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Quoting some interesting paragraphs:
" Do we explain or understand art?
In clinical practise, in publications, and at conferences, we use the words `art' and `therapy' as if we understood their meaning well enough.
If there is debate about what they refer to it is usually about what is meant by `therapy' rather than by `art' - or the `arts'. Within such discussions different and often rival versions of therapy will be invoked by adherents of its various forms: psychoanalytic schools (Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Winnicottian, etc.), Rogerian, gestalt, projective, behavioural, cognitive, humanistic, alternative, new age, and so on. Or, also within the cluster of meanings deriving from therapy, we might refer to fields of medicine, psychopathology, neurology or disablement, together with their associated discourses of scientific description, diagnosis, and treatment. Following in the train of such talk is the question of proof; to what extent do these competing therapies 'cure' the ailments to which they are applied and what is their relative cost to the institutions that employ them? Furthermore, viewing the arts therapies as primarily clinical and paramedical practises, these institutions increasingly insist that such matters as proof and cost be, to use the current phrase, 'evidence based', in line with disciplines from an entirely different cultural background.
In all of this the distinctive claims of art as a social practise, which by changing human perception alters people's lives, have become neglected. It is as if the idea that gave rise to the use of art in therapy - that in a crucial sense the value of being alive is aesthetic in the stongest possible sense of that word, originally so daring and full of interest in the first six or seven decades of the twentieth century, has become, like a dazzling but wayward comet captured in a large and ponderous gravitational field. So, as you will have gathered from these first remarks, I want here to speak for an approach to human meaning, value and suffering - or pathos, from which we derive the word pathology - that originates in art rather than the more instrumental forms of science, which, materially useful as they may be to us, medicine for example, hold us in such a trance. My argument is grounded in the images of the visual arts, a natural consequence of my personal and professional experience, but by implication extends to images that abound in other forms of artistic expression, literature, drama, film, music and dance..."
from: Henzell, John. "Do we explain or understand art?" in "Arts - Therapies - Communication: On a Way to a Communicative Arts Therapy. Volume 1." Kossolapow, Scoble, Waller (eds). European Consortium for Arts Therapies Education. Lit Verlag. 2001.
Münster- Hamburg-Berlin-London (From: I : Region Northwest-Europe. Great Britain & Ireland. Chapter 4 Arts Therapies & the Arts (Art, Music, Dance Movement in Clinical Contexts)). p 169.
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