About pictures in drawing image therapy

Art therapy is the use of any artistic expression as a tool in a psychotherapeutic process. It is a method, which the therapist and the client, in a psychotherapeutic collaboration, can use in order to get material from subconsciousness up to consciousness. Art therapy can be used in relation to different psychotherapeutic approaches, and should always be based on a psychotherapeutic theory. In art therapy, the value of the artistic expression is never important. On the contrary, what is important, is the psychic process and the awareness-raising result of that.

Drawing image therapy is a branch of art therapy. It was created by the Danish psychologist and gestalt therapist Hanne Hostrup in the 1980s. Even if drawing image therapy is a complete form of therapy, with its own methods and an own theoretical reference frame, it should always be used in a psychotherapeutic context and be based on a psychotherapeutic theory. The person, who is responsible for the process in question, should always be an educated psychotherapist.

Most important of all is that the therapist in his/her work only ask questions about the pictures drawn by the client. It is the client’s task to explain his/ her pictures, never the therapist’s to interpret them.

In drawing image therapy the client is asked to draw with the non-dominant hand. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, it can help the client to make the achievement pressure smaller, as the client on beforehand is aware that he/she cannot control in the same way how the non-dominant hand functions. Secondly, the drawings become more precise in relation to the problematic that the client works with, just because it is more difficult to control the non-dominant hand.

Because I work as a psychotherapist, do the duty of confidentiality apply to all collaborations between me and the clients. The same do also apply to the products that the clients produce in art therapy. All the drawn pictures that are on this webpage are my own process drawings.