How Art Therapy Works: Your Mind Is Not Only in Your Head (Part 1)
All photos in this post were taken at a live workshop led by Prof. Hildrun Rolff in our studio.
Art therapy works because your mind is not only in your head. It is also in your hands, and in the things your hands touch.
When I started my counselling studies, I believed a simpler story. The feeling sits inside you, like something in a closed jar. The drawing opens the lid and lets it out.
It is a nice story. I have since learnt it is not quite right.
Most of what follows comes from one book: People Are STRANGE by Lambros Malafouris, an Oxford archaeologist who studies how humans have thought with their hands since the first stone tools. Everything below is in my own words, as a student still learning from the giants.
In Part 1 you will see:
Why the usual explanation has a hole in it
How you think with things, not only about them
What one drawn line can show you
Why clay answers back, and words do not
1. The usual explanation has a hole in it
The usual explanation says art lets out what is already inside. Here is the hole:
If the feeling were already sitting there, ready-made, you could simply say it. Most of us cannot.
The mistake has a name
Malafouris calls it inversion. We assume the idea comes first, inside the head, and the hand only copies it onto paper. He argues it is the other way round.
The thinking does not happen before the making. It happens in the making.
That one sentence is the heart of this whole post. Every section below is a different way of seeing it.
2. You think with things, not only about them
We do much of our thinking with our hands and the objects around us. You already know this. You just have not noticed it.
Two everyday pictures
A child counting. Out come the fingers. Take the fingers away and the sum gets harder. The fingers are doing part of the thinking.
Someone doing a jigsaw. Nobody solves it in their head first. They pick up a piece, turn it, try it, put it back. The hands find what the head cannot see yet.
The big word, after the picture
Malafouris calls this thinging: thinking with and through things, not only about them. In his view, the mind does not stop at the skull. It reaches into whatever we touch and move.
This changed how I see the art table. The paper, the paint and the clay are not decoration around the "real" work going on in your head. They are part of how you think.
3. One line, three things at once
A single drawn line is a movement, an object and a trace, all at the same time. Malafouris opens one of his chapters with this exact task: take a pen and draw a line. Then he asks what you actually did.
You made… | What it is | What it tells you |
A movement | The drawing of the line | What your body was doing |
An object | A line on paper | What is now there to look at |
A trace | A record of how your hand moved | Fast or slow, pressed or light, steady or shaky |
We usually notice only the object. But at the moment the pen stops and still touches the paper, the gesture, the mark and the trace are one event.
Why this matters
A line can show you something before you have words for it. Someone may look down and say:
"I did not mean to press so hard."
The line got there first. In art-based work we do not rush to say what a line means. We notice how it was made, and that is usually where the person finds their own meaning.
4. The clay answers back
When you work with a material, it pushes back, and that push changes you.
Picture a potter at the wheel
The potter presses. The clay presses back. Too wet and the wall collapses. Too dry and it cracks. So the potter has to listen through the hands and adjust.
Who is shaping whom? Malafouris spent about twenty years watching potters to answer that. His answer: both. The pot and the potter make each other. Over the years, the clay even turns an ordinary body into a potter's body, with hands that know things the head cannot explain.
Now compare that with talking
Talking about it | Making something | |
Does it push back? | No. Words go where you send them | Yes. The clay or paint answers |
Speed | Easy to race and loop | Slows you to the pace of the hands |
Where your attention goes | Into the story about the problem | Into what is under your hands, now |
What you can see afterwards | Nothing, it is gone | Something real you can look at again |
You can talk in circles for an hour and nothing resists. Clay resists.
When the material answers you, you have to answer back. That back-and-forth is where something new can begin.
So what does this mean for you?
Your mind is not only in your head. It is in your hands, in the line you did not plan, and in the clay that pushes back.
In Part 2, we look at what this means at the art table: why big feelings come within reach, why nobody can read your picture, and why change stays possible at any age.
Want to feel it rather than read about it?
See our upcoming workshops at artbasedcoaching.com, or write to us at info@artbasedcoaching.com.
Source: Lambros Malafouris, People Are STRANGE: Material Engagement and the Creation of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, 2026).
All ideas are paraphrased in my own words.
Photos: live workshop led by Prof. Hildrun Rolff at the Art Based Coaching studio, Petaling Jaya. Diagrams: Art Based Coaching.
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