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Karen Perry-Anderson February 25, 2014
McWhinnie (1985) relates that Jung and Werner’s insights demonstrated that the nature of the metaphor seemed to tap into different parts of the brain as a different way of knowing. Figures 2 and 3 show two of Cane’s student’s scribble drawings and the images elaborated from them of praying women and a seal with a ball respectively. She would ask students questions about their images and felt those conversations led to resolution of
FIGURE 2
individual students personal issues. Cane also embraced the unconscious as a different way of knowing. She described the imagination as a “child’s passport to the world” (Cane, 1989, p. 56). Cane looked to the writings of Leonardo da FIGURE 3
Vinci for support of her scribble method to bring out the imagination. In her book, Cane relates
how da Vinci would gaze at a mottled stone wall and imagine mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills, faces, and outlandish costumes. She quotes da Vinci in describing his visualizations “in the walls you will find an infinite number of things which you can then reduce and separate into well-conceived forms” (Cane, 1989, p. 57). Cane receives lesser credit for her methods, some used today in art therapy than that of her younger sister Margaret Naumburg, considered the ‘mother of art therapy’. The book, Handbook of Art Therapy (Malchiodi, 2003), mentions the use of a modality called “scribble chase” that is identical to Cane’s descriptions in her book.
Art educators throughout the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century that were able to step away from the common directives on how art making should be instructed to advocate the innate use of imagination, fed the ideas from art education contributing to the field of art therapy. Vincent Van Gogh illustrates more vividly the effectiveness of the revelations of the imagination over drawing from life (Cane, 1989). The oil painting in Figure 4, The Starry Night Over the