The Arts in Psychotherapy, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp.
297-305, 1995
Pergamon
0197-4556(95)00025-9
AURAS AND THEIR MEDICINES
SHAUN McNIFF,
Chase it and it always eludes you;
run from it and it is always there.
(Huang-po, 9th century Chinese Zen Master)
This passage from Huang-po touches on what I see
as the paradoxical conflict that people experience in
relation to auras. When we deny their existence they
are “always there,” and when we try to grasp and
substantiate them into spiritual sciences and tech-
niques they elude us.
I define an aura as a distinctive presence of any
person, place, thing or expression that is displayed by
a radiant world. Within the aura’s sphere many ele-
ments emanate at the same time, some of which are
subtle and others more obvious. In keeping with the
origins of the word aura from the Latin word for
breeze, situations, people and even pictures give off
airs to those who contemplate their presence. My
sense of auras is poetic rather than scientific; never-
theless I am fundamentally concerned with the spe-
cific feeling I get from the thing upon which I reflect.
This way of looking at the world is as real as that of
scientific materialism. It’s just different.
An artwork’s aura is the outward extension of its
physical presence and distinctive qualities, the airs or
expressions that it casts toward the person who per-
ceives it, a pervasive spirit that cannot be encapsu-
lated in concepts. These effects occur within the
realm of perceptual experience as contrasted to the
direct physical treatments of medical science (Am-
heim, 1954).
Twenty-five years of experience in using the arts in
therapy have convinced me that creative expressions
*Shaun McNiff is Dean of Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts and author of many books,
Psychology of Art and the forthcoming Earth Angels: Engaging the Sacred in EveryDay Things.
291
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PhD”
generate rays, energies, vibrations, forces and spirits
that influence people who contemplate them. All of
these qualities of expression, what I call “medi-
tines , ’ ’ are thoroughly practical entities that consti-
tute the therapeutic impact of the arts on an individual
person or a group of people. When we look at the
creative arts therapies as a way of healing through the
expressive spirit, it seems that we are a discipline
based on the curative effect of auras. I am constantly
exploring how we can best access the expressions
generated by images, the process of making art, and
the more general studio environment, all of which
convey direct-felt and more delicate spirits that people
experience as psychic remedies. My use of the term
medicine is aligned with traditions of healing that treat
the soul as well as the body.
I have never separated art from clinical practice.
To the contrary, I find that we are no longer clinically
precise when we move away from the actual expres-
sions of art and start to interpret them according to a
theory that has no direct relationship to the event. But
there is a troubling pattern in our profession of seek-
ing legitimization and security through something
other than clinical examination of the actual phenom-
ena of the arts.
If creative arts therapists are already reluctant to
stick to the physical media in their clinical reflections,
then the serious consideration of auras might be un-
thinkable for many. I would like to show in this paper
how a tangible medium and its expressive spirits are
inseparable from one another. As soon as we face the
physical being of the expression, we are presented
with its aura.
including Arr as Medicine. Depth
 SHAUN McNIFF
There are people who perceive auras as presences
surrounding a person that can be seen by specially
attuned senses and then “adjusted.” The auric field is
defined as an objectively present light emanating from
a person like the aureola around celestial bodies. Cre-
ative arts therapists, eager to find acceptance within a
mental health field aligned with mainstream science,
have kept these ideas at bay.
I have tried to respect the different ideas about
auras in popular culture. I personally do not see light
radiating from people, but I have no interest in argu-
ing that my personal perspective is the truthful and
objective view. I simply want to dislodge narrowly
embedded notions about auras and revive the classical
idea that objects convey expressive spirits that influ-
ence people who contemplate them.
My experience with the visual arts has been the
primary stimulus for thinking about the effects of ex-
pressions as auras. When in the company of a painting
or sculpture, I am always aware of how its total pres-
ence acts on me in a way that words can only suggest.
The artwork stands as a relatively permanent and au-
tonomous presence so there is always time to care-
fully contemplate its impact. I can return to it over
and over again and study what it does to me, whereas
expressions in the other arts are more fleeting and
therefore their auras are not as constant and physically
existent. Yet everything I have observed about auras
in the visual arts and in studio spaces applies to other
modes of expression. The expressions of the rela-
tively stable presence of objects and places help us
understand the auras of gestures, sounds and other
ephemeral media. In this paper I will demonstrate
practical qualities with references to painting, espe-
cially in the sections dealing with color and craft, but
the fundamental ideas about auras apply to all of the
arts.
The Influences of Language
As an artist looking at any type of creative expres-
sion I know there are qualities being transmitted that
cannot be communicated by the language I use to talk
about artworks or even “with” them through imagi-
nal dialogue (McNiff, 1992). Martin Heidegger
twisted words in order to expand habitual conceptions
of reality and to demonstrate how language makes an
object into a “nonentity.” He experimented with po-
etic language to become more attuned to the expres-
sive frequencies of phenomena. Nouns become verbs,
thus inverting assumptions about animate and inani-
mate life. In Heidegger’s word play “the thing
things” and expresses its “essential nature” by
“presenting itself” (1975, p. 174).
The blue blues; the chair chairs; the blue chair blue
chairs and chair blues; different things gather into
compositions in pictures and collectively act upon us;
space spaces; everything is active within a world
where language opens the power of expression to a
total participation. We begin to acknowledge expres-
sions that were not available through conventional
speech.
Psychotherapy has remained faithful to its origins
as a “talking cure” and the introduction of the arts
has happened in a way that has not challenged the
dominance of language as a mode of organization.
And it is generally the grammar and syntax of the
most conservative scientism that has shaped the lan-
guage of creative arts therapy and its resulting
thoughts. The language of behavioral science is inca-
pable not only of conveying the subtle qualities of
creation, but even the most obvious and basic char-
acteristics of an expression, such as the way it moves
or vibrates, are foreign to the standard psychothera-
peutic discourse. Therefore, our penchant for linear
and singular thought, the language we use and our
theories, do not allow access to things outside their
boundaries.
My sense of the way in which material things ex-
press spirits or auras corresponds to one of the most
ancient ideas about the medicinal qualities of the
physical world. Ancient teachings had a thoroughly
material sense of spirits that inhabited all things. Dur-
ing the Italian Renaissance Marsilio Ficino wrote, “a
spirit inside the worldy body spreads out through all
things that are under the anima mu&i. It especially
infuses its power into those which draw its spirit the
most” (1489/1980, p. 89).
Carl Jung described how scientific materialism
brought “the death of all things psychic” (1966, p.
9). In creative arts therapy the interplay between spir-
itualized matter and materialized spirit is lost as peo-
ple converse in lifeless psychological language. A
therapy of material spirits is promulgated in a lan-
guage and psychological perspective that does not ac-
knowledge their reality.
In our popular language we talk about “vibes” and
this term harks back to the ancient idea that things
throw off their spirits to people. As Homer and Lu-
cretius said, rays fly out from objects to touch other
entities in the environment. The ancients were attuned
to the subtleties of vibrational communications.
 AURAS AND THEIR MEDICINE
In my art studios people talk about the energies
transmitted by pictures and they instinctively open to
their influences; in keeping with Ficino’s statement,
they try to become more adept at drawing in the ex-
pressive powers of images. Talking is a vital part of
our interactions with paintings, but I have seen over
the years how spoken language can be restrictive if we
use it as the only way of responding to art. Quiet
contemplation is, of course, the natural way to open
to the expressions of artwork, but our work in creative
arts therapy is based upon expanding solitary creation
into participatory ritual with other people. As Bill
Wilson, the founder of AA discovered, he could not
keep his sobriety unless he shared it with someone
else. Therapies of the soul are based upon gathering
together with forces beyond ourselves. The vitality of
the engagement is, in my experience, furthered by
expanding the scope of our interactions with images.
In addition to talking, we respond to images with
body movement, sound, performance and other ex-
pressions that feed the spirit and keep it free from
containment in one mode of communication.
Within a single mode of response, such as lan-
guage, there are a variety of ways of responding to an
image-explanation, story, dialogue and poetic play.
Art therapy has not been particularly inventive in its
descriptive language. So much more can be done, but
I am realizing how important it is to first recognize the
unconscious limitations of our ways of relating to
images and how they block access to a larger influx of
expressions. We can further the essentially artistic
medicines and healing spirits of the studio by encour-
aging an organic way of speaking about what we per-
ceive through our senses, focusing more on the inter-
action of figures, forms, colors, movements, textures,
spaces, styles and other qualities. If we keep returning
to the images themselves and use language to help us
see them more completely, then we are operating in a
way that affirms the therapeutic properties of expres-
sion. I am always mindful that language is a flexible
ally that assists me in seeing what the image has to
offer. There is never a final and fixed label or mean-
ing attached to an image through words. The words
and pictures continuously interact like dance partners
generating new ways of appreciating their respective
expressions. The therapeutic objective is one of fur-
thering imagination and opening to the influx of its
powers. Attunement to the subtle expressions of
things outside ourselves is concurrently the way to
access their medicines.
Words and pictorial images are distinctly different
modes of expression and one will never contain the
other. Yet in creative arts therapy we have uncon-
sciously subjected art to the concepts of psychological
language. I prefer to emphasize the necessary and
creative interplay between words and images, with
each response to a person’s picture or performance
contributing to a total expression that is more than
“the sum of the parts.” This gesamrkunstwerk trans-
mits auras that act upon the soul.
Wallace Stevens described the interchange be-
tween poetry and painting as “migratory passings to
and fro, quickenings, Promethean liberations and dis-
coveries” (195 1, p. 169). One expressive mode can
never explain or contain another but they can enjoy an
expansive interaction.
I am not calling for the creation of a new thera-
peutic language, which would be as disagreeable to
my ears as behavior science jargon. If we all began to
talk in the same way about how the blue blues and
how the treeing of the forest interacts with the brook-
ing of the waters and the redding sky, a certain way of
being poetic would be systematized into codified
speech. Talking also generates auras and I have found
that the standardization of any language eliminates
the euphony of creative and personal speech that
never fails to deepen my engagement of an artistic
expression.
In responding to creative expressions I try to use
spoken language in a way that augments what I ex-
perience through the senses. When a person describes
intimate relations with a work of art, this invariably
helps me to experience it in new ways. I move from
habitual indentifications of figures, forms and objects
to a more pictorial sense of the way they contribute to
the overall composition. I become aware of shapes
and patterns that I did not see before and this always
brings an infusion of creative vitality.
Spirits in Art
The teachings of Rudolf Steiner have generated
long-standing spiritual approaches to the arts in ther-
apy and education. In 1920 Steiner described how the
spiritual world “fires us when we paint.” Steiner’s
anthroposophical emphasis on how people are af-
fected by the spirits of artistic expression is close to
many things that I see happening in the arts in ther-
apy. But there are at least two major areas where his
methods and those of his followers distinctly differ
from my sense of the medicinal auras generated by the
arts.
3ocl SHAUN McNIFF
First, his “spiritual science” explored how spirits
rather than molecular structures are what really exist
“behind the sense world.” I appreciate his expanding
our sense of matter beyond just molecules to also
include spirits, but, like psychoanalysis, spiritual sci-
ence focuses on what is behind the physical realm,
behind the expression, rather than realizing that spirits
and expressions are conveyed by immediate sensa-
tions. When we value what lies behind expressions,
we tend to disparage the things themselves. Also, we
do not have to choose between molecules or spirits;
we can appreciate both.
My second and most significant difference in
Steiner spirituality concerns the way anthroposophy
polarizes the realm of auras into good and bad states.
Steiner was strongly influenced by Goethe’s notion
that the soul lives in colors and moves through them,
an idea that offers fascinating possibilities for creative
arts therapy. In her book on an anthroposophical ap-
proach to art therapy, Dr. Margarethe Hauschka de-
scribed how Goethe felt that color lives between heav-
enly illuminations and earth’s dark matter. The an-
throposophical method of therapeutic painting opens
the soul to ethereal rays that alter its fixities. This
opening to the medicines of expression is progressive
and it challenges the current boundaries of creative
arts therapy. But after inspiring us to receive the in-
flux of the “etheric” breath, the anthroposophic
method becomes fundamentalistic and negative in as-
serting that its ultimate objective is a “future when
the therapies will become more liberated from matter
and more spiritual” (Hauschka, 1985, p. 15). The
soul is seen as freeing itself from flesh and earth.
Disembodied and invisible spirits are valued in oppo-
sition to the soul of things and the anima mundi, and
this accounts for the intangible qualities associated
with anthroposophical practice.
I am sympathetic with many of Steiner’s meth-
ods-the importance of the complete spectrum of ar-
tistic activity, the healing power of expressive forms
and colors, the essentially spiritual dimensions of
healing through the arts and the need to treat the soul
as well as the body. But these traditional truths are
then hampered by a series of principles that artificially
restrict the innate capacities of the creative process by
excluding dark and earthen substances. The therapeu-
tic sphere is limited to a pure and almost antiseptic
ream of spirits. These highly controlled and manipu-
lative methods have no place in depth psychology or
any therapy that opens to the soul’s pains, pathologies
and transformative disturbances.
My experience in both creative arts therapy and
personal artistic expression repeatedly affirms that the
most disturbing images always have the most to offer
because of the way they demand attention and break
through controls and repressions. A therapy limited to
the positive effects of bright colors denies the soul’s
often twisted, offensive and inverted expressions.
Creation thrives on the interplay between angels and
demons and the “polymorphous perversity” that Sig-
mund Freud revealed as one of the psyche’s most
natural and rudimentary qualities. Exclusive identifi-
cation with light and goodness keeps us in an artificial
realm of spirituality and denies access to core homeo-
pathic medicines of toxins serving as anti-toxins. In
art, we need the nasty spirits as well as the nice ones.
Color
Artists are the best sources for understanding the
psychic effects of creative expressions. They typically
stay close to the physical qualities of arts rather than
use them to advance a particular cosmology.
Claude Monet said that he “had a horror of theo-
ries” that interfered with his direct relations with na-
ture and his attempts to paint impressions of the “fu-
gitive effects” of color, light and atmosphere. His
fascination with sensations or “impressions” gener-
ated by things corresponds to my sense of an aura as
the ambience and feeling imparted by an experience.
I keep returning to Wassily Kandinsky’s classic
text, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912/1970),
when I seek out a perspective on painting that is sen-
sitive to the material process of creating, what the
artist does and how images influence people who look
at them.
According to Kandinsky, a painting expresses it-
self through “1. Color. 2. Form” (1970, p. 46). He
went on to say how form “can stand alone, as a
representation of an object” and color cannot because
it needs specific boundaries. Artists are always talk-
ing about color, atmosphere and other painterly ele-
ments that do not have the same prominence in the art
therapy literature. My own books reflect this pattern.
My omissions of color in publications have been con-
scious and largely due to the frustration of not being
able to include color plates due to the cost. Color is so
important to me and so vital to my personal art and
my practice of creative arts therapy that I want to do
it justice and not try to explain it without the presence
of the actual phenomena. But this deeply felt com-
mitment is having an inverted outcome in that color is
omitted from the general discourse.
Almost every instructional text on art therapy and
 AURAS AND THEIR MEDICINE
professional journal article is without color illustra-
tions. Although this absence can be explained as I
have just done, we have to be wary of how a financial
constraint creates habitual notions that ultimately per-
meate our collective sense of the work we do. A lack
of consideration gradually limits access to the medi-
cines carried by images. If we were troubled by the
exclusion of color and our reliance on the written text,
we would demand its presence and call for instruc-
tional materials in videotape and other formats where
it can be made available easily.
I believe that our relative inattentiveness to color is
an extension of a largely unconscious preference for
form and objectification in everything from our lan-
guage, theories, culture, myths and published mate-
rials. We are drawn to that which can be contained in
regular communications and shy away from essential
artistic elements that transcend their limits. We look
at pictures from the perspectives of narrative and con-
crete messages that fit prevailing modes of commu-
nication. When contemplating a painting in a mu-
seum, in the artist’s studio or on a wall in a house, we
have little difficulty in opening to a reverie that in-
cludes all of its expressive qualities. But to the extent
that art therapy, more than any other creative arts
therapy, is immersed in language and concepts, as
verified by the copious professional literature gener-
ated over the past 20 years, we begin to encapsulate
the field in forms that suit the prevailing modes of
communication. Consequently, a secondary mode of
reflection begins to shape our conceptions of practice
rather than the primary qualities of artistic media. The
same pattern can occur in music therapy research that
has capitalized on music’s mathematical qualities
while paying far less attention to its essentially aural
spirit.
Color illustrates how we establish methods of art
therapy practice in line with psychotherapeutic con-
ventions rather than on the basis of the qualities of art.
Even as I try to create a more imaginative and artistic
psychology of therapeutic practice, I find myself pay-
ing far less attention to color than form.
But in my practice, people are acutely sensitive to
color when they make art and during their reflections
on the images. We constantly talk about the energies
generated by images and how they affect our
thoughts, emotions, bodies and responses. Color, to-
gether with texture, are principal carriers of emotion
and feeling in my studios. They act directly on our
sensibilities without needing to be translated into
words and concepts.
In my experience there has been a discrepancy
between what occurs in practice and what I have re-
ported in my writings. In my art therapy studios, peo-
ple are clearly there to paint and they feel the strong-
est psychic connections to that aspect of the experi-
ence and the spirits it generates.
Painting has flourished as a medicine in my studi-
os. It has been relatively nonproblematic and does not
demand the same reflective attention as the interpre-
tation of imagery and the need to offer alternatives to
labeling images according to psychological theories.
Consequently, I write less about the therapeutic pro-
cess of making an image and give it far less attention
than the process of engaging images once they arrive.
The making of art takes on a shadow status in my
discussions of art therapy, but in the studio it carries
the strongest spirits. I believe that my experience par-
allels the more general lack of attention to expressive
auras in all of the creative arts therapies. Perhaps the
way that we don’t chase after them as primary ele-
ments helps to increase their power in the work itself.
As I look at my experience with color, the absence
of any attempt to systematically grasp or describe its
healing qualities has not in any way hindered how it
acts upon people. The auras of colors are constantly
influencing us. I remember my painting teacher The-
odoros Stamos saying to me, “When I look out at the
world I see alizarin crimson.” It is safe to say that
artists like Stamos are more visually attuned to the
expressions of the world and that they help us per-
ceive things that usually go unnoticed. They bring
sense perception into a lively interaction with imagi-
nation. A similar expansion occurs through creative
science and spiritual meditations.
If we assume that what Stamos sees is present, but
unseen, then nature is constantly displaying fields of
alizarin crimson, cadmium green, burnt umber and
other colors. On the basis of this supposition, we are
unconsciously perceiving fields of color and grada-
tions in hues when we look at the world and, no
doubt, we are being infused with their energetic qual-
ities without realizing it. But in keeping with its bias
toward positive science and conceptual language, cre-
ative arts therapy is almost exclusively oriented to-
ward what is already established in thought, rather
than following the lead of artists in expanding vision.
Nothing in visual experience is more kinetic than
color as it constantly changes in response to the in-
fluences of its environment-light, shape, placement,
quantity and so forth. Color is far more illusive than
form and less likely to be identified as a concrete
thing. In his classic text, Interaction of Color, Josef
Albers made it clear that when it comes to color we
302 SHAUN McNIFF
must learn how “to see,” because the expressions of
color cannot be conveyed through scientific proce-
dure. He wrote, “In visual perception a color is al-
most never seen as it really is-as it physically is.
This fact makes color the most relative medium in
art.. . it is necessary to recognize that color deceives
continually . . . one and the same color evokes innu-
merable readings” (1971, p. 1).
Although color tends to be a less bounded quality
than form, its specificity, as Albers indicated,
emerges from particular interactions and instances.
Therefore, the perception of color requires a sensitiv-
ity to subtle expressions and how something can be
doing more than one thing at the same time. Color
demands that we deal with the simultaneous interac-
tion of different elements that cannot be grasped in a
single and fixed concept. Colors are forever moving
and influencing one another in an ecology that cannot
be discussed in a way that overlooks the kinetic in-
terplay of the entire perceptual field. In this respect,
color can be embraced as the agent that opens art
therapy to its innate powers and complexities grasped
only by ways of viewing treatment that resonate with
the objective qualities of the media.
In the Middle Ages, Hildegard of Bingen de-
scribed spiritual healing as “greening.” In keeping
with her vision, Kandinsky spoke of how the percep-
tion of colors stimulates a corresponding “spiritual
vibration” in the “sensitive soul” (1970, p, 44).
There are no doubt many common, and perhaps even
biological responses that people have to colors. The
vegetal, fertile and life-giving qualities of green are
unquestionable. But like any other living thing, green
cannot be reduced to a singular identity. The color is
also an indication of ill-health and decay-gangrene
and turning green. Decomposition is a necessary con-
dition of new life, but the color green is ultimately
involved with the broad spectrum of life and death
rather than a particular phase. Hildegard’s “green-
ing” is an evocation of one of green’s many aspects.
Ancient wisdom understood this essential multiplicity
in all things wherein the cosmos could be contem-
plated in any detail of life. The phenomena of green-
ness are infinitely variable and our responses to them
can never be reduced to fixed categories of interpre-
tation. What we do is repeatedly open to the particular
qualities of the entity before us. Canned meanings
will always limit perception.
My experience indicates that personal responses to
colors and their aural expressions are apt to be more
individual than universal. We keep confusing the ma-
terial properties of the world and their expressive au-
ras with our feelings about them. Therefore, I am
wary of any attempt to make a systematic science of
the healing qualities of color correspondences. Al-
though we can make general distinctions between hot
and warm colors as well as airy and earthen hues,
clear and constant distinctions tend to end on this
level. I have always found black to be mysterious,
attractive and restful and not depressive. Deep indigos
and umbers are for me especially appealing so I would
have a difficult time with an anthroposophic therapist
who restricts me to the beneficial qualities of pastels.
I do not agree with Eugene Delacroix when he
wrote in his journal (1822-1863) that “Everyone
knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of
‘joy and plenty. ’ ” This attribution is based upon the
same assumption of certainty that allows an art diag-
nostician to say that umber manifests an anal fixation.
My experience indicates that the psychic significance
of a color varies from person to person and at any
moment in an individual’s life there are many fluctu-
ations in emotional responses to colors that simply
cannot be reduced to stable and predictable effects.
They are not only highly kinetic and relative, but as
Albers suggested, they are constantly deceptive. In
keeping with Goethe’s sense that there is a spiritual
being in every color, we can compare our relation-
ships to them to interactions with other people where
nothing can be permanently fixed.
The Influence of Craft on Auras
As a person whose practice of creative arts therapy
is strongly oriented to the “process” of creating, I
have given it relatively little attention in my writings.
This reflects the more general discourse of the field
that has not been particularly concerned with sensory
qualities of creating. Again, I must emphasize, using
my own experience as an example, that the contents
of creative arts therapy literature may be significantly
removed from the actual forces of work itself.
The issue of craft, even more than color, has been
kept outside the art therapy discourse. These omis-
sions are part of an interconnected web that leads to
other exclusions such as the kinetic dimension of
painting and body movement that challenge the
boundaries constructed between art forms. Art ther-
apy overlooks the body and the basis of painting in
kinesis that challenges the prevailing tendency to so-
lidify experience into predictable concepts. We need
to give more attention to encouraging different ges-
tures and how they form an image. But this is difficult
within a tradition that has been more involved with
 AURAS AND THEIR MEDICINE
analyzing what the gesture says about the person.
Because the emphasis is largely on diagnosis, the
therapist stands back and tries not to influence what
happens. Therefore craft and the therapist’s skill with
the medium as well as the aesthetic quality of expres-
sion and the spiritual impact of the process of creating
have been largely irrelevant. When our focus expands
to encourage the medicine offered by gestures, colors
and forms, craft takes on a new significance, more in
line with the archetypal conditions of art.
Once we recognize the spirits of expression, we
have to start making aesthetic discriminations about:
(a) the qualities of pictures and how some will affect
us more than others and (b) how the technical crafting
of an image influences its impact on the person. When
art therapy is exclusively concerned with what the
image says about the person who made it, the making
of a painting is approached as a test situation, no
different than answering a question, doing a series of
exercises or responding to a request for information
that will assist diagnosis.
It seems natural that a discipline called art therapy
must include two universally recognized features of
the artistic process: (a) the making of art as a thera-
peutic process and (b) the contemplation of artworks
in order to be influenced by their expressive qualities
of auras. Within the artistic environment there are
constant qualitative assessments of what is being
done, what a person emphasizes and overlooks and
what the image needs in order to further its expres-
sion. So again, art carries within itself a need for
assessments that is synergetic with clinical evalua-
tion. But we have not done enough to focus assess-
ment on the specific properties of art-making.
Kandinsky said, “Every object (whether a natural
form or man-made) has its own life and therefore its
own potency; we are continually being affected by
spiritual potency” (1970, p. 50). He went on to de-
clare that, “If its form is ‘poor,’ it is too weak to call
forth spiritual vibration” (p. 74).
In art therapy we have been reluctant to look at
how the way an image is crafted affects its therapeutic
value because we have identified with a therapeutic
tradition established on the interpretation of dreams.
There is an incorrect assumption that artistic images
are made by the unconscious psyche in the same way
as dreams. Although intimately related to dreaming,
art-making has many obvious differences, the most
basic being the element of manual craft and the way
it determines expressive potency.
Art therapy’s lack of attention to craft is due to a
host of factors. The two most basic ones are a legit-
303
imate desire to distinguish itself from the academic
traditions of art teaching that often limit freedoms of
psychic expression upon which art therapy is founded
and the lack of technical skills possessed by many art
therapists.
In my therapeutic practice and in my personal ar-
tistic expression, 1 constantly see how the better an
image is made, the more satisfying it will be. Aes-
thetic gratification does not mean that the picture gen-
erates a good or pleasing feeling. Its potency may also
relate to its ability to express disturbing or confused
feelings.
The affirmation of craft in the shaping of artistic
imagery in therapy does not mean that therapists have
to be able to technically instruct patients like an aca-
demic teacher. The process of creation is in itself
instructive. Images, colors, forms, materials and ges-
tures have ways of telling us what they want and
where they need to go. Master teachers always affirm
how we learn from our personal experimentation with
the medium. Monet’s advice was to paint often and as
well as you can without fear of failure and the inev-
itable “bad pictures,” and in this way the paintings
will perfect themselves. An excellent art environment
generates auras that inspire and specifically influence
creation.
The 19th century painter William Morris Hunt, in
his lectures on painting and drawing, described how it
is the interplay between feeling and the materials of
expression that makes the difference between a pic-
ture and a wooden form. He described how expres-
sion gives life and that the painter should “look
through form for expression” (1976, p. 81). Hunt
was not negating how structural qualities carry ex-
pression. When he said, “look through,” it is like
James Hillman suggesting that we “see through” the
world in a way that affirms both sense data as well as
subtle effects (1975).
We can learn from dance therapy’s emphasis on
authentic movement as an indicator of quality, imag-
ination and depth. And according to the masters of the
artistic tradition, the “only” way to get to this sin-
cerity of expression is “to keep doing it” (Hillman,
p. 103). The skilled creative arts therapist helps a
person to further expressive qualities by providing the
inspirational environment and safety needed to con-
tinue working.
The importance of craft in art therapy can be ad-
dressed simply by acknowledging its place and how it
determines expression. Once craft has its role recog-
nized, it will find ways to fulfill itself through indi-
vidual relations with materials and images. The per-
304 SHAUN McNIFF
fecting of artworks is no doubt taking place all of the
time in art therapy in a relatively unacknowledged
way in accordance with both personal and universal
aesthetic ideals. Art therapy’s gift to art is the cele-
bration of innate and idiosyncratic expression without
being constrained by external standards. However, in
our fervor to protect the personal expression of feel-
ings, we have overlooked how it is the arts them-
selves-the images, materials, gestures and auras-
that carry desires for the most complete expression
possible.
Therapeutic Application
Acknowledging the way expressions generate au-
ras that influence people immediately leads to issues
of treatment. Do we follow the medical-diagnostic
approach of controlled and strategic interventions, ap-
plying a certain type of aura to a particular malady
diagnosed by the therapist? It is definitely possible to
manipulate the effects of art in this way, as we have
seen in the planned use of particular art forms-
painting on a small surface when thoughts and emo-
tions are uncontained or, conversely, using a large
paper to encourage free gestures; bright colors, dance,
music, poems and stories to alleviate depression; wa-
ter color to stimulate flow or a more opaque and solid
material to facilitate control; work with clay to be-
come more centered or connected to the material
world; body therapy to counter intellectualization;
large and sweeping motions to further spontaneity;
weaving to encourage sustained concentration and
discipline; the sculpting of figures to further body
awareness; group dance or song to foster relationship
to others. Like any other remedy, the auras of the arts
can be directed toward desired results.
My experience with auras is less controlled. I am
always talking to people about their particular needs,
options and interests with regard to expression, media
and subject matter, but my method is one of always
generating possibilities and then stepping aside. I find
that, when given a safe and stimulating environment
for expression, the soul will always minister to itself
in a way that is more effective than something I plan.
Freedom of movement is necessary because within a
relatively short period of time the individual psyche
might fluctuate dramatically in terms of its needs or it
might simultaneously call for paradoxical expres-
sions. The creative process is often perverse, illogical
and totally contrary to what I might anticipate. Cre-
ating is in this respect close to the inverted ways of
dreams. But inversion can never be established as a
consistent rule in both art and dreams. When I start to
expect the creative path to move paradoxically, it may
stun me with the directness of its action.
In keeping with Huang-po’s statement I cited at the
beginning of this essay, I do not directly seek or chase
auras in therapy nor do I avoid them. So this orien-
tation to creative arts therapy offers little to those
intent on calculated interventions. My experience
with the psyche indicates that the emotions do not
follow the same logic that I might apply to fixing
problems in other areas. I have learned repeatedly that
the old cliche, “trust the process,” always offers the
best operational advice. The dynamics of creation are
often so complex, indirect, contradictory and subtle
that something vital is lost when they are engineered
by an external source.
A therapy of the arts is ultimately about living in
tune with the creative spirit. Creative arts therapy is a
way of accessing the auras of artistic expression that
in turn help us become more receptive to the spirits
offered every day by the physical world. The auras
and salubrious ways of expression revitalize the or-
ganism and breathe in new life if we can stay closely
attuned to them and open to their influences. Faith in
the process is combined with the advice of master
painters to simply keep working. Art is what got us
here in the first place and at a time when we were only
following an intuition of what the world needed.
The medicines of art are more likely to be accessed
through a sustained discipline than a one-time tech-
nical intervention. This artistic perspective on healing
does conflict with the quick-fix mentality that has
driven contemporary health care. The cultivation of
medicinal auras is closer to the world’s spiritual tra-
ditions and the continuities of art. Until recently, spir-
itual and artistic approaches could be dismissed as
“not clinical, ” but we now see that the prevailing
models of health care are incomplete. Medicine is
quickly moving toward a more comprehensive and
natural view of treatment. In this new climate even
those who have been most suspicious about the spirits
of expression may be ready to take another look at
auras.
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