Читать книгу Rewrite Your Life - Jessica Lourey - Страница 12

The human need to creatively express ourselves can be traced back to the oldest-surviving painting, scratched into an Indonesian cave forty thousand years ago. (By the way, it says a lot about human priorities that the first plow wasn't invented until thirty thousand years later, a fact that makes me weirdly happy.) Visual art as expression expanded and flourished from there, producing Michelangelos and Picassos and Gentileschis, but it wasn't until 1939 that the therapeutic value of art was established. That year found WWI veteran and artist Adrian Hill recovering from tuberculosis in a British sanatorium. While there, he was asked to teach painting classes to his fellow patients, many of them returning veterans and a lot of them assumedly bored. Hill witnessed firsthand art's healing power on those vets. He brought his discovery to the general public, coining the term “art therapy” in 1942.

Hill believed that the symbolic mediums of drawing and painting busied the hands and freed the mind, allowing the body's natural reparative mechanisms to do their work unimpeded. His hypothesis was oversimplified, but science would soon prove him right.

Writing as therapy began to catch up to art therapy in the 1960s when New York psychologist Dr. Ira Progoff introduced the concept of reflective writing for mental health. He called this process the Intensive Journal Method. As a Jungian, Dr. Progoff subscribed to the healing power of accessing unconscious or repressed memories. Like visual art therapists before him, he witnessed the therapeutic value of externalizing an emotion or experience, encapsulating it in an image or an essay and thereby releasing it.

Innovators Michael White, an Australian therapist, and Dr. James W. Pennebaker, an American social psychologist, built on Progoff's work in the 1980s. White, along with his colleague David Epston, established the narrative therapy movement. The movement's central tenet is that “the problem is the problem,” not the person experiencing it, and that externalizing the problem by writing about it is the most effective way to address it. Dr. Pennebaker was a pioneer in the writing therapy, or expressive writing, movement, whose research into the connection between secrets, language, and mental health has been groundbreaking. Pennebaker was one of the first to clinically establish that basic writing exercises can significantly improve mental and physical health as well as work performance. His most famous book, Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, accessibly demonstrates the connection between writing and healing.