Girls’ and young women’s experiences of art psychotherapy: formations of re-imagining, re-threading, and re-worlding
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Wright, Karen. 2024. Girls’ and young women’s experiences of art psychotherapy: formations of re-imagining, re-threading, and re-worlding. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]
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Text (Girls’ and young women’s experiences of art psychotherapy: formations of re-imagining, re-threading, and re-worlding)
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Abstract or Description
This submission presents research into a group of ten young women and girls’ (13-16 years old) experiences of art psychotherapy in a Child and Adolescence Mental Health Service (CAMHS) setting which has been little explored within arts psychotherapy research. Six of the participants engaged in individual art psychotherapy and four participants took part in group art psychotherapy.
Informed by a combination of mutually constitutive interlocking subjectivities, critical feminisms, feminist post-structural, and feminist post-human and affect theory frameworks, the research aimed to critically examine structural power and mainstream knowledges to unearth forms of resistance, new knowledge, and ways of being through exploration of the experiences of this group of young women and girls engaged in art psychotherapy.
The research methodology incorporates reflexivity, critical feminist enquiry and ethnography, reflexive field notes and participant contribution elements. Critical feminist methodology underpins the selection of data collection methods, namely reflective dialogues informed through the visual research method of art making. Thematic Analysis was the method employed to analyse the data from the interviews. A case study approach was taken to analyse what was communicated, received and felt by the participants and the researcher through the participant’s artwork.
The main findings include how participants found they were able to move from emotional suffering to better wellbeing, as well as improved relationships to themselves and others through their work in art psychotherapy. Participants revealed how they gained re-connection to the self, others and the world, noting increased communication and interaction with the world. The importance of how art materials that can be orientated to their bodies and aid staying with unsettling emotions into re-imagination and transformation was also shared. For most of the participants, art psychotherapy was able to provide a space to re-imagine their lives. Combinations of interactions with art materials, the room, others and themselves enabled a re-connection to the self, facilitating a dialogue through and with artwork, providing a catalyst for empowered recovery and transformation, beyond oppressions and emotional distress.
Implications for practice are offered in the knowledge shared by the participants, examined through a critical feminist lens that enabled awareness of the reality of their lives, the effects of practice upon them, as well as understanding of oppressions and emotional distress which art psychotherapy can support to explore both cerebrally and corporally. Also highlighted is the significance of art psychotherapy that provisions access to imagination, exploration of connections with the human and non-human world, raises up and makes visible, furnishes routes to new understandings as well as ways towards hope and better wellbeing. This research project brings to awareness that an arts psychotherapy that is open and orientated to the critical feminist theories better understands how art psychotherapy can work for and with young women and girls through emotional distress to re-connection to the self, others and transformation.
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Item Type: |
Thesis (Doctoral) |
| Identification Number (DOI): |
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| Keywords: |
Arts Psychotherapy, Intersectional, Critical Feminist Art Psychotherapy, Feminist Art Psychotherapy, Critical Race Theory, Social Justice, Psychocentrism, Psych biomedical Pharma industrial complex, New Materialisms, Affect Theory. |
| Departments, Centres and Research Units: |
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| Date: |
31 July 2024 |
| Item ID: |
37493 |
| Date Deposited: |
21 Aug 2024 14:53 |
| Last Modified: |
21 Aug 2024 15:00 |
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URI: |
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