Art Therapy

Art therapy at Harley Street

Art therapy at the Harley Street practice is delivered by a Master’s-qualified art psychotherapist, in the quarter that has been home to specialist psychological care in London for more than a century. The orientation is clinical rather than recreational: no artistic ability is assumed, and the aim is not to produce work that pleases. What the work asks for is a willingness to let image-making reach the material that talking has not.

Why an image can reach what words cannot

Many people who come to Harley Street have already spent time in verbal therapy. They understand their difficulty intellectually, yet it has not shifted. Image-making offers a different route in. One particularly suited to trauma, eating disorders, disturbances of body image, and early experience laid down before language was available. For those who are not naturally verbal about their inner life, an image can hold and say what a sentence cannot.

How a session works

A session involves making something (drawing, painting, collage, or another medium) and then staying with what has been made. The therapist does not stand over the work imposing an interpretation. The inquiry is shared: what does the image hold, and what does it now make possible to know or to say? Meaning emerges from the making, not from analysis applied afterwards.

Part of a wider clinical practice

At Harley Street, art psychotherapy sits alongside the practice’s work in psychotherapy, Jungian analysis, EMDR, and the treatment of eating disorders and addiction. For many clients it is integrated with that wider work rather than pursued in isolation, image-making opening a seam that the talking therapy then continues to develop.

Beginning at Harley Street

An initial consultation is available at the Harley Street W1 consulting rooms or online. It is a conversation, with no obligation to continue, a chance to establish whether art therapy is the right approach and to ask anything about how it works.