Edith Kramer
The act of making art is itself the cure.
A founder of art therapy who championed "art as therapy," holding that the creative process itself heals through sublimation.
techniques
Art makes it possible to achieve a degree of sublimation ordinarily beyond the individual’s reach.
Who they were
Edith Kramer was an Austrian-born painter and art-therapy pioneer who witnessed art’s therapeutic power while teaching refugee children in Prague. She fled to the United States in 1938 and in 1950 became art therapist at the Wiltwyck School for Boys. She helped found the graduate art-therapy program at New York University and was honored by the American Art Therapy Association.
Terms they cared about
Ideas worth knowing
Their techniques
How the work was done
Their big idea
Art Therapy Theory
Image-making gives unconscious feeling a form that can be seen and integrated.
The approach they founded
Art Therapy
Creative expression brings emotional experience to the surface, where it can be seen and integrated.
Questions in their spirit
What they’d ask you
Sit with one. Answer online, or in the app.
Carry the idea forward
Kramer — What they’d ask you
Psipas asks you one small, honest question at a time — and builds the picture from your answers.