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Art therapy is a relatively new profession and is still in process of defining where it stands in relation to psychiatry, psychoanalysis and other psychotherapies. Having started life as a relatively submissive handmaiden of medicine - doing a bit of art in occupational therapy - it has gradually found its own identity, and is now well established as a form of therapy in its own right. If growing up involved separation and individuation, self-definition and a growing self-confidence in who one is, then art therapy may well claim to have made this passage rather successfully.
Katherine Killick and Joy Schaverien's book can be seen as a contribution to this process. In its twelve chapters, each by a different practitioner, different aspects of the profession are brought into focus. Anyone with the patience to read the book through 411 be rewarded by a rich and engaging perspective on this young profession.
The first six chapters are rooted in current practice and each is richly illustrated with clinical material. The aim is to give a picture of what art psychotherapists actually do and why they do it. Each writer elaborates a theoretical perspective - some more original than others - and situates the clinical story within this. Through this we get a number of different insights into the ways art psychotherapists relate to their patients, and how they think about them as their therapies unfold.
The second six chapters are more historical in perspective and attempt to understand the emergence of art psychotherapy, as a therapy rather than a pastime, within the large, and now vanishing, psychiatric institutions. At least three of these papers are autobiographical: that on ‘Art, Madness and Anti-Psychiatry’ by John Henzell, which gives an interesting insight into the more subversive strands of art therapy which could align themselves with Laing and other ‘anti-psychiatrists’; Claire Skailes's paper ‘The Forgotten People’, a moving account of her brave, and often lonely, atte