Orbach - The Good Enough Studio: Art Therapy Through the Prism of Space, Matter, and Action

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rt therapy, as a practice, is considered a young one in the family tree of psychology, where it forms one branch among the helping professions. But we art therapists are the offspring of the first men and women who told stories, danced, and sang around the fire, those who powdered plants, stones, bones, and charcoal and left images and engravings on cave walls. Our common archaic roots are the arts.

I have written this book from the perspective of an artist, educator, and therapist working within the context of a studio setting as an extension of ourselves. Such a setting is a safe place where permission, empathy, and encouragement foster intuitive choices and allow reverie and being to unfold. For art therapists, art educators, and kindergarten teachers who wish to create such a studio environment, this book is for you.

These pages explore our archaic artistic roots as we interpret actions and mediums into pedagogical and emotional understanding. Within this archaic, cultural-evolutionary context, I bring stories from the studio with a focus on art materials and processes of their use. These stories describe and define an action-matter view of art therapy, one that foregrounds materials and the actions done with them.

I will highlight the profound connections between the different choices of materials and the physical acts of the artists body as manifestations of a metaphorical, alchemical process the soul goes through. We will see time and again how the body somehow identifies its required path and transforms materials into the deep inner truth of the creator. We will perceive how the choreography and reciprocity of art-making has a precise metaphoric and poetic truth in our life that, when permitted to be, and when recognized, can be freeing and help us to flourish.

Art therapy processes have surprising synchronicities and reveal the emotional accuracy and overlapping of metaphorical meanings of choices on the path to integration and healing. This book will explore many examples of these.

In my description of the art therapy concepts and processes that form my practice, I also try to illuminate the integration between different areas of knowledge, such as cognitive development, nonverbal body signals, culture, art history, artistic technical experience and knowledge, and psychology. Such languages cultivate the art therapist as she joins her clients in authenticity, liveliness, transformation, and health.

The book might also enable one who is not familiar with studio life to experience something of it. This is why I have used different writing genres: essay, technical text, tables, chronological art process, stories. I have also included some images. This variety hints at and symbolizes the richness of languages of the studio.

I have written about the processes and experiences of the studio as accurately and deeply as possible, but toward the end of the writing process, there was an unplanned shift. On a long night flight to Kyoto, I comprehended the studio as an idea, and not as a physical space at all! This insight opened a window onto a new way of thinking about the studio. Thus, the last chapter is a collection of stories that demonstrate the studio as an idea, as a state of mind.

While writing, I have reflected on the next generation of therapists, such as my supervisee, who sense that materials have a language of their own, and wish to develop their understanding of psychology, brain research, technology, and other frontiers of knowledge and of how to nurture, integrate, and refine our unique archaic knowledge from the caves with new knowledge, to the benefit of our society.

You are invited on a journey that might influence your studio and perhaps even your practice. I hope this book will encourage you to explore our archaic roots as they connect to our lives today, as such connections are sure to shape our profession in the future.