I know that you are talking about whether art therapy is a placebo or not but I am curious about your own experience of the therapy. I am not talking about it in an official sense as something you have been practised or being given as an official treatment, but about your own experience of art and art making.

Obviously, this is a philosophy website so is not necessarily about personal disclosure and people are not expected to divulge aspects of their personal experience. However, I am just curious because I was drawing upon my own experience of art therapy to back up my own thinking around the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud.

At one point I did plan to become an art psychotherapist. In some ways, I regret not finishing this particular training but the training was extremely expensive, especially as you were required to pay for personal therapy for the entire duration of the course. There are not many jobs in art therapy and I became a bit disillusioned about its benefits. However, I continue to take an interest in it and do try to find opportunities to do my own art and be involved in art groups as well as creative writing activities.

I would say that one does not have to go as far as art therapy as a curative option. The expressive arts in general have always been a central part of human culture.

This seems like an oxymoron for the simple reason that a placebo doesn't cure anything, that's why it's a placebo. — TheMadFool

Oh, but it does. You are confusing 'a placebo' with a sugar pill. A placebo is an act including something like a sugar pill. The patient is told they are getting a medicine for their illness and they get a pill. That is a placebo. You drop a sugar pill in their drink and don't say you did it and that it's a medicine...that is not a placebo.

By the way, I fail to see how the notion of placebos is relevant to my theory. — TheMadFool

I'll just quote myself then....

To me it is obvious that anything that affects our emotions can have positive or negative (or both) kinds of effects on our health. — Coben

Perhaps I should have added that Art Therapy affects the emotions, I thought you were working on that assumption in the OP. If a ritual so simple as a placebo can affect change, the extremely complicated and generally longer term rituals of art therapy can certainly heal emotional problems and likely more. Now beyond that I think that one can learn through analogical processes and that much of what we are less conscious of functions in processes that are like metaphors. So, I am not saying that it is a direct parallel to a placebo, but rather saying, hell, if a placebo can be effective then art therapy, which is much more directly attuned to the individual and is vastly more nuanced and also gives the patient/client room to express feelings seems even more likely to be effective.

Oh, but it does. You are confusing 'a placebo' with a sugar pill. A placebo is an act including something like a sugar pill. The patient is told they are getting a medicine for their illness and they get a pill. That is a placebo. You drop a sugar pill in their drink and don't say you did it and that it's a medicine...that is not a placebo — Coben

Thank you for the clarification. We're on the same page.

Perhaps I should have added that Art Therapy affects the emotions, I thought you were working on that assumption in the OP. — Coben

I'm mainly concerned with the physical aspects of emotions - the accompanying entourage of bodily phenomena.

if a placebo can be effective then art therapy, which is much more directly attuned to the individual and is vastly more nuanced and also gives the patient/client room to express feelings seems even more likely to be effective. — Coben

My contention is this: there are physical changes that follow in the wake of emotions that are evoked by art. Art comes in many forms but those that are of particular interest to me are music and paintings - in the broadest sense of those words. This raises the possibility that we can, in principle. induce physical changes in the body with art given that we figure out the ins and outs of how all this works. If so, art can be truly therapeutic in that it can actually cure illnesses of all kinds.

As for placebos, they're neither truly therapeutic nor do they actually cure illnesses. In other words, art therapy, insofar as my theory is concerned, isn't[/] a placebo.