretize issues for patients and help them gain a clearer view of problems and solutions.

Simmons - who recently relocated her practice to Missouri - works from a practical, problem-solving, medical model perspective. After six brief pages of introductory material, the author presents 14 sample drawing interventions. Each chapter describes one such technique, shows sample stick-figure drawings and presents a case vignette with extensive patient-therapist dialogue.

For example, the "Cage of Fears" intervention is designed to help patients identify the fears that keep them imprisoned. In this exercise, the therapist draws a simple cage with a stick figure representing the patient placed inside. The patient is then asked to label each bar of the cage as one of their fears. There is a door with a lock.

Patient and therapist then work together to overcome each fear (fear of looking foolish, fear of abandonment, etc.) by creating a treatment plan (social skills training, exploring family-of-origin issues). Over the course of treatment, the drawing may be modified to show the bars of the cage falling away or the combination lock on the door popping open as the patient tackles each problem or gains additional insight.

Other illustrations help visualize such concepts as boundaries, defenses, decision-making, coping and goal-setting. Session excerpts guide therapists on how to introduce and incorporate these drawings into an ongoing treatment relationship.

The main premise of this book is unassailable: people process information across multiple modalities and thus using visual aids in psychotherapy can open new space for expression and understanding. The author has developed a non-threatening approach that uses concrete visual representation to convey empathy and assist in problem-solving. For example, in my own practice, I recently found the "Cage of Fears" illustration quite helpful in a session with an immigrant patient where the language barrier has been quite problematic.

However, several major problems plague this work. First, Simmons' term for her approach, "Interactive Art Therapy," is misleading and overblown. The author fails to acknowledge that there is a well-developed field of study known as art therapy dedicated to incorporating visual art making into the therapeutic process. (Indeed, just a few miles from Lexington, Lesley University is a national leader in training art therapists, who would no doubt take offense to the author's appropriating their discipline's name). Labels are important; a more accurate term for Simmons' idea would be "Interactive Drawing Techniques" or something similar.

Secondly, the applications and cases presented in the book are associated with a practical, coaching-style approach to therapy that will strike most experienced practitioners as overly simplistic. The book will appeal primarily to beginning therapists and to those who work from coaching or problem-solving perspectives.

Also, this approach requires the therapist to do the bulk of the drawing. We do not learn how to facilitate helping patients develop and interact with their own imagery - admittedly, a much more complex process that forms the core of art therapy training.

Practitioners looking to incorporate art into psychotherapy in a more general way should look elsewhere. I would strongly recommend "Artful Therapy" by Judith Aron Rubin (2005, John Wiley & Sons).

Paul Efthim, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist in full-time practice in Brookline, Mass. He holds a faculty appointment at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology.