Is art therapy only for children or does it help adults too?

Art therapy is emphatically not confined to children, though the assumption persists — perhaps because play, image-making, and non-verbal expression carry a cultural association with childhood that makes adults feel they have outgrown them. The evidence and the theoretical tradition both push back against this firmly.

On the clinical evidence side, the research on sandplay therapy — one of the most studied expressive modalities in the Jungian lineage — shows consistent gains across adult populations. Roesler (2019) reviewed sixteen randomized controlled trials and seventeen effectiveness studies, finding significant improvements with moderate effect sizes for a wide range of adult mental health problems: generalized anxiety disorder, depression, interpersonal difficulties, trauma following natural disasters, and social avoidance. A study of earthquake survivors in Nepal found significant improvements across all dimensions tested after seven group sessions. College students with interpersonal problems showed a 62.8% decrease in social avoidance scores. These are not marginal findings.

The theoretical case is, if anything, even more compelling. Jung himself arrived at active imagination — the imaginative method from which art therapy, dance therapy, sandplay, and the other expressive modalities all descend — through his own adult crisis. Chodorow (1997) quotes Jung directly on the origins of his most fundamental ideas:

My most fundamental views and ideas derive from these experiences. First I made the observations and only then did I hammer out my views. And so it is with the hand that guides the crayon or brush, the foot that executes the dance-step, with the eye and the ear, with the word and the thought: a dark impulse is the ultimate arbiter of the pattern, an unconscious 'a priori' precipitates itself into plastic form.

He was not describing child development. He was describing the method by which an adult — himself, in his forties — came into contact with the autonomous life of the unconscious.

Von Franz (1993) makes the point even more precisely in her account of how active imagination relates to the inferior function. She observes that Jung discovered the method specifically because he could not assimilate his fourth function through verbal analysis alone — he had to build, to make, to give the inferior function a material form. An intuitive type needs clay or stone to make the unconscious real; a thinking type may need to dance. The body and the image carry what the word cannot reach. This is not a developmental need that adults leave behind; it is a structural feature of the psyche that becomes, if anything, more pressing as the inferior function accumulates its unlived life.

Hillman (1983) frames the deeper rationale: soul-making is the work of releasing events from their literal surface into their imaginal depth, and this work is never finished. The question soul-making asks — what does this event move in my soul? What does it mean to my death? — is not a child's question. It is the question that becomes more urgent, not less, as a life accumulates weight and loss.

The creative arts therapies do carry something that verbal psychotherapy often cannot: they engage the body, the senses, and the non-verbal registers of experience that trauma and dissociation specifically disrupt. Haeyen (2024) notes that starting with cognition is often the wrong entry point after trauma — imagination and playfulness are frequently the first casualties of distress, and the expressive arts work to restore them from the bottom up, through sensation and movement rather than through narrative. Adults in crisis, adults with somatic symptoms, adults whose suffering has outrun their words — these are precisely the populations for whom image-making offers something that talking alone cannot.

The assumption that art is for children rests on a confusion between the medium and the developmental stage. The medium is image, movement, and material. The stage is irrelevant.

  • active imagination — Jung's method of conscious engagement with unconscious imagery, the theoretical root of all expressive arts therapies
  • James Hillman — portrait of the archetypal psychologist who grounded soul-making in image and craft
  • Marie-Louise von Franz — portrait of the analyst who developed Jung's thinking on the inferior function and active imagination
  • individuation — the lifelong process of psychological development that the expressive arts serve

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1947, On the Nature of the Psyche
  • Chodorow, Joan, 1997, Jung on Active Imagination
  • Von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1993, Psychotherapy
  • Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
  • Haeyen, Suzanne, 2024, A theoretical exploration of polyvagal theory in creative arts and psychomotor therapies
  • Roesler, Christian, 2019, Sandplay therapy: An overview of theory, applications and evidence base