Reflecting the increasing recognition of the importance of the spiritual in healing, Spirituality and Art Therapy 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 are leading art therapists who write from diverse perspectives, including Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and shamanic. They explain how their own spiritual and creative influences interact, finding expression ...

Everyone has different needs when it comes to coping with life's stressors, and children are no different. Some need quiet and soothing activities to calm them down, whereas others require more physical activity or intense sensory input to relax their minds and bodies. This resource comprises a collection of fun, flexible, tried-and-tested activities and make-it-yourself workbooks for parents and professionals to help a child in need of extra emotional support find the coping skills that f...

It can be difficult to be spontaneous during every art therapy group. It is helpful to have a resource full of creative and inspiring ideas that can be utilized as needed. This broad-ranging collection of projects injects variety into art therapy sessions. A Practical Art Therapy is written in an easy-to-read format that is filled with practical creative experiences for therapists to use with individuals and groups.Chapters cover various media and methods, including murals, collage...

Arguing that the profession of art therapy has its roots in the studio environment, Catherine Moon proposes that it is now time to reclaim these roots, and make art once again central to art therapy. She suggests that there has been a tendency for art therapy not merely to interact with and be enriched by other perspectives - psychological, social, anthropological and transpersonal - but to be subsumed by them. For this reason she makes a clear distinction between using art in one's practi...

Contemporary Art Therapy with Adolescents offers practical and imaginative solutions to the multifaceted challenges that clinicians face when treating young people. The author fuses the contemporary theories of clinical treatment with the creative processes of art therapy to arrive at a synthesis which yields successful outcomes when working with adolescents. Clinicians of allied disciplines, particularly art therapists, will find practical suggestions for using imagery to enrich their rel...

This practical guide to running music therapy groups with senior citizens provides effective strategies that encourage therapists to be creative and engaging, and involve participants fully in the music-making process.Ideal for those working with older people in assisted living or nursing care homes, the book covers initial assessment, setting measurable goals, and evaluating progress; discusses current music therapy techniques; and offers an improved plan of intervention. The auth...

Kazimir Malevich’s painting Black Square is one of the twentieth century's emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. None of Malevich’s contemporary revolutionaries created a manifesto, an emblem, as capacious and in its own way unique as this work; it became both the quintessence of the Russian avant-gardist's own art—which he called Suprematism—and a milestone on the highway of world art. Writing about this single pa...

Parent-child-dyad art therapy is an interesting and innovative art therapy, in which parent and child share the production of an artwork. Aiming to reinforce or re-establish bonds between children and parents, it provides a space where parents' early unresolved conflicts and children's developmental abilities can be expressed. Lucille Proulx explores many aspects of dyad art therapy including attachment relationship theories, the roles of parents and art therapists in dyad interventions, t...

Newly qualified art therapists often feel daunted by the challenge of actually being face-to-face with a client and are unsure how to progress after the first image has been created. In this honest and encouraging book, Deborah Schroder explains how art can provide openings into therapeutic relationships and create a safe space for exploring issues and concerns.Drawing on her own development as an art therapist and her extensive experience of supervising new therapists and students...

The field of 'art and religion' is fast becoming one of the most dynamic areas of religious studies. Uniquely, "The Art of the Sacred" explores the relationship between religion and the visual arts - and vice versa - within Christianity and other major religious traditions. It identifies and describes the main historical, theological, sociological and aesthetic dimensions of 'religious' art, with particular attention to 'popular' as well as 'high' culture, and within societies of the devel...

Art therapy enables the client and therapist to explore issues that may ordinarily be difficult to articulate in words; one such issue is the complexity of gender, which can be a subject of therapy in a range of ways. Gender identity is at the heart of our self-understanding. The contributors to this book cover such topics as internalised homophobia in both therapist and client, art and pregnancy, art therapy with women only and men-only groups, feminist art therapy, gay and lesbian issues...

The near-absence of religion from contemporary discourse on art is one of the most fundamental issues in postmodernism. Artists critical of religion can find voices in the art world, but religion itself, including spirituality, is taken to be excluded by the very project of modernism. The sublime, "re-enchantment" (as in Weber), and the aura (as in Benjamin) have been used to smuggle religious concepts back into academic writing, but there is still no direct communication between "religion...