Round the clock: A therapist's and service user's perspective on the image outside art therapy

Abstract

This article is a collaborative piece of work between a clinician and an ex-service user with a diagnosis of personality disorder. It describes a transformative process in which a particular clinical model – the Henderson Democratic Therapeutic Community – played a key role. The art therapy service that this treatment model was able to foster is shown to provide a focal point for a different experience of the self. At the heart of the article is a particular image, made in an art therapy group but which moves through different contexts, retaining different kinds of power. Incorporated with this view of the image, underpinned by a broadly phenomenological framework, is an idea of process outside and beyond therapy.

Keywords:

• Abandonment
• personality disorder
• therapeutic community
• Henderson
• self-harm
• self-discovery
• client perspective

Notes

1. Personality Plus have since changed their name to Emergence, http://www.emergenceplus.org.uk

2. ‘Referred’ meetings could be called any time of the day or night in response to a crisis or other rupture in the running of the community, reinforcing for residents that actions had defined, predictable consequences.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andre Brühka

Andre Brühka is a pseudonym