An overview of the integration and development trends between arts and psychotherapy

Yuxing Xie^*Xianhua Sun

• College of Art and Design, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, China, Nanjing, China

In the field of mental health, the integration of art and psychotherapy has become an important direction of development, the core mechanism of which lies in the creative expression of art forms to promote individuals to achieve emotional release, cognitive reconstruction and social function recovery, and the fusion of art and psychotherapy has given rise to the important field of practice of art therapy. In this study, we conducted a knowledge mapping analysis of art therapy-related research based on the Web of Science (WoS) core ensemble data sources using the CiteSpace bibliometric tool from 2005 to 2024. By searching keywords such as "Art Healing" and "Art Therapy," and after the strict screening, 1799 valid articles were finally included. The study is carried out from multiple dimensions: at the level of basic information, changes in the number of publications, the distribution of journals, the regional distribution, the distribution of authors and institutions are systematically sorted out; at the level of research content, the research hotspots and development trends are explored through the analysis of keyword co-occurrences, clustering mining, and timeline deduction. The study results show that art therapy research from 2005 - 2024 is characterized by phased growth, experiencing, in turn, a period of germination, a steady period, and a period of rapid development. In terms of geographical distribution, Europe and the United States, represented by the United States and the United Kingdom, contributed 63% of the core literature; in terms of the evolution of research hotspots, it has gradually shifted from the early basic intervention research to the exploration of technological integration and the exploration of ethical issues. In addition, the study also found a high degree of relevance of art therapy to multiple disciplines such as psychology, medicine, and rehabilitation, but also revealed limitations such as an imbalance in the development of cross-cultural theories. Although art therapy has made significant progress in theoretical construction and practical application, structural problems such as uneven development of cross-cultural theories, poor articulation between technical applications and practice guidelines, and insufficient research coverage on special groups still exist.