Essays on the Creative Arts Therapies: Imaging the Birth of a Profession

This book is a compilation of the authorís essays concerning the integration of the creative arts therapy disciplines (art, dance, drama, music, and poetry) into one larger organization representing their clinical, scholarly, and public policy activities. This is a book about rites of passage, about naivete and maturity, about growing up. It is about poetics and politics, about the tremendous potential to contribute to the public welfare and the deep fears of collaboration and dialogue. Throughout this book, the author takes the position that joining together clinically, academically, and organizationally will be beneficial to the health of the field as well as that of its clients; that the various disciplines are divided only by the nature of the different artistic media, not by fundamental theoretical or political agendas. These various essays offer personal meditation, polemical argument, practical advice, serious theorizing, and some comic relief. Throughout, you will sense the authorís struggle to express simultaneously his love for and impatience with this, his dear profession, being too quietly born.