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In the mid 1990s, while pursuing my doctoral degree, enrolled in a five-day poetry workshop led by the eminent Dr. Carol Barrett. Conducted at the UCLA campus, this was an opportunity to retreat into the poetic ministries of the written word. While going through this training, one of the exercises chosen by Barrett was to hand out two or three index cards, each containing one random line of text from myriad resources (journals, newspapers, magazines). From these cards, we were instructed to create a poem in less than 10 minutes. The poem, which penned, became one of the most telling dips into phototherapy that had ever written: The phrases that arbitrarily received were I used to come here as a child and what of the things we left. This verse contained hidden clues as to how made sense of my childhood by combing over pictures of my youth and family: The mahogany drawer used to come here as a child-- that long, dank narrow space, looming inside my mind. sorted through pictures of your memory; the only thing worth preserving that kept. used to come here as a child-- that mahogany, bottom drawer, replete with glossy photos, embedded with your history. used to come here as a child-- and pretend that your black and white existence would lend glossy texture to my tattered and broken heart. used to come here as a child-- and sift through the sea of photographs that lined the walnut-stained images of my sepia-toned hues of your color. used to come here as a child-- and bury myself in the comfort of your memory, more real than any that you left me. Yes, used to come here as a child-- always hoping, praying, to find you real in those long-ago places, now buried in your institutionalized, and vapid mind. used to come here as a child-- but no longer do visit that ebony rimmed, mahogany container that was you. But what of the things we left? After wrote this poem, was stunned by its evocative nature and what it unleashed in my core. This concretized how photographic images reveal our history and our biology. Later, expanded on that theory in my second text. (1) Soon after that workshop, found myself teaching my first phototherapy class. New to this particular venue, scoured the research and read the more historical texts of David Krauss and Jerry Fryrear (2) and Fryrear and Irene Corbit. (3) But it wasn't until read the work of Judy Weiser that really understood the genre of phototherapy in which had been operating. (4) The beauty of phototherapy, which can be understood as a variety of ideologies that examine pictures of one's past as well as creating pictures/photographs/sculptures/videos from one's current perspective, is that the work inherently has the ability to immediately trigger memories, trigger affect, put the client back into that feeling state in a way that no other medium can. (5) As an art therapy clinician, have patients with complex etiologies such as Asperger's syndrome, autism, and aphasia of varying typology. Indeed, have repeatedly witnessed the power of photographic images in accelerating recovery in these often unreachable pati ents. But, as Weiser suggests, from an historical viewpoint, it is indeed understandable: We can only be aware of ourselves to the extent that we can self-reflect; our existence at any moment is a summary of selective memory and, within the distortive nature of that process, also a partial fiction created only by what we can know of ourselves and have introjected from others. (6) This is especially true when working with people who have temporarily lost their memory (for example through traumatic brain injury) as well as those who are enduring the cruel reality of the varying stages of Alzheimer's and dementia. …
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