Healing the Presence in Arts Therapy

Abstract

Good practice in arts therapy requires reflection on its very foundations: human health that sets the therapeutic goals and the role of the therapist in the process of healing and an understanding of art that would legitimize its place in therapeutic activities. The concept of health is currently under discussion and the concept of art is inherently open. In all activities understood as auxiliary in the healing process, the primum non nocere principle applies. A thoughtless use of art in therapeutic activities can be harmful. The WHO identifies health as broadly defined well-being allowing satisfactory productivity. In this paper, such understanding of health is discussed and contrasted with an approach that views health as a dynamic state of equilibrium that we owe to the vitality of the processes of homeostasis and allostasis, while recovery is understood as an effective effort taken by the whole body to manage these processes. Such a perspective allows us to see health as both being in “good shape” and the vital ability to strive for the “good shape.” I link the vitality of these processes with the human ability to be present. I see art as a uniquely human experience of the difficult, often painful process of striving for a good form, and the form itself. I call that form “affecting presence” after Robert Plant Armstrong (1971). The creative expressive process that results in the creation and recognition of such forms is seen as driven by striving for adaptation and transcendence. Fulfilling both of these goals requires a presence that enables direct encounter with likeness and otherness. In arts therapy practice, giving equal attention to the process and the affecting presence that issues from it is both its most crucial task and the condition of its success.