ArtTherapy

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Psychoanalysis

The primary goal of art therapy is to understand the internal world of our patients. We strive to make it accessible for exploration and then search for meanings that will ameliorate physical and psychological pain and foster growth. If we are to communicate effectively with our patients, it is essential to discover a common language.

Long before the development of language, the infant experiences his/her self and its own world in images and sensory events. Even after the development of language when the ability to communicate verbally is established, many of our internal states are very deep, very private and beyond the world of words. Thus the true essence of these states becomes less accessible through verbal communication, but can be expressed through art.

In art therapy, we stage a meeting between the inner world of the patient and the external reality represented by the art therapist. The picture exists in the area between the two in the transitional space, and becomes a transitional object, a bridge between the inner and the outer world of the patient. Both worlds contribute to the creation of the picture. It is the picture that helps the person to keep inner and outer reality separated yet interrelated and connects the physical world with the emotional world, the body with the mind.

According to Winnicott (1971), the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, the transitional object and the various transitional phenomena that succeed it later in development form the foundation for all creative activity.

Through their pictures, adults, adolescents and children express and project their inner images. The created picture can then be investigated and interpreted together with the art therapist or just accepted as a great creative project. This particular kind of "experiencing together" provides psychological support within the protected confines of the creative process and facilitates mutuality between patient and art therapist. A primary partnership can then develop similar to the relationship between the playing child and its available, yet unobtrusive, mother.

On the one hand the patient can express her anxieties by painting. On the other hand the therapist can demonstrate her bondedness to the patient by accepting these pictures and mirroring them back. For both, patient and art therapist, the drawings created in the course of this process does represent this bond.

In the process of confronting a patient with chronic pain, trauma, chronic and potentially fatal disease, or psychological stress, the self-worth of the patient is continually threatened by the disintegration of his/her body. The long, painful treatments of chronic pain or cancer can contrast strongly with the ideals of a dignified life. This gap constitutes for many patients of all ages a significant narcissistic injury, which can become the source of deep psychological pain. Reparative processes that reestablish the integrity of the self in the patient can give rise to extensive creative output and productivity. Some patients develop the strong need to work creatively throughout the process of their illness into their recovery. In the creative act they wish to make new sense out of the aspects of their inner and outer world which they have temporarily lost or which causes them pain, in an attempt to take control and gain insight.

Who can benefit from Art Therapy:

• Children and adults who have chronic pain.
  
  
• Children and adults who have cancer or are cancer survivors and experience emotional stress or want to work through their fears, anxieties and problems related to cancer, changing bodies and new family dynamics.
  
  
• Children and adults who are struggling with anxieties, depression, OCD or Bipolar Disorder.
  
  
• Adults who would like to explore their inner world and gain insight into their personal relationships in an attempt to improve them.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy emphasizes the impact of early and present childhood development on the patient's personality and current life difficulties. It also emphasizes the importance of the therapeutic relationship between patient and psychotherapist in working through the patients' issues. The psychotherapist helps the patient to gain insight and self-understanding, thus enhancing conscious and unconscious awareness to elucidate pathologies.

Looking at dreams, free associations, and past and current relationships to significant people in the patient's life, the psychotherapist tries to understand the patient's behavior in an attempt to relieve symptoms and allow for positive life changes. The psychotherapist makes use of interpretation and analysis of the relationship between the patient and the psychotherapist (transference/counter-transference)

Who can benefit from psychodynamic psychotherapy?

• Children, adolescents and adults who are curious to explore their inner lives to relieve symptoms and better understand their relationship to significant people in their lives.
• Children, adolescents and adults who experience trauma, cancer, other chronic, potentially life threatening diseases, chronic pain, anxiety and depression.
• Children, adolescent and adults who have lost a loved one and need help in grief- mourning work.
  
  
  

What is psychoanalysis? When people ask what psychoanalysis is, they usually want to know about treatment. As a therapy, psychoanalysis is based on the observation that individuals are often unaware of many of the factors that determine their emotions and behavior. These unconscious factors may create unhappiness, sometimes in the form of recognizable symptoms and at other times as troubling personality traits, difficulties in work or in love relationships, or disturbances in mood and self-esteem. Because these forces are unconscious, the advice of friends and family, the reading of self-help books, or even the most determined efforts of will, often fail to provide relief.

Psychoanalytic treatment demonstrates how these unconscious factors affect current relationships and patterns of behavior, traces them back to their historical origins, shows how they have changed and developed over time, and helps the individual to deal better with the realities of adult life.

Analysis is an intimate partnership, in the course of which the patient becomes aware of the underlying sources of his or her difficulties not simply intellectually, but emotionally -- by re-experiencing them with the analyst. Typically, the patient comes two to four times a week, lies on a couch, though not always, and attempts to say everything that comes to mind. These conditions create the analytic setting that permits the emergence of aspects of the mind not accessible to other methods of observation. As the patient speaks, hints of the unconscious sources of current difficulties gradually begin to appear -- in certain repetitive patterns of behavior, in the subjects that the patient finds hard to talk about, in the ways the patient relates to the analyst, and so on. Patient and analyst join in efforts not only to modify crippling life patterns and remove incapacitating symptoms, but also to expand the freedom to work and to love. The goal is that eventually, the patient's life -- his or her behavior, relationships, sense of self -- changes in deep and abiding ways.

Who can benefit from psychoanalysis?

The person best able to undergo psychoanalysis is someone who, no matter how incapacitated at the time, is basically, or potentially, a sturdy individual. This person may have already achieved important satisfactions -- with friends, in marriage, in work, or through special interests and hobbies -- but is nonetheless significantly impaired by long-standing symptoms: depression or anxiety, sexual incapacities, or physical symptoms without any demonstrable underlying physical cause. One person may be plagued by private rituals or compulsions or repetitive thoughts of which no one else is aware. Another may live a constricted life of isolation and loneliness, incapable of feeling close to anyone. A victim of childhood sexual abuse might suffer from an inability to trust others. Some people come to analysis because of repeated failures in work or in love, brought about not by chance but by self-destructive patterns of behavior. Others need analysis because the way they are -- their character -- substantially limits their choices and their pleasures. And still others seek analysis definitively to resolve psychological problems that were only temporarily or partially resolved by other approaches. (American Psychoanalytic Association)

artwork: Judy Wachner, colored masking tape, collage