The Revealing Image. Analytical Art Psychotherapy in Theory and Practice. By Joy Schaverien. London:  Tavistock/Routledge.

To my knowledge, this book is the only published text which aims to explore the nature of the transference/countertransference relationships between art psychotherapist, the artist/patient, and the art work. The ways in which the picture influences the therapeutic relationship and itself becomes influenced by it, are addressed

from a number of different perspectives. Joy Schaverien argues that the picture itself can become a transference object and a means through which the subjective and objective nature of the patient's experience can come to be mediated.

Drawing predominantly on ideas from Jung, and the neo-Kantian philosopher Cassirer, Schaverien explores the processes involved in image-making and the processes which revolve around the image once it exists. In terms of the former, which Schaverien designates the life in the picture, she contrasts the differences between a diagrammatic image which may appear lifeless, as it visually describes and depicts something already consciously known, with an embodied image, which is one that can be achieved through the painter relinquishing the attempt to reproduce the picture seen in the mind's eye, and to allow the evolving images to interact with and inform the marks that its creator makes. The resulting embodied image, which captures and incorporates something of the essence of the painter's personal experience, is now contained within the boundaries of the picture and remains available, over time, for the many and various associations to it, to be explored within the therapeutic relationship.

The process of painting, with its shifts between primary identifications with the image, to more separate and objective perceptions of it may be echoed in the transference with the art psychotherapist. Working with the image, the art psychotherapist can explore these shifts as they become recreated in the psychotherapy and in what can become a highly charged triangular encounter. The way that meaning can be contained verbally and