ABSTRACT
This chapter compares Sigmund Freud’s iconic consultation room—located first in Vienna and then, after the start of the Second World War, in London, where patient and analyst would have been surrounded by many collected artifacts, small sculptures, images, reliefs and carpets—to the art studio-atelier, where artist-patients meet in a group with the art-psychotherapist to create art, while exploring their lives with cancer and its treatments. These artist-patients have been faced, suddenly, with new realities and visited with unsettling medical trauma. They meet in the space of the art room for creative exploration and play, ultimately to work through and, eventually, integrate their traumatic experiences. Not unlike Freud’s patients on the couch who were asked to free associate verbally with memories of their pasts in order to help them access their unconscious, cancer patients free associate by painting, drawing or making cutout collages in a safe and creative environment. The art-psychotherapist is there to catalyze this free play of the imagination, not unlike Freud, though in a somewhat less tactile and messy fashion.
