The Multiple Self-States Drawing Technique: Creative Assessment and Treatment with Children and Adolescents

This book introduces the Multiple Self-States Drawing Technique (MSSDT), a creative, transdiagnostic, clinical assessment tool and treatment intervention for child and adolescent clients. The MSSDT provides clinicians and patients with a novel opportunity to bridge the gap in youngsters’ selves-awareness of discrete emotional states.

Dr. Parente teaches clinicians how to guide clients through this contemporaneous version of projective figure drawing in order to discover and explore trauma-based, dissociative, and emotionally dysregulated self-states and to focus on adaptive, resilient states of well-being. Specific, step-by-step instructions are provided, and case illustrations demonstrating the proposed clinical advantages of the method are presented. Chapters show how this experiential, psycho-educational, arts-based activity can be flexibly applied to a broad range of ages and clinical populations and how using the MSSDT may support mental health professionals’ clinical work.

Through this manual, clinicians will learn how to help clients foster a beneficial relational encounter, promote therapeutic self-expression, and develop an enhanced self and other awareness.

Susan C. Parente, PsyD, is a licensed psychologist and a psychodynamic and relational practitioner. Dr. Parente has provided child, adolescent, family and adult psychological treatment services, comprehensive psycho-diagnostic assessment, consultation to schools and families, and creative arts and play therapy in multiple settings. She has maintained a private practice in her Montclair, NJ office for over 25 years.