title: [Treatment and personality development with art therapy. A description of the method].
abstract: Composition as a creative form of self-expression plays an important role not only in maintaining health, but also in gaining insight into the healthy personality and in the definition of this category. It seems nowadays that psychology has collected more information on the pathological personality than on the healthy one. Therefore, different workshops of art therapy are also scenes of a "spiritual alchemy" because they can give a deeper insight into the personality in addition to the primary aim of treatment. The method of the thematic art psychotherapy based on catharsis-experience is based on analytical psychology and on analytically oriented group-therapy. The aim is to generate artificial catharsis-experiences employing the impressive forces of poems, music compositions in order to raise the unconscious or the partly experienced partner-conflicts to the surface, which could manifest themselves in the process of the creative work and could be elaborated in group-activity. The creative process (specially adapted art techniques) provides good opportunities for patients to depict their traumas and complexes and also to resolve them involving the whole personality and not only at a cognitive level. The method, tuned to the workings of nature, helps the personality to develop the emotional and volitional segments, the sensitive and empathetic capabilities, as well as the recognition skills of consciousness. In the therapeutic process, the work of art that is created holds a mirror to the creator, offering to him or her the opportunity to face the real complex at the background the actual conflict. The method aims to achieve a reconstruction of psychic dynamics in two ways. The first is an emotional resonance to the changes of nature, of the year and of the feasts, in which the psychic process starts from inside to the direction of the outside world (psychic enrichment and accomodation). The second way leads from the outer world to the inner one and this psychic assimilation or internalisation process is supported by a true to nature representation of the objects of the outside world. The reorganization of the social relations (through catharsis-experiences) serves both of these psychic movements (a mutual flux between the inner and outer world), as it includes both the actual as the past bonds.
authors.affiliation: Lelki Egészségvédô Alapitvány Mûvészet-pszichoterápias Mûhely, Budapest, Hungary. antalfai.marta@freemail.hu
authors.forename: Márta
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Antalfai
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001154:Art; D001155:Art Therapy; D002399:Catharsis; D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D003405:Creativity; D004496:Education, Continuing / Q000379:methods; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009146:Music; D033262:Narration; D010151:Paintings; D010553:Personality Development; D011037:Poetry as Topic; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy; D012613:Sculpture