The Expressive Use of Masks Across Cultures and Healing Arts explores the interplay between masks and culture and their therapeutic use in the healing arts such as music, art, dance/movement, drama, play, bibliotherapy, and intermodal. Each section of the book focuses on a different context, including viewing masks through a cultural lens, masks at play, their role in identity formation (persona and alter ego), healing the wounds from negative life experiences, from the protection of medical masks to helping the healing process, and from expressions of grief to celebrating life stories. Additionally, the importance of cultural sensitivity, including the differences between cultural appreciation and appropriation, is explored. Chapters are written by credentialed therapists to provide unique perspectives on the personal and professional use of masks in the treatment of diverse populations in a variety of settings. A range of experiences are explored, from undergraduate and graduate students to early professionals and seasoned therapists. The reader will be able to adapt and incorporate techniques and directives presented in these chapters. Readers are encouraged to explore their own cultural heritage, to find their authentic voice, as well as learn how to work with clients who have different life experiences. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

This book brings engagement and conversation to a cross‐pollination of creative and expressive writing and multi‐modal art forms. Through the lens of expressive arts therapy, the authors demonstrate how writing can reveal the unexpected that emerges from art making. The lineage of expressive arts therapy includes artful writing, poetry, associative, creative, and memoir, for example, to engage in self‐discovery, growth, and restorative care. Each chapter is grounded in intermodal expressive arts with a central focus on creative and expressive writing, which is informed by movement, visual art, storytelling, music, sound, photography, and physical performance, including response art, and has writing prompts and invitations as well as playful and improvisational integrative arts writing explorations. Creative arts therapists and expressive therapists actively searching for creative playful self‐reflective writing practice will find this book a rewarding resource. Krystal Leah Demaine, PhD, MT‐BC, REAT, CTRS‐C, RYT, music therapist, expressive arts therapist, and professor of expressive therapies at Endicott College, practices HEARTful healing note by note through song, story, poetry, and creative curiosity. Tamar Reva Einstein, PhD, REAT, expressive arts therapist, poet/artist, and teacher, crosses cultural borders in Jerusalem with the arts as her mother tongue, threading writing and arts like her threaded beads and amulets.

This second volume expands and develops the discussion on arts therapies begun in volume one on the field’s relationship with children and young people’s mental health, demonstrating further contemporary research within international contexts. The book responds to a resounding call to address children and young people’s mental health. It explores a unique mix of diverse arts modalities including art, music, dance, expressive arts, and drama, creating opportunities for discourse and discussion of how the different arts therapies cohere and relate to each other. Chapters are truly global in approach, ranging from schools in India to children’s hospices in the United Kingdom, refugee transit camps in Greece, and residential care programmes for LGBTQ+ youth in the United States. Discussions from Greece and Taiwan, and innovative research from Israel, Norway, and Scotland are also featured with reference to diverse social, political, and cultural contexts. Ultimately, chapters prioritise the links between research, theory, and practice, providing accessible and implication-led dialogue on contemporary issues. This book provides new insights into the expanding field of the arts therapies and will be of great interest to arts therapists as well as academics and students in the fields of arts therapies, social work, psychotherapy, health psychology, and education.

Group Play Therapy presents an updated look at an effective yet underutilized therapeutic intervention. More than just an approach to treating children, group play therapy is a life-span approach, undergirded by solid theory and, in this volume, taking wings through exciting techniques. Drawing on their experiences as clinicians and educators, the authors weave theory and technique together to create a valuable resource for both mental health practitioners and advanced students. Therapists and ultimately their clients will benefit from enhancing their understanding of group play therapy.

Therapy: The Basics is an introductory book to psychotherapy and its different theoretical approaches. It attempts to demystify and de-stigmatise therapy by answering some common questions posed by prospective clients. lykou presents an accessible overview of psychotherapy and counselling, mapping a variety of the most popular approaches from psychoanalysis and cognitive behavious therapy to embodied and creative therapies, whilst giving an overview of the roots of psychotherapy in traditional and indigenous healing methods. The book also acknowledges criticisms of current approaches, with their neo-liberal heteronormative Eurocentric perspective, and considers where therapy stands in today’s globalised world. The book's structure allows different umbrella theories and their developments to be explored separately but also in relation to one another. This book is essential reading for trainees, a useful reference for qualified therapists who want to deepen their knowledge, a supporting resource for prospective psychotherapy clients, and a companion for readers who simply want to expand their horizons.

Communication Research on Expressive Arts and Narrative as Forms of Healing: More than Words examines a number of widely used expressive arts therapies from a communication perspective, providing case studies and other qualitative investigations focused specifically on communication aspects of expressive therapies including drama, music, and dance/movement therapies. This collection, edited by Kamran Afary and Alice Marianne Fritz and authored by contributors with experience as educators, artists, and licensed therapists, integrates communication, therapy, and pedagogy to explore the role and efficacy of expressive arts therapies. Scholars of communication, performing arts, and mental health will find this book particularly useful, along with mental health practitioners and scholars conducting fieldwork.

Art and Mourning explores the relationship between creativity and the work of self-mourning in the lives of 20th century artists and thinkers. The role of artistic and creative endeavours is well-known within psychoanalytic circles in helping to heal in the face of personal loss, trauma, and mourning. In this book, Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, a psychoanalyst, art therapist and artist - analyses the work of major modernist and contemporary artists and thinkers through a psychoanalytic lens. In coming to terms with their own mortality, figures like Albert Einstein, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Klee, Eva Hesse and others were able to access previously unknown reserves of creative energy in their late works, as well as a new healing experience of time outside of the continuous temporality of everyday life. Dreifuss-Kattan explores what we can learn about using the creative process to face and work through traumatic and painful experiences of loss. Art and Mourning will inspire psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to understand the power of artistic expression in transforming loss and traumas into perseverance, survival and gain. Art and Mourning offers a new perspective on trauma and will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, psychologists, clinical social workers and mental health workers, as well as artists and art historians.