Page 16 - ART FORM AND MENTAL HEALTH - Ingrid Pénzes

preferences and aversions towards certain materials and experiences.
The art form in art therapy assessment
The art form is specific and unique for art therapy treatment and for art therapy observation and assessment. Art therapists therapeutically apply the art form because they assume that the art form is related to the client’s mental health. This is a fundamental assumption for art therapists, and diverse art therapy approaches agree that a client’s mental health is expressed in the art form, i.e. the use of art materials in an art- making process, resulting in an art product. Why is that? Where does this assumption come from?
In order to answer this question, we need to consider the art-making process as well as the art product. The art-making process requires acting in the moment and responding to the art form. Art therapists assume that art making involves implicit, non-verbal and automatic processes that are analogue to processes involved in daily life functioning (e.g. Hinz, 2009, 2015; Smeijsters, 2008; Stern, 2010). For example, when clients have not used art materials for many years, the materials are novel to them. The way clients respond to this unfamiliar situation is supposed to offer insights about how someone copes with and adapts to unfamiliar tasks in life such as risk avoidance behavior, self-management, tendencies to highlight negative features, frustration tolerance, perceived levels of competence, and unwillingness or not knowing how to play and experiment (Hinz, 2009, 2015; Maner & Schmidt, 2006; Smeijsters, 2008). This could reveal healthy and unhealthy coping behaviors or thoughts and thus the art-making process could give insight into a client’s mental health.
The assumption that the art product is related to a client’s mental health can be traced back to Freud’s analyses of art works of great artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. According to Freud, the art products are an expression of the artist’s unconscious. Prinzhorn (1919) has been one of the first psychiatrists that have attempted to systematically analyze the productions of the mentally ill. According to Plokker (1963), art has many merits for patients suffering from schizophrenia: ‘The images are the realities itself and [...] when in our creative process we change the image, then we have created new realities.’ (p.93). He is also one of the first authors to have pointed out the limitations of trying to rationally understand the art product by just analyzing its content. Nowadays, most art therapists
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