What happens in an art therapy session and do you need to be artistic?

The short answer to the second question is no — and Jung himself said so directly. When patients objected that they were not painters, he replied that "neither are modern painters, and that consequently modern painting is free for all, and that anyhow it is not a question of beauty but only of the trouble one takes with the picture." The work is not art in the aesthetic sense; it is something prior to art, something the image-making function of the psyche does whether or not the hand is trained.

What actually happens in a session varies considerably by approach, but the underlying structure is consistent. A patient arrives carrying something — a mood, a dream fragment, a recurring image, a bodily sensation, a state of distress that has no name yet. The therapist's first task is to protect the space rather than fill it. The patient is invited to work with whatever material is available: paint, clay, sand, movement, collage, pencil. The instruction is not to produce something beautiful or coherent but to follow what wants to come. Jung described this as betrachten — a German word meaning both "to look at" and "to make pregnant by giving attention":

Looking, psychologically, brings about the activation of the object; it is as if something were emanating from one's spiritual eye that evokes or activates the object of one's vision... if it is pregnant, then something is due to come out of it; it is alive, it produces, it multiplies.

This is the operative principle: concentrated attention transforms a passive image into an active one. The patient is not decorating; they are entering into a relationship with what is already moving inside them.

The forms this takes are genuinely plural. Some patients paint visions from dreams. Others work with clay and find that the hands know something the mind does not — a woman in one documented case kneaded clay for half an hour without intention, and a figure of a mother and child emerged "as if from the very earth," carrying the emotional content she had been unable to articulate verbally. In sandplay, the hands move through sand with eyes closed, and the body's own sense of space — vast or constricted, held or unsupported — becomes legible. Tina Keller, an early analyst in Jung's circle, danced her inner experience in session with Toni Wolff, describing it afterward as "much more potent than the hours in which we only talked." Movement, sculpting, weaving, writing — each medium activates a different register of the psyche, and von Franz observed that the choice of medium often reflects the inferior function: intuitive types tend toward clay and stone, sensation types toward wild fantastic stories, thinking types sometimes toward dance.

What the therapist does during this is largely a matter of restraint. Jung was non-directive. He urged patients to paint what they had seen in dream or fantasy, then left them to struggle with it. The point was not interpretation in the moment but the concrete shaping of the image — because the act of giving form enforces a continuous study of the image "in all its parts, so that it can develop its effects to the full." The picture works back on the patient. Jung noted that once a patient had experienced being freed from a wretched state of mind by working at a symbolic image, they would return to that means of release whenever things went badly — not because the therapist told them to, but because the psyche had learned its own medicine.

Interpretation comes later, and it is not decoding. Hillman's insistence is relevant here: the image is not a symbol to be cracked open for a hidden meaning but a presence to be stayed with. The question is not "what does this mean?" but "what is happening in this image, and what does it want?" The tradition of amplification — bringing parallel images from mythology, alchemy, and cultural history to bear on the patient's specific image — is meant to widen the image's resonance, not collapse it into a formula. A snake in the painting is not simply "transformation"; it is this snake, in this posture, in this color, doing this thing, and the tradition holds dozens of readings that might illuminate it.

The session typically closes with some form of reflection: the patient speaks about the process, what arose, what surprised them. The product itself — the painting, the sand arrangement, the clay figure — is not discarded. It remains as evidence of an inner event, something that happened and can be returned to.

  • active imagination — the method underlying art therapy in the Jungian tradition
  • James Hillman — archetypal psychology's insistence on staying with the image rather than decoding it
  • Marie-Louise von Franz — on the inferior function and the choice of expressive medium
  • anima mundi — the soul of the world, the imaginal ground from which images arise

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1954, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW 16)
  • Jung, C.G., 1976, The Symbolic Life (CW 18)
  • Chodorow, Joan, 1997, Jung on Active Imagination
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1993, Psychotherapy
  • Tozzi, Chiara, 2017, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training
  • Hillman, James, 1975, Re-Visioning Psychology