By chance, just over 50 years ago, I became an art therapist in a state hospital on the Northshore of Boston where I have always lived. With support from Rudolf Arnheim at Harvard University and others, I committed myself to furthering personal and community well-being through art. In my mid-twenties I established a graduate program at Lesley University which spawned an international community of expressive arts therapy. I have worked worldwide in advancing art healing and art-based research. Now University Professor Emeritus, and for the first time without a full-time position, I am trying to embrace the unpredictable ways of creation, and as I wrote, Trust the Process.
C. G. Jung anticipated everything we do today, and more, with his practice of active imagination over 100 years ago. I have used this book as a primary reading in my courses. I also consider it to be among the best books dealing with the creative process, especially the emphasis on how the individual ego, or person of the artist, is a participant in a larger intelligence of creative imagination. We relax a grip on the controls to enable the expression to manifest itself, as Jung personally demonstrates in The Red Book, Liber Novus, just recently available to the public.
All the creative art psychotherapies (art, dance, music, drama, poetry) can trace their roots to C. G. Jung's early work on active imagination. Joan Chodorow here offers a collection of Jung's writings on active imagination, gathered together for the first time. Jung developed this concept between the years 1913 and 1916, following his break with Freud. During this time, he was disoriented and experienced intense inner turmoil --he suffered from lethargy and fears, and his moods threatened to overwhelm him. Jung searched for a method to heal himself from within, and finally decided to engage with the impulses and images…
In college during the 1960s I studied Eastern and indigenous world religions with Thomas Berry which informed my approach to art healing. Only recently I discovered how he evolved to become a leading figure in the ecological community, calling for a new depth of psychology of nature. His vision of how each person and all of nature participate in an inclusive creative force is for me the way forward with art healing. Among his books, including The Great Work and the new biography published by Columbia University Press, I recommend The Dream of the Earth as a starting point. We participate in a creative process that is within ourselves and larger than us, a convincing paradigm embracing the sacred dimensions of art healing as affirmed by my colleagues Bruce Moon and Pat Allen.
This landmark work, first published by Sierra Club Books in 1988, has established itself as a foundational volume in the ecological canon. In it, noted cultural historian Thomas Berry provides nothing less than a new intellectual-ethical framework for the human community by positing planetary well-being as the measure of all human activity.
Drawing on the wisdom of Western philosophy, Asian thought, and Native American traditions, as well as contemporary physics and evolutionary biology, Berry offers a new perspective that recasts our understanding of science, technology, politics, religion, ecology, and education. He shows us why it is important for us to…
The Bible is the greatest mystery novel ever written. It begins in the Old Testament with seemingly random accounts of ancient people in far away places with strange customs. There’s the prophecy of a coming Hero who will conquer the villain and restore peace to the land. The mystery reaches…
This is a poetic masterwork with the potter’s wheel as a metaphor for creating our lives as “an ongoing process” in which every act integrates all of life. In our current era there is a tendency to cry cultural appropriation when we look beyond our immediate context and study art healing principles within the whole human community and find ourselves in others. Mary Caroline Richards offers good art medicine for this myopia in demonstrating how ideas are not the property of persons “but live in the world” as people and all of nature do. “The deeper we go” in the contemplative process of centering, the more separations “dissolve.”
James Hillman called for the revisioning of psychology based on art, culture, and imagination. Of his many books, The Myth of Analysis, offering three essays on psychological creativity, language, and femininity, is the one that I reference most, especially his position that “the language of psychology insults the soul.” Social science and the therapy jargon of the “establishment” are not getting better, and as Hillman says, we become ill in sync with it. He said to me that art therapists can “be the carriers of imagination into the culture at the grassroots level. I really do want to encourage them with all my heart.”
In this work, acclaimed Jungian James Hillman examines the concepts of myth, insights, eros, body, and the mytheme of female inferiority, as well as the need for the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality. By examining these ideas, and the role they have played both in and outside of the therapeutic setting, Hillman mounts a compelling argument that, rather than locking them away in some inner asylum or subjecting them to daily self-treatment, man's "peculiarities" can become an integral part of a rich and fulfilling daily life.
Originally published by Northwestern University Press in 1972, this work had…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
I work with groups and communities in studio environments where people worldwide encounter past baggage about their artistic expression or lack of it, all of which invariably arouses intimidation, fear, doubt, and resistance. This concise, 138-page text has been the go-to book in affirming universal and quality participation. Less experienced artists appreciate the value of beginning and veterans let go and begin anew. The goal for all is authentic expression, or as Suzuki-roshi says, “to express your true nature in the simplest, most adequate way and to appreciate it in the smallest existence.”
Named one of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century (Spirituality & Practice)
A 50th Anniversary edition of the bestselling Zen classic on meditation, maintaining a curious and open mind, and living with simplicity.
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."
So begins this most beloved of all American Zen books. Seldom has such a small handful of words provided a teaching as rich as has this famous opening line. In a single stroke, the simple sentence cuts through the pervasive tendency students have of getting so close to Zen…
Art heals by infusing individuals and communities with creative energy transforming afflictions into affirmations of life. The book seeks to revive transcultural healing processes of art, approached as including all forms of artistic expression, emerging spontaneously throughout history. As a member of the art in therapy community, I perceive our professional discipline as a part of the whole. In addition to professional therapeutic practice, we can lead and enhance access to people everywhere as a form of public health.
To encourage participation, authentic artistic expression is viewed as a force of nature present in us all, and the greatest obstacle is the assumption that it is only for a talented few. In proving efficacy, we show the art evidence generated now and, in the past, trusting its impact rather than attempting to translate artistic expression into something other than itself.
Cleo Cooper, a cross-cultural psychology professor, is living the dream on the Big Island of Hawaii. With ocean-dipping weekends, she enjoys her dog, her job, and her boyfriend Ben - until the day she’s on a research vessel and a dead body is caught in the dragline.
My book is a collection of monthly Editor-in-Chief letters to the readership of World Neurosurgery, a journal that I edit. Each essay is short and sweet. The letters were written for neurosurgeons but have been re-edited so that they apply to all human beings. They cover topics such as leadership,…
