Pioneers

Introduced to this country in the forties and fifties by Dr. Martin A. Fisher, Selwyn and Irene Dewdney and Marie Revai, art therapy has now entered its second generation in Canada. By now art therapy has grown into a full-fledged profession with training institutes, individual practioners, institutional connections and professional associations across the country. Those of us of the first generation of Art Therapists are now collaborating with our students and former students in our common endeavour in expanding the effectiveness and influence of the profession. The profession has come of age. And a sure marker of that fact is that, by now, thirty some years after it began here, it possesses a past, a history.

As art therapists we understand that the unconscious is expressed through visual communication. As art therapists we provide the environment and the relationship for visual and verbal manifestation and the working through of personal suffering. We witness the uncovering of volatile material as well as normal expression of life’s complexities

The art is our guide. We wait for images and symbols to appear. We watch for affect, articulation and content. We are with our clients as the substance and meaning of the art shows up. We love the art. We know that it is telling us the truth. And the clients use our attention to their art and creativity as part of their journey to their own healing.

At the beginning of the nineteen hundreds Freud’s investigation of the unconscious was changing the world. Among his followers, the recognition that not only dreams, but also art illustrates the unconscious, as well as the healing potential it offered, came from two different sources:

• There were the treaters of the psychiatric population who noticed that their patients’ art revealed unconscious elements that could not be reached verbally and had a value beyond words

• There were the art teachers who noticed that the art of their students was expressing very significant and meaningful personal issues which could be valuable in understanding human behaviour.

In Europe and North America, this awareness developed gradually, and by the early 1940’s the term art therapy was loosely being used, especially in the psychiatric community.

In Canada, the original pioneers were all born within the first 14 years of the nineteen hundreds. Bearing in mind that Freud was very much an influence at the time, our mentors each came from a passionate psychoanalytic background which they used as the foundation of their work. All began their art therapy practice by introducing art to psychiatric patients. Making their discoveries independently, they never collaborated with each other and as will be explained, their approaches to the use of art in healing was diverse.

In the late 1940’s, Dr Martin A. Fischer a psychiatrist began offering art to his psychiatric patients at Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital in Toronto. Later, as a consultant to the department of Ontario Children’s Aid Society he introduced the use of art therapy with children, focusing on the aspect of primary prevention of emotional problems, an area to which he dedicated much of his energy and life’s work.

In the late 1940’s Selwyn Dewdney, an artist, writer, and explorerer, began using art with psychiatric patients, and by the early 1950’s included his wife, Irene, also an artist, joined him in his work at both the Westminster Veteran’s Hospital in London, Ontario and the London Psychiatric hospital.

Marie Revai, an artist in Montreal began teaching art to underprivileged children and was eventually hired to work in the Alan Memorial Hospital with psychiatric patients.

Imagine the conditions in the psychiatric hospitals in the nineteen forties. The medications and treatment methods were undeveloped. It appears, though, that because of the lack of understanding of how to help these people as well as a desire to find a way, art therapy, though not widespread, was given some credence as a possibility for treatment in the hospitals. It is clear that the art of a patient suffering from depression would be as we see it today, fragile, dark, impoverished. And the art of a patient experiencing psychosis, who would have been marginally medicated or not at all, would have been as we expect, fragmented, expressing and illustrating delusions and fear and more.

The same is true with the art of children from those days, although the terms of reference were different. Whereas today we see contemporary childhood cultural icons, much fantasy, space ships, cartoon characters, etc., the art of children who were angry and abandoned in those times, had the same flavour and texture of anger, grief and loss.

Our four pioneers had found a use of art which produced tangible evidence of feeling states, mental positions and personal symbols, and they saw the power of healing and understanding that it offered. I expect that their observations were supported by noticing the change in their patients during and after making images, as well as what the patients said about their art as a reflection of personal experience. They recognised that the art was a powerful tool in accessing the inner life of the individual. Convinced of the healing properties of art making, they brought it to us to pass it on. They were true teachers. They gave us the opportunity to learn from them and the prospects of our furthering their work and expanding on it.

We are now at a turning point. Our four Canadian pioneers have placed individual stamps on their use of art in healing. It appears that there were three streams:

• Dr Fischer remained closely aligned to psychoanalysis in his use of art therapy and tended to work with the normal population with people capable of insight and to use the art to help them work towards change.
• the Dewdneys while dedicated to their own psychoanalytic investigations, developed techniques in using art for healing such as the ‘objective approach’ as well as valuing and encouraging the artist
• And Marie Revai whose interest in the psychiatric population was using art as a diagnostic tool

As they worked with the art, they each developed a following. The groups that surrounded them naturally wanted to learn about art therapy from the masters, and they in turn felt fit to teach. So training programs, informal and formal, began to spring up.

• In 1967 Dr. Fischer established the Toronto Art Therapy Institute a program that has since become a two year post graduate art therapy training.
• In the 1970’s Irene Dewdney began to informally train art therapists. This led to the establishment of the art therapy post-baccalaureate training program at the University of Western Ontario in 1986.
• And Marie Revai’s work led to the founding of the master’s degree program at Concordia University in 1983.

At the time of the beginning of formalizing training there was a lot of resistance to art therapy. Art therapy was seen as ‘flaky’, a ‘fringe technique’, something that may be only useful for children, something that was easy, and anybody could do it. Dr. Fischer, the Dewdneys, Marie Revai were never put off or held back. In their dedication to the value of art therapy, they passed on their belief and determination to their students. I was a student in those early days, the early seventies, and although we found ourselves justifying and defending ourselves to the skeptics (of which there were many), we stood proud and defiant; it was as if we had a calling!

In the seventies, the professional communities in Ontario and Quebec, and British Columbia, were still resistant to art therapy, but a beginning was made in initiating it as a treatment modality. Every time an art therapist was given a position in a hospital or agency, though rare, we celebrated the triumph. Here and there people would find contracts and roll up their sleeves and get to work. The art therapists became active, joining together to form associations, trying to support each other, and as groups finding ways to promote this work.

As I was writing this, I wondered to myself whether things have changed much since then. Yes and no. While we are still pioneering this work, while we still do not have too many jobs advertising for art therapists, while we are still on a mission, I believe there is some change. There are more of us. There is a growing presence across Canada. Art therapy is being acknowledged. The literature is growing. And art therapy is being welcomed into the mainstream, recognized as having something to offer.