Shaun McNiff - Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul

Shaun McNiff remains first and foremost an ally of the soul. Here he offers us a stunning array of entry points into the creative process. We learn how to transform the most mundane aspects of life through artistic encounters and to engage with our most painful challenges creatively.

Pat B. Allen, Ph.D., ATR, instructor at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of Art Is a Way of Knowing

Art Heals restores the therapeutic imagination to its central place in human life. The creative energy of this book will be recognized by all those who have been touched by the healing power of the arts. It is a masterly work by a master in the field of creative and expressive arts therapies.

Stephen K. Levine, Dean of the Doctoral Program in Expressive Arts: Therapy, Education, Consulting, at The European Graduate School

Shaun McNiff challenges us through these remarkable essays not only to take on the role of artist and dare to create our most compelling images, but also to dialogue with them and by doing so, to engage in a process of healing the inevitable wounds of being human. In a moment in history when the images most available to us are the most horrifying and numbing, McNiff offers a stunning antidote.

Robert Landy, Ph.D., RDT/BCT, Professor of Educational Theatre and Drama Therapy, New York University

Reading Art Heals is like attending a retrospective exhibition of a master artist, with its careful selection, critique, and contemplation of McNiffs original ideas and guiding images. In refining and reimagining these ideas in the context of today, McNiff brings a fresh vision to his work and offers a valuable answer to the increasingly incoherent fragmentation of mental health care.

Lynn Kapitan, Ph.D., ATR-BC, Associate Professor of Graduate Art Therapy of Mount Mary College and author of Re-enchanting Art Therapy

ABOUT THE BOOK

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 arts 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

SHAUN MCNIFF is internationally recognized as a founder and leading figure in the arts and healing field. University Professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he is past president of the American Art Therapy Association and the author of several other books including Art As Medicine, Trust the Process, and Creating with Others.

Sign up to learn more about our books and receive special offers from Shambhala Publications.

Or visit us online to sign up at shambhala.com/eshambhala.

How Creativity Cures the Soul

SHAUN MCNIFF

SHAMBHALA

Boston & London

2011

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2004 by Shaun McNiff

Cover art: Flying Girl, by Shaun McNiff.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McNiff, Shaun.

Art heals: how creativity cures the soul / Shaun McNiff.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2729-5

ISBN 978-1-59030-166-1 (alk. paper)

1. Art therapy. 2. Creative ability. 3. Healing. I. Title.

RC489.A7M3563 2004

615.85156dc22

2004006996

Art heals by accepting the painand doing something with it.

CONTENTS

I did not set out with a plan to spend my life furthering the work of art and healing. My start was serendipitous, as I described in Art as Medicine (1992). Let me repeat some of my story here and add some further details to set the context for this book.

I graduated from Fordham College in 1968 with a liberal arts degree and a commitment to art and social change. I made large minimalist paintings the following summer while working as a welfare social worker in Brooklyn. When the paintings became increasingly minimal, exploring different ways of placing a single line or band of color on differently sized canvases of cadmium yellow and white, it seemed that the most artistically faithful thing I could do was to stop painting altogether.

I attended law school in Boston but left in the middle of my second year to return to art and took a job in an iron works so I could learn how to weld and make steel sculpture. After two months I decided that I had to do something more professional. On the basis of my New York summer experience and rumors that one could get hired without an MSW, I went in late February to the local state hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts, looking for a social work job. I met with the hospital personnel director who told me that the rumors were not true, but he looked at my rsum and said that the art therapist had just left for Honolulu. It turns out that he was director of volunteers when my grandmother, Margaret Tyndall, came to the hospital every Thursday to sew and create with the hospital patients. I left the hospital that morning in the beginning of 1970 as an art therapist, never having heard the term before. Art therapy happened to me. Like most of the important ideas and insights of my life, it arrived outside the frames of my plans and intentions. If there was anything important that I did, it was to respond to the invitation.

I was given the opportunity to set up an art studio for the patients and immediately immersed myself in supervision and training. The hospital had a psychiatric residency program in affiliation with the Massachusetts General Hospital and I had access to wonderful supervisors. Within a few months I was giving regular talks to groups of nursing and pastoral counseling students who visited the art studio and who were always eager to see the patients art and hear about what we were doing. Through these studio talks I realized that people were keenly interested in art therapy. Shortly afterward, Rudolf Arnheim at Harvard agreed to supervise me in a masters program offered by Goddard College, and he sent me a student intern from the Harvard Divinity School and another from Radcliffe. Receiving the support of Arnheim, the preeminent authority on the psychology of art, gave me the confidence to start publishing my ideas and to become more of a public advocate for art and healing.