Hospital art therapy: when is it born?
The art therapy in the hospital develops practically starting from after the second world war. The first real art therapy groups in the hospital were born in Great Britain in 1942 for tuberculosis patients and initially the method was that of an art school. Thanks to Adrian Hill, artist and psychologist himself, the term art therapy is born, a practice that begins to spread in countries with a strong psychoanalytic and psychiatric tradition (Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States) in response to a need for renewal of methodologies in the pedagogical and rehabilitative field.
In the United States, Edith Kramer and Margaret Naumburg are the first doctors to start treating with art therapy in the hospital, children and the mentally ill. Naumburg, in particular, is the first to talk about hospital art therapy as a form of psychotherapy. We are in 1954 when Robert Volmat founded the first art therapy atelier at the Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris, with the aim of experimenting with forms of psychotherapeutic approach through the use of art. After the traumas left by the Second World War, a statement like “Art represents an intermediate state between reality and dream, between introversion and extroversion, between sensibility and thought, between matter and the spirit "which comes from the most famous text of Volmat, " The Art Psychopathologique ", resounds like a hope.
When is the hospital therapy in Italy born?
In Italy, hospital therapy in medicine was born as a concept in 1872, when Cesare Lombroso, in his theoretical paper " Genio e follia ", underlines the close relationship between madness and art, starting what is considered by some to be the most important official collection of works of art by psychiatric patients in Italy, kept at the Lombroso Museum of the Institute of Legal Medicine of Turin.
Lombroso was also the director of the Pesaro psychiatric hospital. Italy, linked to the positivist tradition, remains behind, however, with respect to the rest of Europe as regards the progress of studies on psychodynamics and the application of hospital therapy. It is with the law180 of 1978 that finally the art therapy enters the hospital and is clinically recognized as a fundamental therapeutic tool. In Italy everything starts with music therapy around the 70s and today new artistic techniques are being tested in every direction.
Purpose of hospital therapy
Hospital art therapy is often seen in contrast to what is the classical treatment methodology of a pathology. But it is not so, it is important to contextualize. There has been talk of the humanization of the hospital, in the sense of making that place a transit point for the most human life, not a magical enclave where all the evils of the world can be solved. Every medicine, every therapy, as well as every disease is related to the environment and the country in which we live.
Therefore, treating a patient through art therapy does not necessarily mean seeing surprising improvements in being from one day to the next, nor does it imply their radical transformation. Simply, through art therapy in the hospital we try to give back to the individual his history, his environment, his time, his relationships with himself and with others and all that surrounds him, in order to make him live daily most possible harmonic. And the response to treatment also improves.
