Below are some extracts from Cathy Malchiodi’s revised and updated 2007 book edition The Art Therapy Sourcebook (Chapter 1)

‘While art can serve as decoration or hang in a museum, there are other purposes for art, ones that are connected to self understanding, a search for meaning, personal growth, self empowerment, and healing. Many of us have lost contact with these purposes or have not realised that art is more than novelty or ornamentation. Drawing, painting, sculpture and other art forms are powerful and effective forms of communication, and cultures through the ages have been defined and understood through their art. While art has been used to record human history, it has also incorporated our ideas, feelings, dreams and aspirations. Art chronicles and conveys a wide range of emotions, from profound joy to deep sorrow, from triumph to trauma. In this sense, art has served as a way of understanding, making sense, and clarifying inner experiences without words. Visual thinking is our ability and tendency to organize our feelings, thoughts, and perceptions about the world around us through images. It pervades everything we do, from planning our day to dreaming at night. We often use visual references to describe our perceptions of people and things we experience in our everyday lives. Most of us are familiar with the cliché ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ or sayings about colours, such as ‘she was green with envy’, ‘I have the blues’ or ‘ he looks at the world through rose-coloured glasses’. We designate and characterize the world with visual descriptions, we think in images, often using them to represent thoughts and feelings’.

‘Sigmund Freud, considered to be the father of modern psychoanalysis, observed that dreams, feelings and thoughts are experienced predominantly in visual form’.

‘Carl Jung, known for his interest in visual symbols in dreams and art, also noted the importance of images in therapy. He observed that by allowing a mood or problem to become personified or by representing it as an image through dreams or art, we can begin to understand it more clearly and deeply and to experience the emotions that are contained within it’.

‘More recently, researchers have discovered that traumatic experiences often become encoded in the mind in the form of images. This is, when we experience traumatic events such as violent acts or catastrophes, our mind may take them in just like a camera taking a photograph. It seems only natural that memories would first emerge in the form of images, bringing them to consciousness in a less threatening way’.

‘A survivor’s view of life may be tragic, but for the same reason she has learnt to cherish laughter. She has a clear sense of what is important and what is not. Having encountered evil, she knows how to cling to good. Having encountered the fear of death she knows how to celebrate life’ (Judy Herman, 1987)