I was thinking today about an incident that happened to me. This woman came up to me after my group and after she had had a visit with a patient and asked me what the patient's drawing meant. She wanted to know what it would all mean. I told her the only thing I could tell her was that the patient was quiet when she was coloring it in. The woman had taken a class in art therapy and she had a dictionary about color so she was going to go home and look it up. I didn't say anymore about it. My thoughts went to the reasons why looking up colors that she used is not a good idea.
Some people think that art therapy, or that therapy in general, is really mind reading. We'll tell people things that they're thinking or going through or just know things that they don't want other to know.Some people think that therapist will know things that the client doesn't know about themselves. And if we get mad at a client, we'll use our powers for bad things. People might think that art therapy is more like mind reading than talk therapy because some people have symbols in their artwork and a client might think that a symbol can be interpreted as something else instead of what it means to them.
It doesn't help that there are dictionaries about color or books that basically say, "If you draw this, it means this other thing." But my point is that therapy is not like this. An art therapist should not start telling a client that using red and black most definitely means the person is depressed. It matters about behaviors. It matters about what the person says about the artwork. If a person is using a lot of black and red because that was the colors of their high school football team or because they really like tomatoes with pepper, and on top of that, client doesn't act depressed, then that theory doesn't apply to them.
Art therapy is about what the client says about the artwork. And each therapist has their own theory. For example: I'm a Feminist Jungian type of therapist. I think that people have patterns of behavior that repeat in their life until they notice them and choose to stop them. Societal expectations and gender roles hold people back from pursuing what they want or being the type of people they would like to be. If something's on a person's mind, it will come out whether I ask questions about it or not. For artwork, I like to ask people questions like "If your artwork were a type of music, what type of music would it be?" or "If your artwork was a type of food, what type of food would it be?" I don't ask "why," or "what inspired you to make that?" because the answer most likely is going to be "because I felt like it" (that would most likely be my answer). People don't have to be realistic in their artwork for it to be expressive. And they're not coming to me for me to be an art teacher to them. For my personal self, I like there to be a question or a memory I have in mind while doing the artwork or a "directive" to the art because I get to know more about myself that way. But in practice, I mostly let people choose what art materials they would like to use. I do this because it's probably been a while since people have done art and they just have to experiment with the art materials.
Freudian, humanistic, and behavioral art therapists would most likely practice a lot differently. Some might use more directives. Also, art therapist can choose the medium or style they'd like to use, such as comic books style, clay, photography, graffiti, and others. Some art therapists are more about what symbols a person used and not what the person said about the artwork. But they are trained so that they are not impeding a person's personal growth, assuming that's why they're coming to therapy.
So, therapy is not mind reading. Therapists don't tell you things about yourself that you wouldn't know about yourself. And they don't tell you things that you don't know about yourself. Also, art therapists have different styles, however, it's supposed to help in your art and growth.
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