Provoking Thought for Someone Else’s Paper—A Critique of Berki’s “Art as Therapy? Therapy Through Art?”
Summary Marget Berki, a German writer and translator, seeks to convince his readers of the invalidity of Art Therapy in his 1996 article “Art as Therapy? Therapy Through Art?” Berki opens his article by starting at the beginning of Art Therapy’s life. He speaks about the early therapists lack of professional training and their ‘strange’ ideas, and how they ‘pretended’ to help people. Berki then delves into his idea that Art in actuality causes problems instead of curing them. He brings up several suicidal artists and poets and asks us why art does not help them. He also tells us that most artists are on drugs while they are working on their projects, and that is when their best work is produced. The next section of his article covers the darker side of art as he moves into Nazi Germany and the ideas posed by Hitler and his counterparts. The main idea he stresses is that they believed they were composing art through their search for the perfect race. At this point he then delve