Philippe Jacquet holds a master’s degree in art psychotherapy. It is a discipline he returns to consistently in clinical practice — not as a separate modality, but as a way of reaching what language alone cannot access.
Why words are not always enough
We all lie with words. There is no moral judgment in this — it is simply human. We soften, we edit, we choose what to present and what to hold back. Language is the tool the conscious mind controls most completely.
When a person draws something, paints something, or creates something, the product is placed in front of them. It exists outside the mind. It can be looked at. And it is considerably harder to lie about what is sitting there on the paper than about what was felt for a moment and then passed through the editing process of language.
This is the fundamental clinical power of art therapy. It moves around the defences that words maintain.
Who it works particularly well for
Art therapy works with particular force for people who live predominantly in their heads — the intellectual, the analytical, the person who has developed sophisticated verbal defences and can talk fluently about their experience without ever quite feeling it.
For these people, language is already a defence mechanism. They are skilled at it. Asking them to draw something — to work with an image rather than a sentence — goes against that mechanism. It asks them to be somewhere they are less controlled, less fluent, less defended.
That is precisely where the work can happen.
The anorexia example
A patient comes to see Philippe presenting with anorexia. She is identified with her anorexia — it is not something she has, it is something she is. To challenge it directly, in language, is to challenge her. The therapeutic alliance fractures before it can form.
Philippe asks her to draw the anorexia.
She draws it. It goes onto the paper. It is now out there — an object in the room, separate from her, something that can be looked at by both of them together.
There are now two stages to the work. In the first, it is Philippe and the patient, both facing the anorexia across the table — she is still protecting it, but it is no longer entirely inside her. In the second stage, something becomes possible that was not before: Philippe and the patient, working together against the anorexia. A therapeutic alliance with the part of her that wants to recover.
The drawing made this possible. The conversation alone could not have.
What art therapy looks like in practice
What matters is not the medium. Philippe works with whatever is available — engaging the imagination directly, asking patients to bring their own materials, working with postcards and images. The question is always the same: how can this person be invited to engage with their inner world in a way that bypasses the editorial control of language?
Creativity as the mechanism of change
A person who comes with a problem needs to find new ways of seeing it, new ways of being in the world. This is, at its root, a creative act. The person who develops this capacity in the art therapy room tends to carry it back into their life.
“It is easier to lie with words than with what you make. When a patient draws her anorexia and places it on the paper in front of us, something shifts that no conversation had been able to move. The image is there. We can both see it. And now, for the first time, we are on the same side.” — Philippe Jacquet
Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet — psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, London.