Introduction

This article reports an art therapy case with a Lewy Body Disease client. The art therapy is provided at home for 6 months, on a weekly basis. The process is significant for its positive outcomes. Similar findings are showed in specialized publications on the benefit of creative and art therapeutic methods for clients with LBD and other dementia syndromes [1]. Lowering depression and anxiety levels is a main benefit improving both clients’ psychosomatic/mental status and their relationships with the professional and familial caregivers. Art therapy also proves its effectiveness for other degenerative disabilities with elder [2] and in chronic neurologic diseases [3].

Case Report

J. is a 78 years old man. He is an educated, gentle and nice person. He is living with his wife in a beautiful flat filled with books and art and could benefit of a quiet aging-but he is ill. The Lewy Body Disease progressively deprives him of his capabilities. He is more and more disorganised, depressive and anxious. He has panic attacks when his wife has to go outside, is not anymore able to stay alone at home and has difficulty to go outdoors even for an accompanied short walk…It is previsible that in a short delay it will not be possible to maintain him in a domestic environment. But his wife finds it hard to place him in a specialized home where obviously he would not find the same familiar surroundings, comfort and emotional security…I am asked to offer him art therapy sessions of one-and-a-half hour once per week. I propose a pallet of simple materials-pencils, charcoal, pastels and gouache and big paper sheets placed on an easel. I invite him to draw and paint as it comes, just moving his hands and looking at the resulting traces. He is already familiar with this work frame as a family friend who is an artist previously tried to involve him in a creative expressive activityquite unsuccessfully. He has some difficulty to start touching materials and sheets. But, little by little, offered the possibility of a free choice of materials within non-directive therapeutic management, he starts to trace something on a paper… From one session to the next one, it looks like he is gradually climbing a ladder, each step bringing more concentration, complexity in compositions, colours, forms and storytelling. He figures his favorite themes, music, nature, people walking in the city and enjoys sharing. I am talking to him and progressively he responds to my requests of explanations as a translator-interpreter of his own creating and reflexion.
The cohesion of his verbal expression greatly varies from one day to another but his wish to make art and share about it goes growing. Our relationship is empathic, in these sessions he is quiet and positive, his wife can leave while he is busy with me. She also testifies of a better compliance to daily routine in caregiving and less anxiety about being dependent. The art therapy sessions are a space-time for secure attachment. The art therapeutic process is based on the principle of the empathic creativity as the core active factor in art therapy [4]. A selection of the client’s productions created in these 6 months cure (Figure 1-6) shows a process of psychosomatic and neural stimulation visible in the growing complexity of the compositions and colors. J. talks more and more and even if his verbalizing is often difficult to decode, he is happy to share while I am listening and «feeding» the dialogue, both creative and verbal, through an authentic creative human encounter.


Discussion