Healing the Presence in Arts Therapy
Healing the Presence in Arts Therapy

Summary/Abstract: Good practice in arts therapy requires reflection on its very foundations:human health that sets the therapeutic goals and the role ofthe therapist in the process of healing and an understanding of artthat would legitimize its place in therapeutic activities. The concept ofhealth is currently under discussion and the concept of art is inherentlyopen. In all activities understood as auxiliary in the healing process,the primum non nocere principle applies. A thoughtless use of art intherapeutic activities can be harmful.The WHO identifies health as broadly defined well-being allowingsatisfactory productivity. In this paper, such understanding of health isdiscussed and contrasted with an approach that views health as a dynamicstate of equilibrium that we owe to the vitality of the processesof homeostasis and allostasis, while recovery is understood as aneffective effort taken by the whole body to manage these processes.Such a perspective allows us to see health as both being in “goodshape” and the vital ability to strive for the “good shape.” I link thevitality of these processes with the human ability to be present.I see art as a uniquely human experience of the difficult, often painfulprocess of striving for a good form, and the form itself. I call that form“affecting presence” after Robert Plant Armstrong (1971). The creativeexpressive process that results in the creation and recognition ofsuch 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 thatissues from it is both its most crucial task and the condition of its success.

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