The Languages of Art Therapists, Nona Orbach
Embodying our organic text
An art therapist communicates in two languages: the language of materials and the language of psychology. She uses both, with one illuminating and expanding the other. In recent years, I have been accompanying the personal writing of art therapists who submit texts to the YAHAT- The International Arts Therapies Library, and I have noticed a significant gap: sometimes therapists whose work in the studio is rich and sensitive find it difficult to describe in words, to conceptualize the processes that took place in the studio. Some physical, sensory, and material knowledge is lost in the transition to spoken and written language.
I sometimes encounter a similar distance in supervision sessions and in reading professional literature, where the gap is broadly "glued" through psychological terms.
While psychological terms are vital, we are a professional space that still struggles to articulate a fundamental part of our essence because we have not yet developed and embodied our own organic written expression.
Therefore, I suggest we think about this together and explore literary genres and modes of expression that weave connections between these two modes and approaches.
To this end, I will sketch, somewhat schematically, three typical perspectives among art therapists, all of whom may be excellent therapists, but whose starting points regarding materials, actions, senses, and language differ.
The Tree Metaphor and Three Characteristics of Art Therapists
To understand why the transition from material to word is not self-evident, I would like to return to the tree metaphor, which has accompanied my thinking about creative processes for many years. Through it, we can see the different aspects from which we operate as therapists and how we move between sensory experience and conceptualization. The tree metaphor contains three parts: roots, trunk, and top. Each part characterizes and represents an essence of the creative process, with passages within the tree like a spiral that moves from the depths of the dark earth up to the top in sunlight, then curls down into darkness, and so on.
The roots in the darkness express the feminine aspect of our psyche, the anima. They encompass the primary instincts, senses, and imagination. This phase derives much of its vitality from the nonverbal knowledge accumulated in the body and, in a vague way, guides the modes of physical communication with materials.
In the trunk phase, the creator observes their work from a distance, signaling a shift in consciousness. The creative process now turns toward thinking and conceptualizing what their body and soul have created. Words take center stage. The creator reflects on connections, associations, and memories, sharing what they have experienced during the process and what they now see from a distance in their work. This is the masculine aspect of our personality, the animus.
The treetop represents the broadest and most integrative expression of the creative and thinking process. The branches, foliage, and fruit hold the work's emotional meanings, memories, and spiritual imagination, which begin at the root. In this phase, through contemplation of the work or a sequence of artworks, the creator and therapist might undergo an intense emotional experience that reverberates from the root to the top and beyond. These are moments of deep understanding that encompass all parts of consciousness, in both matter and words. These are moments of wonder in the treatment of art, where we experience how matter and spirit complement and resonate with each other.
The spiral process repeats from the roots upward and from the top down through the trunk. The movement among the roots, the trunk, and the tops occurs in every creative process. But it seems to me that each of us has a more natural and familiar area in the tree, an area that is a kind of home. Some of us live mostly in the roots; some in the trunk. This area is our natural point of departure, from which we set out to meet the world.
Three perspectives
The three perspectives I will present are not fixed types or a ranking of therapists, but an attempt to observe different professional tendencies, the places where we feel at home, and the possibilities for movement that open to us. Each therapist may do deep, sensitive therapeutic work from her own point of view, and each has the other possibilities as well.
I imagine the therapists who work from the roots phase as children whose senses were very awake. They loved mud, kneaded dough, were not afraid to get dirty, and found creating with any material both a joy and a natural mental refuge for processing feelings nonverbally. As a result, they naturally have a deep trust in creative processes. They are also the ones who usually come to art schools, teach art, and only then come to learn therapy. When they are therapists, they easily identify with creators; they understand sensorily and intuitively, in their bodies, through their mirror neurons, what is happening in front of them. Accordingly, they can also make organic suggestions.
At the same time, verbal language is less available to them, perhaps because they did not feel the need for it. In our supervision sessions, it becomes clear that the conceptualization of such a therapist is less rich than the therapist's natural and intuitive moves with patients.
The therapeutic processes will be valuable, but it will be difficult to communicate to the parents and the educational or psychiatric staff, in words, what is happening there and how life events relate to gouache smearing. In other words, they will often have difficulty explaining the connection between bodily and material actions and the mind. This gap can sometimes create a sense of professional loneliness, especially when it is difficult to convey to the staff the full complexity of what happened in the studio.
During our supervision sessions, she will demonstrate, with wisdom and involvement, how the patient has instinctively responded, marveling at hopeful transitions from 2D to 3D and at changes in materials. I will also notice the sensuality she conveys through her body language. However, her verbal conceptualization will be poor.
Other therapists feel at home in the trunk phase. They have the language to articulate it. Many come to art therapy after a degree in social work or psychology; they know a great deal about the field, and some have already worked in and experienced therapy. They understand the psychological language and can easily formulate the patient's story, through psychological theories and metaphors, in the cognitive light of the tree trunk.
Because actions and materials are less immediate to them, their attention is directed mainly to the content, which is also reflected in verbatim writing. When they share with me the story of the patient's pictorial artistic process, they immediately relate to the psychological concepts and less to the way it is done. They hardly see the "how".
Sometimes this starting point is also evident in the way she organizes the therapy room. They have a clean seating area with armchairs. Adjacent to the wall is also a table for creation, but the materials on it are usually linear rather than stained. In other words, the therapy is represented by two physical worlds, and the encounter begins with talking armchairs. Thus, the transition from sitting to a creative act is postponed, and often the work illustrates what was discussed before.
Some therapists find that the two languages come together more naturally and that they move flexibly between the roots and the stem. They experience healing processes through materials and the senses, and express them through metaphors and verb elaboration. They move naturally toward integrating language and matter.
At the same time, I find that therapists who move easily between the stem and the roots are quite rare.
These are not three fixed types or levels of professional development, but rather starting points and tendencies that may shift across therapeutic contexts and encounters with different patients.
The tree top appears in all the therapists described, conveying special moments that may occur in any therapeutic session when matter, body, memory, and meaning echo each other. In the experience of art therapy, both in the therapist and in the patient’s soul, this state is expressed in moments of resonance among mind, spirit, and matter; new meaning is created, and connections are formed among what the body has just created, a memory that emerges, emotions that float, new insights, and the connections between the past and the present. These are the moments when the patient and we rise to a new meaning. In that moment, everything is reconciled with optimism and expansion.
Not every meeting or relationship involves moving through the entire tree, and it doesn't happen with every patient. Each meeting is unique, and it is one way rather than another for a reason. Some patients need to stay at the roots for a long time without pushing toward the trunk, and vice versa. Therefore, the tree map helps us discern where we are so we do not create unnecessary interventions.
Recognizing our natural area in the tree is not meant to fix us there but to open up additional possibilities. A therapist who lives in the world of roots can learn to give words to her sensory knowledge, and a therapist who feels at home in the trunk can deepen her listening to the material and the body and give them a poetic language. Thus, we can expand our ways of observing and acting, and the language we use to share the knowledge created in the studio. In both cases, a poetic language of words is needed to create contexts and bridges.
Why is it important to create movement in the tree?
Even if each of us has a more familiar and natural area within the tree, it is possible to expand and learn to move between the areas, because movement will deepen and enrich the therapeutic work as well as the personal creative processes!
I find that one way to foster the flexibility of this movement is through writing. Not just as a means of documenting what happened, but as an action that expands the observation itself.
When we search for words, verbs, and images to express feelings, we may discover meanings we did not notice at the time of the event. When a therapist keeps a detailed record of the patient's actions and collects metaphors and associations, this essence will move into the treatment. In addition, if she shares these materials with the supervisor, it becomes a mutual learning experience. And so, the experience will move into the tree top of both of us, and the patient will receive more accurate and richer responses.
How can we write about art therapy?
Writing about actions that transform materials, objects, and feelings is inherently difficult because there is a gap between the quantity and variety of words in all languages to define what the body expresses in tiny gestures. Maybe that's why we write in generalizations, and maybe that's why we rely so heavily on abstract psychological terms. We seek poetic writing that comes from our intuitive right brain, closer to poetry than to logical article writing. We need metaphors, images, and playful wordplay.
Personal and poetic writing can be a significant bridge woven between the worlds of matter and words; not writing that rushes to explain the work, but rather texts that seek to observe the details that unfold in the studio: the movement of the hand, the choice of material, the pace of the actions, the small changes. From gentle, poetic observation, images and metaphors emerge, deepening our understanding.
Writing as a Stream of Consciousness
Personal writing processes develop both humanely and professionally. Our delicate observational abilities branch out and deepen, and we become more sophisticated as therapists and supervisors. Short sentences and paragraphs that accumulate in a notebook will reflect and teach you, little by little, more about yourself. The more they accumulate, the more you will be able to find contexts and meanings among them and connect them to a running text. Through them, you can also identify what concerns you.
Perhaps we can start writing as we create in the studio: without knowing in advance what the result will be, out of curiosity, through acting and movement. Perhaps like doodling born from a small gesture, gradually discovering its form.
Perhaps we will give ourselves in writing the same permission we wish to give our patients in the studio: to experiment, to make mistakes, to erase, to repeat and try. To let the words grow out of the actions and the experience, and to trust that something will be revealed along the way.
And I say this: Our writing can be personal, playful, and flowing if we treat it like a doodle rather than a realistic painting. As in the studio, you can start with a small act here and only later discover where it leads.
Perhaps we should give ourselves the same permission in writing that we wish to give our patients in the studio? To start without knowing, to experiment, to make mistakes, to erase, to repeat and try. To let the words grow out of the actions and experiences.
When we allow ourselves to write without knowing in advance where we will end up, we begin to activate the same qualities that allow us to create in the studio: curiosity, acting, and trust in the process.
Perhaps writing itself is also a movement within the tree?
It begins with roots, with a vague feeling, in an image or a physical memory; it becomes the trunk, where we find words and notice connections; and sometimes it reaches the top, where broad meanings are revealed that we did not know we were seeking.
And so, little by little, we will develop and embody a poetic language of arts therapy that knows the nourishing darkness of the roots, the light of the trunk's observation, and the open space of the tree top, and moves flexibly between them.
Such a language not only describes what is happening in the studio but also continues the act of creation in its own way. Our professional language will be embodied in our bodies, in matter and soul.
We don't have to choose between materials and words; rather, we should learn to listen to both, weave a web of connection, and let them speak to one another.
I hope that The International Library of YAHAT will be a place where these personal languages can meet, resonate with one another, and develop another professional language that does not distance itself from the material and the body in order to talk about the soul.
Nona Orbach: nonaorbach@gmail.com
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