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.
I wrote...
Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul
By
Shaun McNiff
What is my book about?
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.
When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.
The Books I Picked & Why
Jung on Active Imagination
By
C.G. Jung,
Joan Chodorow
Why this book?
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.
When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.
The Dream of the Earth
By
Thomas Berry
Why this book?
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.
When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.
Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person
By
Mary Caroline Richards
Why this book?
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.”
When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.
The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology
By
James Hillman
Why this book?
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.”
When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
By
Shunryu Suzuki
Why this book?
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.”
