PICTURES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS

The 10-year-old boy had been through the most horrible experience imaginable -- watching his home burn with his mother, two brothers and sister inside. He had behaved angrily since then, punching holes in walls and playing with knives. And he refused to speak.

That was the situation when art therapist Caroline Brown encountered him in a locked Cincinnati psychiatric hospital. At first, they just drew pictures together, she starting in the lower left-hand corner, he in the other corner. After three days, she started coming out of her corner and so did he.

Over time, he drew a stick figure in front of a black house with black bushes at the side. Then he took the red crayon that is a familiar signal of anger and drew in flames.

"I said, `I know what you saw,'" Brown recalled. "'When you're ready to talk about it, we will.'"

She then drew her own stick figure next to his and connected the hands.

Later, he asked if he could talk to her. "Those were his first words in six months," Brown said.

The boy told her a person was hidden in those black bushes next to the burning house -- his dad.

Years afterward, the recounting of that moment still clouds her eyes.

"His dad had told him if he ever told anybody he would kill him," Brown said.

Most breakthroughs that occur in art therapy aren't as dramatic, but people who do what Brown does often are called on when other forms of therapy aren't working.

Brown, who works at the Cottonwood Residential Treatment Center and has a private practice in Jackson, says art therapy works because images are primary to us and constitute a language of their own.

"The image helps mesh the unconscious with what we know about ourselves or what we think we know," she says.

Images come through when words fail. "I always say some things are too deep for words," Brown says.

Much of her background is in helping victims of abuse. Art therapy can be effective no matter the age or background of the victim, she says.

Brown has seen thousands of stick figures in her career, but childlike drawings belie the seriousness of what they can reveal.

"Often adult drawings have no hands or feet -- they're helpless," Brown said.

Often, some image of victimization appears in the artwork and may be a revelation. But the process is far from ended for someone who has been abused.

"It can be very releasing, but it can be scary when I put it back in your lap and you have to take responsibility," Brown said.

"Sometimes that means a complete lifestyle change."

Victims sometimes have adopted a victim role. "Something else can be learned in its place," she said.

A graduate of Southeast with a major in art, Brown was a designer for the Ralph Edwards Co. for 10 years before finding a calling in the relatively new field of art therapy. She received her master's degree in art therapy from the University of Louisville.

Brown is the only registered art therapist between St. Louis and Memphis.

Artists say that creating art is itself therapeutic and Brown agrees. "There are two schools of thought: art as therapy and art as psychotherapy ...I believe the two need to come together."

Well aware of the current controversy in psychological and legal circles about the validity of recovered memory, Brown says she is careful not to provide her patients with leading questions."

The patient is asked to draw a memory, and usually it's not a happy one. Then the process unfolds. "I let the person tell me about their drawing," she said, adding that many drawings will follow.

One 52-year-old woman realized through art therapy she had been sexually abused not only by her brother but by her father.

Identifying her approach as primarily Jungian, Brown says certain archetypes appear in drawings over and over. For instance, a tree often symbolizes the self. A knothole in the tree indicates something traumatic. "It would lead me to ask certain questions," she said.

One patient drew a tree that looked like a hand with a knothole and had rockets hanging down, "ready to take off." Together they would talk about the physical abuse that tree revealed to Brown.

"On the surface you would never have known it," she said.

One biracial boy drew a bird sitting in the fork of a tree. "He was trying to decide whether to follow his father or mother," Brown said.

Brown's profession is only 25 years old, and she is one of fewer than 6,000 art therapists practicing in the United States. She said the local medical and therapeutic communities slowly are beginning to accept the value of art therapy.

Many people who have been victimized victimize themselves by continuing to live with negative beliefs, Brown said. Art therapy forces patients to take responsibility for whatever feelings they're experiencing.

"The drawings become a record. I can go back and show them the drawings," Brown said.

In the end, no therapy can erase horrific experiences such as abuse, but victims can come to realize they are survivors who amount to much more than that experience, Brown says, adding:

"You don't slay the beast, you make friends with it. The beast becomes the beauty."