After all, are coloring books therapeutic?

Psychologists have argued that coloring books are not therapeutic. Will it be? Everything will depend on the concept of therapy. Understand the problem.

Hello friends!

Recently, we have seen the trend of coloring books emerge, a true publishing phenomenon, with several bestsellers. Just go to a big bookstore or famous websites that sell books to see that sales are and continue to be high.

In our area of ​​psychology, however, there is some criticism of the promise stamped on some covers of these coloring books: the promise of being therapeutic. Psychologists argued that coloring is not the same as doing therapy, because there is no elaboration of content and there is no production of new content. That is, the shapes were already drawn and just filling the shapes with color would not bring a benefit as expected. In fact, instead of de-stressing and producing calm and peace, for many people it would be having the opposite effect, that is, it was causing more stress.

These criticisms make sense. But after all, are these books really therapeutic? Can anyone extract any benefit from them? Let’s think together.

After all, are coloring books therapeutic?

As we learned from Socrates, we shouldn’t start with examples, or rather, examples are part of the analysis, but we have to get to the concept first. What does it mean to be therapeutic?

If the concept of therapeutic is linked to talking about one’s own psychic contents, as in psychotherapy, and is restricted to just this delimitation, evidently, coloring books will not be therapeutic.

But does every therapy boil down to psychotherapy? What about art therapy, music therapy and occupational therapy?

Well, I’m not an expert in any of these three areas, so I’ll leave it up to the experts to comment. However, the author I study for my doctorate, Carl Gustav Jung, the creator of Analytical Psychology, was an important author for the development of these areas because he expanded (since 1916) the scope of psychotherapy.

Therapy: between ethics and aesthetics

In the text The Transcendent Function, Jung defines this function as “the union of the contents aware and unconscious” (JUNG, p. 1). The contents of the unconscious can be accessed through dreams or spontaneous fantasies during analysis. However, at certain times and for certain people, fantasies do not appear so spontaneously. So what is needed is an artifice called active imagination by Jung.

He writes: “Patients who have a talent for painting or drawing can express their affections through images. It is less important to have a technically or aesthetically satisfactory description than to leave free reign to fantasy, and that everything be done in the best possible way” (JUNG, p. 15).

In addition to the visual type, somewhat anticipating NLP, Jung speaks of visual types, auditory types and those who prefer to access their unconscious with their hands. Which means it opens up possibilities for writing (monologues or dialogues, auditory type) and also for sculpture and dance (kinesthetic).

The question I wanted to get to is: what remains of what emerged from this process of active imagination? Jung has two answers:

– a subject can go in the direction of creative formulation.

– a subject can go in the direction of understanding.

Thus, a person who is more connected to aesthetics will tend to evaluate the product of their imagination through questions related to the beauty of the forms, whether it was beautiful or ugly, whether it was harmonious or disharmonious, whether it was pleasant or unpleasant. Remembering that aesthetics comes from the Greek αισθητική – aisthésis: perception, sensation, sensitivity.

And someone else will not wonder about beauty (or ugliness). She will think of the meaning of what she has produced. Not the philosophical meaning itself, of what the thing is, but the meaning of that content for your life, for your happiness, well-being, for what that relates to your symptom, to your suffering. In other words, she will be asking ethical questions.

See also – 9 Reasons to go to therapy according to Jung

So is coloring therapy?

If we take Jung’s idea for active imagination, we will see that an important component is that everyone must create their own content. O red book, that Jung wrote, is a textbook example of how the process works. He writes dialogue, entire scenes and draws, a process through which he accesses his own content.

So, really, if we define therapy as the access and elaboration of individual contents, coloring a previously structured form would not be therapeutic.

However, at least in my analysis, I don’t think we need to be so radical. The coloring process is similar to playing a song by another composer. If I learn to play guitar, piano or any other instrument, I can become an excellent instrumentalist without ever creating a single melody. So playing someone else’s music is therapeutic? Is creating a predetermined mandala with colored sands like the Buddhists or drawings in Corpus Christi therapeutic? Dancing a ready-made choreography or a dance previously outlined by the culture – like a samba – is it therapeutic or not?

Again, we fall into the problem of the concept. If therapy is strictly linked to the production of new content, that is, in a way related to originality, these activities would not be therapeutic. Therefore, a composer could benefit from the production of his music, while those who listen or reproduce it would not.

However, if we do not link the idea of ​​therapy only to originality, we can arrive at a broader view of what should be included or excluded.

If I take a drawing to color and color it my way, wouldn’t that be original? (In psychotherapy with children, isn’t the choice of game and the way the child plays a factor to be taken into account in the diagnosis?) If I color and through coloring I start to access, with the colors, what I am feeling, wouldn’t that be therapeutic, wouldn’t it bring me self-knowledge?

For example, let’s say someone is feeling down and only uses colors close to gray (which are typically linked to sadness). Now, wouldn’t colors have a meaning, both aesthetic and ethical?

If I start coloring and realize I want to draw my own shapes, won’t the book have gotten me started?

If I color and come to realize that life is not just about a goal – art has no purpose – wouldn’t that be a benefit to me?

Conclusion

I imagine that there will be no consensus among psi professionals on this problem. This is because, as usual, there is no consensus on the definition of concepts. That’s why we have several psychologies and not just a single one.

I, particularly, think that these books can be useful yes. Useful to show people that it is possible to do something without a purpose, a goal. They can bring back childhood memories (when painting and coloring existed) and can relax, calm, distract, although they can also do the opposite.

My opinion is that such books can be like a bridge to access deeper contents, for the creation of original, particular and peculiar materials. But, even if it is not a bridge, it is something that shows the reaction of each one given an activity. If a person gets stressed, it’s not the drawing that made him stressed…

Questions, suggestions, criticisms and comments, please write below!

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