AuthorHouse presents Art Therapist Myra F. Levick, PhD, ATR-BC (Part Two)

Today, AuthorHouse Author’s Digest presents part two of our guest blog from self-published writer Myra F. Levick, PhD, ATR-BC. Myra is the director of the South Florida Art Psychotherapy Institute, and the author of Levick Emotional and Cognitive Art Therapy Assessment.

Click here to read part one, if you haven’t done so already. Otherwise, read on to learn more about Dr. Levick’s research!

When A Picture Really Means More Than A Thousand Words (Part Two)

As I followed my mentor’s lead and attended lectures by staff psychiatrists, I learned that “art therapy” is using the creative process instead of words as a means of communication between therapist and patient. I learned that the “art therapist” does not interpret a patient’s art production, but facilitates the patient’s ability to interpret their own work, to make conscious what was unconscious. The more I learned, the more I trusted the creative process to help people begin to recognize and cope with internal and external conflicts.

My career path took many turns. I went from art therapist to art therapy educator, to founder and first president of the American Art Therapy Association. Within all of this, my particular interest and forte remained coping mechanisms and the relationship between intellectual and emotional development. Subsequently I had the extraordinary opportunity to work with Ms. Anna Freud for five weeks in England.

This experience, and the publication of my first book in 1983, led to an invitation from the Miami-Dade County School District to develop an art therapy assessment to be used by the therapists employed in their clinical art therapy program. That assessment and where it has taken me is the crux of this blog.

Working with the art therapy staff at Miami-Dade, an assessment was designed that I believed was a good one. For the next 14 years I lectured, conducted seminars and collected data on the Levick Emotional and Cognitive Art Therapy Assessment. Being an academician, I knew it was time to test the validity and reliability of this instrument. I initiated a normative study in the Palm Beach County School District, the community in South Florida most representative of the general population.

(To be concluded)

To read the results of Dr. Levick’s research and the final part of her guest blog,  please check back at AuthorHouse Author’s Digest at the end of the week. Until then, check out Levick Emotional and Cognitive Art Therapy Assessment at the AuthorHouse Bookstore!

Read more about AuthorHouse author Dr. Myra F. Levick and her research at the links below:

Children at Risk – the homepage of Myra F. Levick, Phd, ATR-BC

The Boca Raton branch of the National League of American Pen Women

Myra’s Facebook page

Myra on LinkedIn