Supposing that the being group-bullied of children are primarily produced by the maternal
rearing attitude, this study was designed to improve both the child-raising attitude of the
mothers and the adjusting behaviour of the victimized children by treating the group-bullied
children and their mothers together with the psychodynamic art therapy.
The psychodynamic art therapy used in this study was based on the theory of
psychodynamic therapy, and its study questions were on whether psychodynamic art
therapy indeed affects 1) the rearing attitude, 2) the emotion expression, and 3) the insight
level of the mothers of group-bullied children, and especially 4) the victimized behaviour
and 5) the behaviour problems of the victimized children.
The subjects of this study were 2 mothers and 2 children victimized by group. This
psychodynamic art therapy was performed with a total 30 sessions of each 50 min therapy
for the mother and total of 20 sessions of each 45 min therapy for the child. The following
results were obtained: 1) The primary occurrence of being victimized of the children is
supposed to be originated from the maternal child-rearing attitude. Prior to this therapy, the
mothers had showed aggression/hostility, neglect/indifference, and rejection to their own
child. However, posterior to this therapy, all of them have drastically reduced the raising
attitude of aggression/hostility, and, changed to be warm and affective to their own
children. 2) The mothers of the victimized children have increasingly expressed positive
emotion with the progress into the latter half of this therapy, while conversely reduced the
negative emotion expression. At the first half, those clients showed their intellectual insight
at the level of 1 to 2, whereas their emotion expression insight of the level of 3 to 4 were
increased and more deeper with the progress into the latter half. These results mean the
present psycho-dynamic art therapy made them to express negative emotion, helped them to
accomplish self-acceptance and insight, and became effective to change their rearing
attitude. 3) The bullied children showed a significant improvement from the victimized state
through this psychodynamic art therapy. 4) Through this psychodynamic art therapy, the bullied children became much less problematic to their emotion and behaviour.
This means that a practice of this maternal therapy has to precede all others for the therapy of the victimized children. Finally, this study needs more systematic works to support these results.
Key Words : Psychodynamic Art Therapy, Group Bullying, The Mother's Rearing Attitude