In this exceptional new third edition, the author has retained the intent to animate the spiritual dimension that exists within all of us and embrace its resource for growth and change. Tapping into a person's belief system and spiritual dimension provides clinicians with information that can impact both assessment and treatment. By drawing on sources in the literature of religion, psychodynamics, systems theory, sociology, art, and ethics, the author lays a foundation for discovering and measuring clients’ spiritual sensibilities and search for personal meaning of their relationship to God. Chapter 1 discusses the evolution of the book and how the author embarked upon the inclusion of the spiritual dimension in assessment and treatment. Chapter 2 reviews the literature that encircles art therapy, mental health, and spirituality and explores its impact. Chapter 3 examines the Belief Art Therapy Assessment (BATA). Chapter 4 highlights the interviews and use of the BATA with clergy, while Chapter 5 explores its use with a “normal” adult artist population. Chapter 6 looks at spiritual art therapy with emotionally disturbed children and youth in residential treatment. Chapter 7 offers a case vignette of spiritual art therapy with a suicidal anorectic bulimic. Chapter 8 discusses phototherapy applications regarding the issue of mourning and loss. Academic and clinical applications are presented. Chapter 9 explores humankind’s search for inner and outer meaning after the tragedy of September 11. The final chapter offers an extensive discussion on the pathway for life and the body in treatment. The role of yoga and art therapy, including the importance of moving forward into life with greater resiliency and independence, is examined. An excellent resource for increased knowledge and sensitivity, the book is designed for art therapists, mental health workers, social workers, educational therapists, pastoral counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other creative arts therapists.

The book is an exciting exploration of the different ways in which the spiritual forms an essential, life-enhancing component of a well-rounded therapeutic approach. The contributors explain how their own spiritual and creative influences interact, finding expression in the use of art as a healing agent with specific populations.

The field of art therapy is discovering that artistic expression can be a powerful means of personal transformation and emotional and spiritual healing. In this book, Shaun McNiff, a leader in expressive arts therapy for more than three decades, reflects on a wide spectrum of activities aimed at reviving art's traditional healing function. In chapters ranging from "Liberating Creativity" and "The Practice of Creativity in the Workplace" to "From Shamanism to Art Therapy," he illuminates some of the most progressive views in the rapidly expanding field of art therapy: • The "practice of imagination" as a powerful force for transformation • A challenge to literal-minded psychological interpretations of artworks ("black colors indicate depression") and the principle that even disturbing images have inherent healing properties • The role of the therapist in promoting an environment conducive to free expression and therapeutic energies • The healing effects of group work, with people creating alongside one another and interacting in the studio • "Total expression," combining arts such as movement, storytelling, and drumming with painting and drawing

Doctor Ellen G. Horovitz shares over 40 years of experience as she transliterates evidence-based art therapy into medical terminology. This revised and updated Third Edition spells out the how-to's behind producing art therapy assessments, process notes, significant sessions, objectives and modalities, termination summaries and internet-based assessments into translatable documentation, designed to dovetail within an interdisciplinary medical model. In addition, this third edition emphasizes information on how to use psychological applications and art therapy based assessments to ensure best practices and efficacy of patient care. This step-by-step methodology fashions these reports, placing art therapy on equal footing with all mental health clinicians and generates records, which serve as points of departure for practitioners. This text is designed as a teaching tool that lays the foundation to enhance pertinent skills that are important to patient practice, including the armament to write up clinically-based reports that serve as a model for the field. Additionally, the practitioner is offered sample formats, legends and abbreviations of clinical and psychiatric terms, guidelines for recordable events, instructions of writing up objectives, modalities, and treatment goals as well as training on composing progress versus process notes. The Appendices provides a wealth of information and forms to use in one's clinical practice. This must-have reference manual amasses information that will serve as a companion guide for every art therapist to formulate clinical reports, and it will aid patients toward their trajectory of wellness, recovery and, above all, health.

The purpose of this book is to provide a basic understanding of Voice Movement Therapy and how it uses both spontaneous vocalization and the creation and performance of song, integrated with active body movement, to increase expressive and communicative skills and to strengthen one’s sense of self. Chapter One presents an overview of its history and core principles, and Chapters Two through Six provide articles by various practitioners to give the reader a sense of how they work, both with clients and students and for themselves, in ways that follow a basic set of principles, yet differ widely in accordance with the nature of the individual or group, the practitioner, and the cultural and socio-economic conditions of each encounter. Some of these articles reaffirm the past work of founder Paul Newham who, taking inspiration from the Alfred Wolfsohn/Roy Hart tradition of extended voicework, established a more specifically psychotherapeutically oriented vocal discipline and worked with individuals with special needs, students of voice, and performers. Other articles show how this work has been extended to new populations: those experiencing mental and physical illness and addiction and abuse, displacement and alienation, hidden disabilities, the need for formal mediation and conflict resolution, and transitioning into motherhood pre- and post-partum. Several others illustrate how the therapeutic component of the voice lesson has been broadened and deepened. In all instances, the aim of the editors has been to present a framework within which practitioners may tell their own stories in their own voices. The final chapter addresses ways in which we see this work going forward. It will be of interest, both in the United States and internationally, to professionals such as therapists, counselors, teachers of singing, teachers of speech and drama, speech-language pathologists; academic institutions that have courses in the creative arts therapies; conservatories for music and drama; and parents and parent organizations, especially those for children with both special needs and hidden disabilities.

What are the core concepts of art therapy? What can you learn from a drawing of a bird's nest, a collage or some scribbles? Why become an art therapist and how do you do it? What happens in the therapy room? In the style of a graphic novel, A Graphic Guide to Art Therapy answers these questions and more. Art therapy and its key concepts, theory and practice are introduced through illustrations and text. Beginning with an overview of art therapy as both a practice and a career, it shows the routes to becoming an art therapist and what the role entails. The essential approaches, frameworks, techniques and assessment styles of art therapy are visualised and discussed, making this book the perfect companion on your journey as an art therapist.

Clay art therapy inspires awakening. Earth-infused and experiential methods are relational, self-reflective, and transformational. Clay therapy provides documented outcomes in healing, anxiety and stress reduction, trauma and recovery, as well as in reframing beliefs and identity. The approach builds skills in daily living and relationships. Seeking a holistic perspective to inform clay therapy, this project follows decades of research into the healing of trauma in minority cultures revealing the hidden power of spirituality as meaning making. A person-centred method reframes minority identity within a postmodern psychotherapy. Experiential methods in therapeutic art-as-life and life-as-art embraces scientific evolutionary theories of development, cooperation, ascent, and convergence. Clay-based psychotherapy is informed by culturally infused methods reflecting on western, minority, and disability experiences. We explore our therapy studio productions as well as the works of contemporary sculptor Andrea Martini, and the 15th century works in terracotta by Andrea della Robbia. Our approach provides for opportunities to reflect on the nature of clay art therapy in healing, capacity and skill building, identity formation, and in facilitating transcendent outcomes.