Re:Painting Lesson

That was a beautiful and moving art therapy anecdote. It made me think about paying attention to 'avoiding the mess'. Often, in my work, I 'encourage the mess'. A 6 year old girl referred to me for emotional behavioural problems (as a result of her parents’ difficult and acrimonious divorce) needed to be very angry in the art therapy sessions. In her second session, she needed to enact a messy destruction, rather than create “a fine piece of work”. She wanted to play “splishy-sploshy” with water and very diluted paint. I allowed an enormous mess to unfold, which I felt was a symbolic defecation. In the middle of the session the girl asked to go to the toilet, I accompanied her and she then returned to her “splishy-sploshy.” The following week her mother told me that she had been much calmer and amazingly, she had been to the toilet that week. Until that moment I had not known that the girl also suffered from chronic constipation which had been ameliorated by the art therapy intervention. In conjunction with her doctor, we were able to reduce her steroid medication for her condition.

I believe both these anecdotes belong to the area in medicine known as psychoneuroimmunology. Both these anecdotes show the power of an art therapy intervention to change (subtly or profoundly) physical symptoms in a person. But sadly, it is so hard to validate this work and prove it to be effective from a 'scientific' point of view. As a result, art therapy is not always given the credit it deserves as a therapy that can trigger change, psychologically and physically.

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Re:Painting Lesson, by Lindsay Smith, 11/22/01

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