Storytelling as Visual Narratives Representations in Art Therapy

Abstract

‘People are story tellers by nature’. The storyteller is a well-known personality in all human societies throughout recorded history. Storytelling technique is grounded in therapy. Storytelling ability emanates from narrative knowledge. Notably, it is reframed as the patient’s ability to use cognitive, symbolic, and affective mental processes to create narratives and visual representations. During Art Therapy sessions, the patient creates narratives and visual representations to understand the meaning and significance of his/her mental state. The narrative is the result of the patient's storytelling. In Art Therapy, storytelling is less verbal and more visual. Denzin and Lincoln say: ‘The visual narrative tells many different stories at the same time as it mixes and combines multiple images.’ I have found, however, that visual narrative is not complete without support through dialogue and language. The usefulness of both the visual and the verbal led me to develop the concept of visual narrative representations. There are many visual modes available in Art Therapy such as drawings, sculptures, and many others. I recognize them as visual representations. However, I have found that the visual, by itself, is insufficient to understand fully what is transpiring in my patients’ minds. Therefore, I combine the visual and the narrative and refer to them as visual narrative representations. Both verbal and visual representations are assessed by the ‘Six-Piece Story Making Technique’ (6PSM), a projective technique using structure to help a client create a new, fictional story that can be used in psychotherapeutic assessment or treatment. Mooli Lahad elaborated six coping modalities: belief, affect, social, imagination, cognition and physiology, which are universally referred to as Basic-PH. Arthur Frank refers to another important reason to use storytelling interventions in Art Therapy sessions. Through telling their stories, patients create empathic bonds between the wounded storyteller and the wounded healer. Finally, because stories can heal, storytelling in Art Therapy reveals the connections between deeper layers of the patients’ soul and body through their sign making in their artwork.