The purpose of this study is to identify research areas of art therapy in
detail and establish its academic identity by analyzing co-occurrences of key
words, and investigating the intellectual structure of Korean art therapy.
Thus, a similarity matrix was developed including the 175 most frequently
used words among 1,136 words, which were extracted from 845 research
papers published in「Korean Journal of Art Therapy」, and a hierarchical
cluster analysis and network analysis were performed. Consequently, this
study found the following results. First, network analysis is more appropriate
for analyzing the intellectual structure of ar therapy which is a practical
study than cluster analysis, and the intellectual structure of Korean art
therapy consists of the five research areas of “art therapy theory”, “testing
and scales”, “clinical cases of art therapy”, “art therapy trend”, and “training
for art therapists”. Second, it confirmed that art therapy as a tool to examine
one’s psychological characteristics presented in a work and change them
based on psychology and art, has an intellectual structure that is different
from that of other studies. This study explored the intellectual structure of
Korean art therapy in a systematic and scientific way by utilizing an
informetric method.