TAIKKARI

kuvataideterapian työhuone
Sisko Miettinen

An essay, proposed for the next publication of ECArTE, Arts-Therapies-Communication, volume 3.

Looking for the frames for art therapy
-smuggling an egg, and planting seedlings

I am not the first and the only one who has been a member of a team that has invented a new art therapy training ­ neither the only in my country or in the whole of Europe. The first art therapy courses started in Finland in 1960’s, and different institutes, both private and public, have tried their wings on this field. The program I have been involved with, has been the latest one, establishing a new kind of programme, aiming to an integrated academic, practical, both Finnish and European art therapy concept. Simultaneously, art therapy is about to get an independent status, without needing to hide behind other professions any more. Academic status is one aim. It is the basic requirement: the nest, the quiet space to build a proper hatching place for the precious egg, a new profession of an art therapist.

I am telling you here two stories about this passage: my first story is about the experience of transforming and combining the Finnish and the British training models, and about my experiences in running the first Post Graduate level art therapy programme in Finland. The first story was published as a lecture in Luxembourg, in the 6th European Arts Therapies Conference (2001). The second, a survey about the first qualified student’s experiences and working possibilities, was given out in Madrid, at the 7th European Arts Therapies Conference (2003).

Prologue

In order to feel strong roots on the European ground of art therapy, and to grow up together, I think that it is utterly important to share some of this experience with the other European arts therapists. We are, most probably, all experiencing similar kind of processes in different parts of Europe right now. We do not necessarily get on with each other, and the survival game of different programmes and theories is hard to stand for all of us. I think that this is all about transformation: transformation of thoughts and dreams into the real world, or transition from the inner world to the outer world. This process is similar with the process that happens in art therapy session.

But first, in order to build a ground for the reading experience, I want to speak shortly about my personal involvement with this subject. It is not a story of a hero, not at all, but this experience has forced me to read and understand a lot: about archetypes, about dying and creating, about the two horrible Monsters (Hostility and Prejudice), and about the painful dynamics of creativity in everyday life.

I even have had to read the Finnish national epic Kalevala, written 150 years ago, once more, when I returned back to my own country as a newly qualified art therapist from Britain ­ so hard it was to understand and to figure out the difference between these two cultures, and so difficult it was to return back home.

Every time when something new is born, something else will have to break away, says the British psychoanalyst and writer Rosemary Gordon in her book “Dying and Creating”. The same happens at the beginning of the Kalevala story, during the first poems:

“Now because of that the mother of the water,
mother of the water,
virgin of the air, feels burning hot, her skin scorched;
she thought her knee was burning, all her sinews melting.
Suddenly she twitched her knee, made her limbs tremble;
the eggs turned into the water,
are sent into the waves of the sea;
the eggs cracked in pieces, broke to bits.
The eggs do not get into the ooze,
the bits do not get mixed up with the water.
The bits were turned into fine things,
the pieces into beautiful things:
the lower half of one egg into the earth beneath,
the top half of the other egg into the heavens above.
The top half of one yolk gets to glow like the sun,
the top half of the one white
gets to gleam palely as the moon;
any mottled things on an egg,
those became stars in heaven,
anything black on an egg,
those indeed become clouds in the sky.”

                            The Kalevala/ Poems of the Kaleva District (1849)

This story of the first egg is a symbolic story about the beginning of the human, earthly life. It is also a story of the end and the new beginning, a symbol of transformation. According to Rosemary Gordon, the symbol links “strange to familiar, relates the conscious to the unconscious, the here and now to general and abstract, soma to psyche, physical fact to the meaning, the fragment to the whole, and reason to passion”. (Gordon 1978, 107).

I needed the power of my national myths to survive during this transitional period of my life. I had learned a new profession in another country, and transported my knowledge back home. The pleasure of drawing and painting, as well as making a sculpture of the egg was big those times. The biggest one, a ceramic egg was so big, that my son, who was born in Finland later on, was, at one point, afraid of it. I wanted to keep the egg in a safe place out of reach of his small, active hands, and I found a good place on the top of the fireplace, where it could be seen easily. In the fantasies of my son, the egg could possibly break in pieces during some dark night, and give birth to something. When I asked about the possibilities, he mentioned unknown, frightening and monstrous creatures.

Luckily, he was able to speak about it, and I was able to tell him about the times of the egg was born in another country, and how it was transported here across the continent, from west to east, and how precious it was for me, the memory of my studies in Britain.