Art as a Means of Accessing Ourselves. Using Art in Psychotherapy

Using art in psychotherapy could become an interesting instrument for the cure and the prevention of psychological and psychiatric problems. This belongs to that trend that sees the mediation of art as having big potential to go beyond the spoken word. Everybody knows that our emotions, thoughts, feelings, and so on, are living in the body and speaking through the body, in fact the symbolic dimension (art, music, dance, painting and so on) reconfigures the experience of living. In this form of therapy we use Art as a means of accessing ourselves and opening ourselves up to the world. The forms of artistic mediation that we mainly describe in the paper are the basic elements of tango and performative theatrical technique (Theatre of the Oppressed and Physical Theatre). In the final part of this paper a series of images illustrate specific cases in which the method and its outcomes are described.