Secrets, symbols, cornucopias, prophesies?

The four boxes are a small selection from my ‘collection’ of containers that I provide my private practice clients and clinical supervisees for safe storage of their three-dimensional artworks. I have collected these and other boxes over many years, seemingly randomly, though have begun to question how random this really is/they really are over the last few years. Some are given to me, some I have procured from elsewhere or simply found, some I have actively solicited from colleagues, friends and neighbours when my supply is diminished. I never really know what I am going to put into and have in my store at any given time and have never paid much conscious attention to them other than perhaps their size, shape, structure and satisfactory condition. Farrell-Kirk (2001) notes that boxes are widely accepted as an art therapy technique and she explores how boxes are employed by clients to this end. What I have found in recent years that has stimulated my interest and afforded delightful intrigue is how surprisingly well the appearance, nature, context - ‘brand’ - of the box arriving in my therapy room to be allocated a specific client seems to speak of what is central to what any given client is bringing to art psychotherapy – most often long before such material has emerged consciously or become apparent otherwise. I have been given to flights of fancy that the boxes are dialoguing with me at unconscious depths, mischievously inviting that they know more than I or my clients do, enticing me to select certain ones ‘pick me, pick ME!’. Some may argue this is merely my projection, and with 27 years of clinical practice experience I can ‘attune to’ what is in the depths of a client’s psyche and soma on first encounter. While I will have conducted an initial assessment and built a little image of my client prior to commencing art psychotherapy, that seems a fundamentally pompous, hubristic notion to me. I just don’t buy that. I can’t - despite being an ardent advocate for synchronicity. I imagine the boxes choose the client. I find myself ‘staying with the box’s communication’ as it were, to take this precious communicator, frequently prophetic object of affinity with its client, confidently clutched in hand from the attic store - a box that inevitably ‘belongs’ to the commencing client. The boxes that chose to be included as a photo for others to view told us (client and me together) of core states, experiences, defences, lacks, paradigms, beliefs, anguish, physical illness and much more. A container, a holder? Yes, inevitably, what else then. A repository, receptacle, chest, hamper, casket, coffer, bin, protector of secrets and symbols, and now?...A remarkable cornucopia of prophetic conveyances adding to the mysterious alchemy of unfoldingnesses of matters of great import at another unknowable level during art psychotherapy – evidently an additional previously-unforeseen ‘foreseer image’…Am I still intrigued by this new exegesis of ‘self-box’? You bet!

Shelagh Cornish has been in continual practice with children, adolescent, parents, families, and adults in inpatient, outpatient and the community, presenting mental illness diagnoses amongst other troubles for more than 27 years. Previously Lead Art Psychotherapist in Specialist Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, and Strategic Lead for the profession in Derbyshire Health Care Foundation NHS Trust until 2012, she is currently a Senior Lecturer and researcher on MA Art Therapy University of Derby (since 2002), Senior Lecturer Nottingham Business School Nottingham Trent University, BAAT Registered Clinical Supervisor, BAAT Registered Private Practitioner, HCPC Registered Art Psychotherapist, Registered Member MBACP, Member of BAAT SIPP-SIG, Member of ATCAF -SIG, a Systemic Practitioner and practising artist/musician. Further information can be found at www.heartening.co.uk