Focusing-Oriented Art Therapy

Focusing provides an effective way of listening to the innate wisdom of the body, while art therapy harnesses and activates creative intelligence. Focusing-Oriented Art Therapy: Accessing the Body's Wisdom and Creative Intelligence is a ground-breaking book integrating renowned psychologist Eugene Gendlin's Focusing with art therapy. This new, Focusing-based approach to art therapy helps clients to befriend their inner experience, access healing imagery from the body's felt sense to express in art, and carry forward implicit steps that lead toward change.Written for readers to be able to learn the application of this innovative approach, the book provides in-depth examples and descriptions of how to adapt Focusing-Oriented Art Therapy to a wide variety of clinical populations including individuals and groups with severe psychiatric illness, trauma, PTSD, anxiety, depression, and more, as well as applications to private practice, illness and wellness, spirituality and self-care.Integrating theory, clinical practice, and numerous guided exercises, this accessible book will enhance clinical sensitivity and skill, while adding resources for bringing creativity into practice. It will be of interest to art therapists, Focusing therapists, psychologists, counselors and social workers, as well as trainers and students.''Dr. Rappaport's professional, accessible and enjoyable detailed approach...includes a user-friendly introduction to Gendlin's Focusing Method as well as a bridge to using Focusing with art therapy... Readers will find it both refreshing and practical and a much-used addition to their libraries.''-Dr. Doris Arrington, ATR-BC, Licensed Psychologist, Notre Dame de Namur University, Professor Emeritus''Laury Rappaport is an articulate teacher and committed artist, who as a psychotherapist can look back on a long professional career, mastering Focusing and Expressive Arts Therapy alike. Based on this expertise, she eloquently presents a rich text written from a truly phenomenological perspective that guides like a red thread through this practical book. As a result it speaks to therapists of diverse traditions. What a helpful contribution for a wide range of practitioners interested in the Arts or Focusing.''-Paolo J. Knill, co-author of Principle and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy and Minstels of Soul: Intermodal Expressive Therapy''In a time the fields of neuroscience and somatic therapy increasingly inform therapeutic intervention, Laury Rappaport has written a book that is both timely and passionate in its message... Every therapist who uses creative methods in their work will benefit from the wisdom found throughout this volume.''- Cathy A. Malchiodi, PhD, ATR-BC, LPCC, National Institute for Trauma and Loss, Lesley University, MA, USA''... A major contribution to art therapy literature and practice... This intellectually provocative, yet thoroughly practical text, establishes Rappaport as an emergent leader in the art therapy world and author of a book that every student and art therapist must read in order to appreciate the depth and breadth of our discipline.''- Shaun McNiff, author of The Arts in Psychotherapy, Art as Medicine, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, and Art-Based Research''The reader can get a solid foundation in both Focusing and Art Therapy through Dr. Laury Rappaport's book. The book goes further to transform both of them, in showing how Focusing is always functioning in Art Therapy and how Art Therapy explicates the Focusing process. With lots of exercises, enriched with examples from therapy and workshops, Focusing-Oriented Art Therapy dives deeply into the life process and yet it succeeds in being a highly practical book.''- Akira Ikemi, PhD, Professor of Clinical Psychology, Kansai University, Japan