Drawing the Line: Art Therapy with the Difficult Client

This resourceful guide presents art therapy techniques for difficult clients where the typical therapist-client interaction can often be distant, demanding, and frustrating. Offering practical and theoretical information from a wide variety of treatment populations and diagnostic categories; and incorporating individual, group, and family therapy case studies, the text is filled with examples and over 150 illustrations taken from the author’s sixteen years of experience working with hundreds of clients. The author is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a Master’s degree in Clinical Art Therapy. The text comes with an accompanying CD-ROM which includes full-color pictures and additional material not found in the book.

Using art therapy to enhance traditional therapy

Art has its own power to tap into a basic part of the human psyche, opening a nonverbal line of communication between artist and viewer, or client and therapist. In some cases where language is a limiting factor, art-making has great potential for therapeutic progress by giving the client another means of expression. Drawing the Line: Art Therapy with the Difficult Client introduces mental health professionals of all backgrounds and experience levels to the power of art and its use with your clients.

What defines "the difficult client"? Each therapist may give a different answer: the child who refuses to talk, the rapist who denies responsibility for his actions, the adult victim of psychotic hallucinations, to name just a few possibilities. Drawing the Line covers both relevant theoretical constructs of psychotherapy and practical solutions for assessment and treatment. Yet what really brings the text alive are the numerous case history reviews—including many sample artworks—taken from the author's sixteen years of practice.

Drawing the Line also features:

• Coverage of a wide spectrum of "difficult" clients, from children and adolescents through adults
• Case studies from a similarly diverse population
• Presentation of a variety of useful assessments, approaches, theoretical applications, and diagnostic categories
• An accompanying CD that includes full-color pictures and modeling for therapist and client

In addition to being an excellent educational tool for students, Drawing the Line is an essential, practically oriented guide for any mental health professional interested in incorporating art therapy into their practice.

Lisa B. Moschini has a BFA in art and design from California Institute of the Arts and an MA in clinical art therapy from Loyola Marymount University. She has been a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist since 1992 and is the owner of Drawing-the-Line Seminars & Consulting (www.drawing-the-line.net), which specializes in the blending of the arts and psychotherapy. She presently resides in Santa Barbara, California.