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Abstract

This presentation demonstrates visual art therapy as a unique integrative approach to the multidimensional treatment of PTSD. This model offers unique contribution in three major areas: 1. working on traumatic memories; 2. the process of symbolization and integration; 3. providing unique qualities for containment, transference and counter transference. The artistic medium encourages the pictorial expression of the clientâ??s inner experience enabling communication with the traumatic memory in its own language â?? shape, color and sensations. The medium allows dissociated, repressed materials stored in memory as visual images to reach consciousness, to be expressed and encountered. The symbolic image spontaneously emerging in the clientâ??s work is the core of the healing process and has the ability to contain and bear the dissociative character of the trauma. Thus symbols evoked in the artistic products of victims help recode the traumatic event and turn a dissociated and isolated instance into an integrated part of the individualâ??s personality, connected associatively to other thoughts, feelings and times. In this way, a coherent biographical continuum is formed and the healing process can occur.

Biography