March 5, 2015: Directed Bake Off: Art Therapy Continued.

         A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator. (Eugene Delacroix)

     Since Lori did such a good job last week of telling us about her field of study and work, and since I read some desire within the group to have more time to discuss the vast information that she presented, I decided to make this Bake Off a so-called directed Bake Off in order to provide a chance to expand our consideration of art therapy and empathy.

     Lori and several members of our group clarified that Art Therapy primarily draws out the client. It is using art to bring out a narrative, a story, from that client and then moves further by interacting with the art.

     Lori studies at Mount Mary College which is one of only 60 programs in Art Therapy. 

     Paul mentioned that one could ask "How does it feel to be in that picture?" and this question might succeed in drawing out the client. He described one patient of his who had Ashberger's Syndrome and always drew himself as a locomotive. He could not see the need to study math or other subjects, but this identification that he had with train locomotives could be used to help him with his math homework by framing what he had to learn in the language or examples of math calculations.

     One member asked Lori if the colors of the art work used or drawn by the client had any significance. We recently had a presentation on color therapy and learned how colors do play a role in people's moods and may even have beneficial or curative influences. Lori answered that the use of color by clients is often subtle. Bright colors are not always positive and vice versa. The actual nature of the drawing tells us more. For example one client might show an explosion and even though it was drawn with bright colors, the nature of this depicted explosion showed the chaos in his life. Therefore, a client uses certain colors but it may not be a conscious choice and those colors may not have the meaning you would think.

     Another member asked if anyone had heard of the Luscher color test. This is a psychological test invented by Dr. Max Lusher in Basel, Switzerland. Dr. Luscher believed that sensory perception of color is objective and shared by all but that color preferences are subjective and that these subjective states can be measured by using test colors. Luscher believed that color selections which are guided unconsciously, they reveal the person as they really are and not as they would like to be perceived or as they may falsely perceive themselves. Luscher developed a list of meanings of certain test colors and used these to analyze clients. The results of this color test have not been scientifically proven and most people fell it is not valid. There was some testing done trying to compare the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory which is regarded as an effective testing device with the Luscher Color Test and there weas no significant agreement between the two test results.

     Paul commented that when he is treating chronic pain, he asks the patient to answer several questions about the nature of their pain: How big is it? What shape is it? Where is the pain? And what color is the pain? As treatment of the pain progresses, one does not have to get into interpreting the color, but the therapist can see if treatment is changing the color of the pain. You are not specifically trying to change one color to another but it does change so that you can see some effect of the therapy.

     Mark spent some time describing what he does in his work with neurofeedback. He described that people that come to see him for neurofeedback treatment have had lots of treatments. They have seen a lot of doctors, had consults, medications, and various behavioral therapies. In other words, almost everything has been tried. but what he does is like art therapy, in that it is non invasive. By invasive he means that it does not alter the body's neurochemistry as medications do, nor apply shock therapy or involve invasive procedures. Briefly he described neurofeedback as using technology to mirror the state of consciousness back to the client using audio and visual feedback. Really the brain's activity is shown to the patient through varying sound and visual graphs or spikes. Some members expressed an interest in learning more about these techniques from Mark so that this might be a future program.