Re:Invention and Realignments of Art Therapy

Abstract

As art therapy evolves over generations and geography, its practitioners must learn to negotiate complex professional identities in the context of ever-changing needs and challenges for which there are no maps. The world in which art therapy originated no longer exists; the world we are entering is in constant flux. We are greeted here by unfamiliar ideas and technologies, new science, conflicting social and political agendas, and as-yet unimagined practice arenas. This paper considers a long-standing dialectic in art therapy: the desire for a safe harbor among our own kind and the pressing need to journey into the unknown. It discusses reinvention as a pragmatic practice that awakens the expectation of change. Once awakened, it becomes necessary to recreate paradigms, myths, and frameworks, and to realign with the new and emerging world.