Margaret Naumburg (May 14, 1890 – February 26, 1983) was an American psychologist, educator, artist, author and among the first major theoreticians of art therapy.
[6] The school began with two teachers and ten students focusing on letting children develop their own interests and ideas.
Up to the present time, education has missed the real significance of the child's behavior by treating surface actions as isolated conditions.
Having failed to recognize the true sources of behavior, it has been unable effectively to correct and guide the impulses of human growth....
[8] Many notable individuals taught at the Walden School including Lewis Mumford, Hendrik van Loon, her sister Florence Cane, and Ernest Bloch.
She called her approach Dynamically Oriented Art Therapy, which was based primarily on Freudian theory.
This approach, her main contribution to the art therapy community, promotes " the release of spontaneous imagery" from the client through the symbols drawn and free association of the artworks.
[11] She was also sympathetic to Jungian notions of universal symbolism and Harry Stack Sullivan's ideas about interpersonal psychiatry.
She was skeptical of simple or rigid approaches to symbolic meaning, which was consistent with Freud's teaching about dream analysis.
[1] Naumburg wrote "when art teachings are routine it discourages efforts at spontaneous and creative expression forcing pupils to recreate what they already know is good."
This forces the creator to use another part of the brain hopefully releasing the unconscious mind to form the symbolic imagery needed to gain access to more insight of the self.
[1] Dynamically Oriented Art Therapy is based on recognizing that man's fundamental thoughts and feelings come from the unconscious.