Resumen de The use of drawing in psychotherapy
Drawing, its potential and its use have not yet exhausted psychological debate. Graphic activity has long been seen as a supple tool for understanding intellection maturation and the individual’s personality, thus contributing to the development both of intelligence tests and projective methods.
Nevertheless, despite the many attempts to identify precise diagnostic indicators, empirical research has documented its lack of success in an extensive literature. In this connection, Boncori maintains that graphic techniques, however much popularity they may now enjoy, cannot properly be termed tests.
In short, there appears to be no positive connection between the particular features of drawing and psychological characteristics. With their modest reliability, drawings seem to be an inadequate means of legitimizing individual evaluations: emotional, cognitive, developmental and pedagogical factor all interfere too much for indicators to be validated.
This paper will demonstrate that drawing can be employed in a variety of ways and for a number of purposes, since – like any play activity – it has multiple functions.
And like play, drawings have a sole source: the imagination, or the capacity for fantasy.
Accordingly, what we are dealing with here is not a question of uncovering hidden meanings, but of assessing the creative ability that the child, through drawing, can deploy. The idea of ferreting out elements from the inner world must be replaced by the idea that drawing can help the child use play to process his relationship with the outer world. Reality, in fact, takes on meaning when it can be ideally transferred into the realm of fantasy, and this takes place through the innate capacity that the human being has for self illusion, in the etymological sense of in-ludere, or “entering into play”.
