Joy Schaverien The Revealing Image: Analytical Art Psychotherapy in Theory and Practice.  Routledge

Joy Schaverien is an experienced teacher and practitioner of art therapy who has long been interested in the nature of transference and countertransference in art therapy. This book is an investigation of these phenomena from a theoretical point of view which Schaverien often claims is a new one. Her aim is “to establish the central role of the picture as a vessel within which transformation may take place and this involves the picture as an object of transference”. Schaverien's main influences are Jung and the philosopher Emst Cassirer. It is from these two sources that she derives the term “analytical art psychotherapy” to describe a form of art therapy where the picture is understood to be “an object of transference and countertransference itself with implications for the wider therapeutic relationship”.

Schaverien proposes that there are two different, although linked, transferences within the art therapeutic relationship, one to the therapist and one to the picture. It is this other transference which forms one of the main themes of this book and which Schaverien names the “scapegoat transference”. This biblical scapegoat, she explains, was ceremoniously embodied with the sins of the community before being cast out into the wilderness to die leaving the community purged. Schaverien argues that this offers a useful way of understanding the engagement of the patient with art objects made in therapy. “Like the scapegoat”, she writes, “the picture may be experienced as a embodiment, and so its disposal may play a significant part in the resolution of the transference”. I remain unconvinced by Schaverien's idea of a second transference and think her concept of the art object as a scapegoat could be adequately explained by psychoanalytic theory. However, the notion of what she refers to as “disposal” raises some interesting issues when considering the real differences between art therapy and psychoanalytical psychotherapy.

Under the headings “The life in the picture” a