The School of Health Professions, at Murdoch University in Perth WA, has been providing training in person-centred counselling at Graduate Diploma and Masters level for ten years. The success of these qualifications has seen student numbers grow and the valuable contribution of well-trained practitioners entering the community. An important aspect of the training has been the inclusion of the unit ‘Introduction to Creative Arts Therapies’. In response to the popularity of this course component, and in recognition of the unique therapeutic value the arts therapies bring to the counselling profession, the University is staying at the forefront of psychotherapeutic and counselling education and practice with the planned introduction of a Graduate Diploma of Creative Arts Therapies in 2017.  Potential exists to expand this training to a Masters of Creative Arts Therapies in 2018. The development of the creative arts therapy training is highly sort after, and significant qualification development at Murdoch University, as currently, no other university level training exists for this field in WA.

The arts therapies encompass the separate modalities of art therapy, drama therapy, music therapy, dance therapy, poetry therapy, play therapy and sand tray therapy and also integrated or intermodal approaches. Developing from this pivotal role the arts play in human cultures, the arts therapies have been evolving with purposeful intention as a profession for the past one hundred years.  Artists, musicians, actors, dancers and poets in conjunction with psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, counsellors and other healthcare professionals have worked with and explored the flexible and adaptable potential of the arts in relationship to therapeutic experience.

The arts therapies are practised globally, with professionally trained arts therapists providing therapeutic experiences to a wide range of client populations to meet an ever-growing need for finding effective therapeutic interventions for relieving human suffering.  Application of the arts therapies and has successfully occurred within contexts and client groups as varied as intellectual and physical disability, schools, hospitals, outpatients clinics, psychiatric and mental illness, addictions, cancer treatment, palliative care, refugees, trauma, chronic pain, veterans, dementia and aged care. (Malchiodi, 2005, Jones, 2005)

Application of expressive modalities has seen the integration of the arts therapies into existing psychotherapeutic practices to develop creative arts therapies approaches that build upon the theoretical frameworks of theories such as Psychoanalysis, Analytical Psychology, Humanistic Person-Centred Therapy, Adlerian Therapy, Gestalt Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (Malchiodi, C. 2005).  More recently, there has been increasing development of philosophical and theoretical understanding and practice of the arts therapies that draws upon the unique qualities of working with aesthetics and the interrelationship of aesthetic experience and sensory perception across the various art modalities and is described as therapeutic aesthetics. (Knill, Levine, & Levine. 2005)

Essential understandings in the practice of the arts therapies include working with the connection between physiological and psychological dimensions to human experience and the significant contribution of imagination and creative expression in the process of experiencing relief and healing for people in psychological distress.  To provide a therapeutic space in which these explorations and transformational processes can occur, theories of liminality and transitional experience and transitional space are significant. (Knill et al. 2005) The process of working with the arts therapies can create an externalised expression of experiences that may be confusing, distressing or traumatic for the client.  These expressed images, be they paintings, sculptures, dance movements or enactments, bring forward the contents of the unconscious self and conscious experience having a presence and voice external to the creator (Jones, 2005).  Through active participation opportunities for self-expression exist, though which the psyche may be explored, opening the way for cathartic expression of feelings or containment of feelings and perceptions, according to the therapeutic need of the client.  Such expression and exploration can provide a deepening of self-understanding and self-acceptance and the potential for the transformation of feelings, emotional healing and resolution of conflicts (Malchiodi, 2005)