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Robert has documented his international travel with fine art photographs of indigenous people in their daily life experiences, fascinating wildlife, landscapes and creative portraits. His work has been exhibited and published internationally and he has been the recipient of many awards for his work. For more details view his Professional Vitae and scroll to “Art, Honors and Exhibitions”.
PhotoTherapy with Dr. Robert Irwin Wolf
The uses of photography, as a tool to gain personal insight for emotional growth, has been divided into two areas of application. "Therapeutic Photography" implies that photographs may be used by people for their own personal growth without the help of a certified or licensed professional therapist. These exercises are designed to promote reflection and self-awareness for the photographer viewing their own photographs (or anyone viewing another person’s photographs), leading to deeper understanding of the unconscious meaning that is often contained within the image. Photographs are like visual metaphors, that contain many levels of meaning, as found with dream images. The other application of photography, "Phototherapy" is conducted by a trained therapist who integrates photography into their clinical work with clients. I also have found that people often don't realize how the unconscious seeks expression in their lives, often with unintended consequences, and using photographs becomes a way to explore unconscious material in a safe, playfully creative manner.
While it may still be somewhat rare today for many clinicians to integrate photography in their clinical work, I have been publishing articles on using and teaching phototherapy, taught within several graduate art therapy programs and conducted training seminars for mental health professionals since 1976. Currently, there are many practicing art therapists and psychoanalysts who have had this unique training, enabling them to integrate the use of photography within their clinical work.
Early History of Phototherapy
Before teaching Phototherapy on the graduate level, during the period from 1973- 1980, while simultaneously training in psychoanalysis at The National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, I had the opportunity to work as the clinical director of the Henry Street School, a special education junior and senior high school run by the Henry Street Settlement in NYC. I staffed the school’s clinical program with social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists and graduate art therapy interns from the Pratt Institute graduate art therapy program. In this way, art therapy was literally woven into and integrated within the fabric of the school curriculum. ‘Individual Art’ sessions and Art Therapy Groups utilized the unique creative expertise of each graduate student. During this period, Daisy Nelson-Gee, an art therapist at the Blueberry School in NYC and Judy Weiser, a colleague in Canada and I, began to publish a series of articles on phototherapy. These became the formative years for the development of the field of Phototherapy. In addition to my work, since then, many other clinicians in related fields have also written about Phototherapy and Therapeutic uses of Photography.
At Henry Street, I had secured equipment grants from the Polaroid Foundation for cameras and film to explore their therapeutic use with our students. These inner-city adolescents were failing in the regular school system for a variety of reasons including learning disabilities, emotional problems and truancy. I found that the cameras allowed these teens to express themselves through the photographic media in a way that they were often reluctant to do through more traditional art modalities. This was likely due to the limitations they often discovered in their educational experiences. Facing a blank piece of paper would, for these children, confront them with their 'fear of failure', often causing them to hesitate to use traditional art materials. However, they would readily take cameras out into their world and bring back images of themselves, others and their environment, that we would then work with therapeutically. I gave these children the opportunity to explore various ways they could work with these photos using their innate creativity. The Polaroid Foundation asked me to write a report to each year, describing how we were using their products. These reports were interesting enough to be picked up by professional Art Therapy journals and published as a series of articles that were eventually combined into a chapter in a book, Phototherapy in Mental Health, edited by Kraus and Fryrear and published by Charles Thomas in 1983. These original articles were further elaborated upon and included within another paper, "Advances In Phototherapy Training", The arts in psychotherapy, 34 (2007) 124-133. These articles were then published with further elaboration in a chapter of “The Therapeutic Uses of Photography In Play Therapy”, Integrating Expressive Arts and Play Therapy: A Guidebook for Mental Health Practitioners and Educators, Green & Drewes, Eds, January, 2014, John Wiley & Sons:New Jersey.
My latest work with photography in psychoanalytic psychotherapy has been conducted remotely with clients within my private practice, where participants would email photographs that we would then use as starting points in sessions for discussions that inevitably led to exploration of deeper unconscious material that were expressed through these photographs. This has become a powerful tool for clients dealing with trauma as it offers a safe way to express experiences that can then be slowly recognized and processes without triggering defenses. See my Vitae for a link to the Abstract of my latest article, published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, “Synthesis of Photography, Art and Neuropsychological Concepts Within Psychoanalytic Therapy: An Illustrated Case Study”,that illustrates this dynamic treatment process.
For more Information Contact Robert Irwin Wolf at rwolfnyc@gmail.com