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This monograph includes six previously published studies which were developed as aspects of a research project of the Psychiatric Institute and Hospital of New York. The aim of the project was the investigation of the possible use of “free” or spontaneous art expression as an aid in both diagnosis and therapy. The emphasis was on the release of the unconscious into imaginative and spontaneous art projections as a factor in ego development and the planned use of the transference relationship with the art teacher in therapy.
The six studies appeared in psychiatric journals and a volume of child psychiatry. Each study covers one child. There are five boys 5, 9, 10 and 11 years of age and an adolescent girl of 15. They presented various types of neurotic behavior disorders or other neurotic syndromes. Case histories from the hospital are presented. All of the children were under observation and treatment in the New York State Institute and Hospital.
There is a careful description of the method of dealing with the child in the art class as well as a description of the evolution of the transference situation and how it is encouraged, handled and used by a therapist.
Each child is seen in individual art sessions in which a therapeutic relationship is fostered while at the same time the art work is encouraged to progress from routine tracing, through representational depicting of observations to spontaneous or “free” expression of fantasy and unconscious material. The therapeutic value of the technique emerges clearly in these studies, which is not dependent on interpretation so much as on its function as “an image language of the unconscious.” The technique is especially useful with children because they are “closer than adults to primitive expression through images and play.”
The author discusses the psychodynamics of art as a projection of the inner life of the child and the symbolic meaning of some aspects of abstract form and color. The therapeutic relationship with the te