Art therapy uses drawing, painting, clay and other image-making, within a therapeutic relationship, to reach feelings and memories that words cannot easily reach. It offers shamanic work a clinical account of why images and the body can reach early, pre-verbal wounds that talking cannot, an understanding of how much the maker brings to any image, and a reminder that what matters is the process, not a polished result.
What is art therapy? #
A form of psychotherapy in which making images is the main way of working. The British artist Adrian Hill coined the term in the 1940s, after finding that drawing and painting helped him and his fellow patients whilst he recovered from tuberculosis in a sanatorium.1 In the United States, Margaret Naumburg and Edith Kramer shaped the field, and the art therapist Nora Swan-Foster has suggested that Carl Jung‘s part in its founding has been under-credited: Jung painted his own images and encouraged his patients to do the same.2 In the United Kingdom, ‘art therapist’ and ‘art psychotherapist’ are protected titles, and practitioners must be registered with the Health and Care Professions Council.
No artistic skill is needed. The emphasis falls on the making and on what it brings up, not on how good the picture is; one practitioner’s guide calls this ‘focus over perfection’.3
Why can images reach what words cannot? #
Because some wounds happen before we have words. The earliest relationship, with the mother, begins when we are a baby, before we have language and usually before anything we can consciously remember as adults. If that attachment goes wrong, the wound is embodied, somatic and unconscious, and so hard to reach through talking therapies alone. Working with pre-verbal material usually needs therapies that use imagery, such as art therapy, or therapies that work with sensation and movement, such as the body-centred psychotherapies.4
Louis Tinnin and Linda Gantt, two researchers in trauma treatment and art therapy (he a psychiatrist, she an art therapist), offer an account of why. In their view the right hemisphere of the brain holds the memory of pre-verbal times. When a child develops spoken language, the left hemisphere comes to dominate and claims ownership of the whole self as ‘I’, dismissing the right hemisphere and the body as ‘it’. The right hemisphere stays closely connected with the body, and can then express itself, and be reached, mainly through physical and symbolic expression.5 Gantt and her colleague Tally Tripp describe how giving a traumatic memory form in a sequence of drawings can help the person see that the event is really over.6
The same chapter notes that overgeneralising about differences between the two halves of the brain can be “overly simplistic”.7 The teaching does not rest on the neuroscience: the point is that some of what wounds us lives in the body and in images, beneath words.
What does this mean for shamanic work? #
That journeying may be well suited to pre-verbal wounds. Shamanic journeying is largely non-verbal and symbolic, and can be very somatic, visceral and embodied, so the work of Tinnin and Gantt may back up how effective it can be with pre-verbal material.8 In a journey, a person can go to the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer to experience being nurtured as a baby, and what it is like to feel securely attached to a Mother, protected, cared for and loved. Because this is gentle, somatic and sensory, it can begin to release the earliest wounding patterns held in the body and let healthier ones form. Where a person’s history makes it too hard to imagine a loving Human Mother, nurturing from another mammal that suckles its young, such as She-Bear or She-Wolf, usually comes more easily.9 Finding Your Deep Soul has a journey for meeting a Lower-World Mother. See What are the mother wound and the father wound?
Is a journey like a work of art? #
In important ways, yes. A journey is co-created. The shamanic realms sit just beyond our comprehension, so to interact with them we have to give what is there form and detail, much as a painter gives form to a story from the life of a saint. The painter chooses the scene, the light, the clothes and the faces, and brings to it the style of their era and place and their own personality. A shaman, too, brings imagery that makes sense in their own time and culture, and their own personality, so no two shamans’ journeys look the same.10 Journeys are mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, not logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this: like great paintings, music or poems, they try to convey something mysterious and intangible, and are never objectively true.11
There is a difference, though. What makes a painting great is often its artistic licence. What makes a journey great is how true a representation it is, how much of it comes from Spirit and how little from the shaman’s own licence. That is why hollowing-out and stalking ourselves matter: the aim is not to bring nothing, but to be aware of what we bring.12 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
What is the beholder’s share? #
A phrase from the study of art, and a useful key to the Lower-World. Great art is rarely photorealistic. It suggests things, gives the impression of them, and asks the viewer to do some of the work. Art historians call that work the beholder’s share. A viewer looks at smears of minerals on a canvas and turns them, in the mind’s eye, into a living scene they respond to in their own way, so the art becomes a collaboration between artist and viewer.13
The Lower-World works in a similar way. Language is largely a middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer, left-brained thing, about labelling and defining. The Lower-World is largely beyond language: it is the realm of metaphor and imagery, evocative and symbolic, “akin to poetry, painting, or music”.14 An art therapist’s feel for images that work by suggestion is close to what a journey asks of us. See Why are there no words or symbols in the Lower-World?
Do you need to be artistic to journey? #
No. Artistic people often take to journeying more quickly, because they are already used to drawing on the right hemisphere. But anyone with a right side of the brain can imagine things, and so can journey. Having both halves of the brain in balance is our natural state, the way humans lived for most of their history, and learning to journey is a return to that balance.15 Like painting or playing an instrument, imagining gets better with practice. See What is shamanic journeying?
