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Art therapy has always had a close connection with analytical psychology, arising from Jung's process of active imagination. Pictures and their interpretation have always played a part in individual analyses, but the practice of art therapy has become a profession in its own right, whereby therapy takes place through production of the art object and its understanding. Some will say that the act of painting has a healing effect, others that the picture must be seen as displaying both personal and archetypal content. A third group would regard the painting as only an adjunct to the more important therapeutic relationship that is taking place. The author feels that neither of the terms ‘art therapy’ or ‘art psychotherapy’ adequately covers what happens through the mediation of the picture, and suggests a new terminology ‘analytical art psychotherapy’, acknowledging, in so doing, the ideas of both Jung and the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer.
In this book, Schaverien sees the picture, not just as a demonstration of content, but also as a carrier of transference, evoking in its turn a countertransference from both patient and therapist. The pictures produce a form of relating ‘which draws the artist/patient and therapist/viewer into a deep transference to the picture itself; and also to each other through the picture‘. Referring to Jung's essay on transference, and to the work of Schwartz-Salant, she sees the picture as embodying processes that take place within the interactive space which connects the therapeutic couple.
She also describes the picture in terms of what she calls a ‘scapegoat transference’, in which the painting contains the disturbing and sometimes unconscious affects, that are then disposed of in the therapist's safe keeping. This would be an ‘embodied’ picture, whose content is not immediately ‘amenable to discourse’ but which may disclose its meaning over time. At later reviews of the picture series, the disturbing image may be found to have tran