Dr Martin A. Fischer

Dr Fischer was my teacher. He died suddenly in 1992 at the age of 78. His work made an important contribution to art therapy, and with it he touched many peoples’ lives.

Dr Fischer came to Canada in 1940 from Vienna. He had trained as a medical doctor in Vienna and by the time he was finishing his studies, the Nazi’s had come to power. One the day of the final exams, the Nazi’s stormed the examination room and removed all the Jewish students. The journey out of Vienna was treacherous with internments in prison and internment camps. Through some efforts on the part of a Jewish charity he finally arrive in Canada and there was interned in a British Fort. After his release, arranged by a doctor in Toronto, he wrote his final year of medical school, and subsequently received his psychiatric training.

Dr Fischer’s distinguished career included many creative innovations. For our purposes I will emphasize his initiation of residential treatment for children and adolescents in the 1960’s where homes were established as surrogate families, and which has become an accepted treatment model in our society. As well as acting as a consultant for the Ontario Children’s Aid Society, Dr Fischer taught psychiatric residents for many years. In all of these settings he introduced art therapy.

I remember Dr Fischer telling us that in the 1940’s he gave a psychotic patient a drawing pad and a pencil. Later the patient came to him with the whole pad filled with drawings. Dr Fischer noticed that the images were personally very meaningful and his agitation was significantly reduced by the emotional discharge through art. This interaction between doctor and patient was an inspiration that led him to use art therapy in treatment.

After many years of treating psychiatric patients in hospitals and children in residential care, by 1967 Dr Fischer was convinced enough in the power of art in healing that he established the Toronto Art Therapy Institute.

Dr Fischer’s main thesis was the art’s ability to uncover the unconscious. His faithfulness to Freudian theories of the unconscious motivated his model of art therapy. At the same time he proposed that art had not been given its rightful position in Freud’s exploration of the unconscious and dreams and we art therapists would carry forward this work. Dr Fischer proposed that spontaneous expression through art and the free association to images produced was a direct route to the unconscious. He taught us that the unconscious stores our hidden experience and distortions, and that once externalized through the art and identified, we can begin to change.

In consideration of his dedication that the unconscious has the power to shape our lives, Dr. Fischer was unwavering in his conviction that as art therapists, we become fully acquainted with the process of art therapy and its connection to the unconscious. This was central to his training approach. As we worked with our clients we were repeatedly astonished at the power and the truth of the art. As we worked on ourselves we saw the same. We learned how the application of art to the unconscious works. We learned that expressing pain and suffering though art therapy can be effectively channeled in the direction of healing and health. We saw art depicting sadness, anger, grief and hope. We learned that art tells the truth, the whole story. Dr Fischer would say: “Let the art speak for itself. It needs no interference”.