Art Therapy Master of Arts (MA)

Art therapy is an independent therapeutic method in the social-preventive and rehabilitative, as well as in the clinical-psychological and psychotherapeutic fields. The process seeks to reflect an inner-psychological form of experience in an artistic medium, for example a picture, a sculpture and/or a graphic and makes it possible to methodically and interventorily reorient and reorient forms of experience and social expression.

The extra-occupational four-semester, academically certified university course for art therapy at the SFU Vienna, which concludes with a Master of Arts after the fifth semester, is primarily aimed at social workers, social, special and curative educators, employees in social psychiatric services, life and social counsellors, as well as artists and visual educators, and nursing and clinical professions, such as animation nursing staff and gerontopsychiatric professions.

The university course Art Therapy MA with its previous curriculum is no longer offered from winter semester 2023/24. No new participants are accepted.

Admission requirements

• University entrance qualification or previous professional experience
• German language level C1
• One-page letter of motivation
• Curriculum vitae in tabular form
• Admission interviews
• Admission seminar

Where life destinies have become one-way streets, often only the image remains, which is symptomatic and symbolically groundbreaking. The SFU offers the course on a scientific basis from a practical point of view, which means working out the background of the disturbed or cancelled life patterns and images and making them accessible using artistic-practical methods.
Neurobiological and genetic, psychosocial and psychomotor foundations are therefore developed in the degree programme in order to be used in social and curative education, acute, rehabilitative and outpatient clinical professional fields, i.e. to be explored initially in an intensive treatment context under supervision.

High practical relevance

Students are brought into contact with clinical-rehabilitative practice right from the start and are supervised, i.e. accompanied, in this process. At the same time, they are theoretically trained in the fundamentals of problems that are susceptible to practical application. The idea is therefore to provide a seamless practice-supervision-theory programme that introduces practical, theoretical and self-reflective aspects.

The course is continuously accompanied by artistic, material-aesthetic-orientated and (psycho-)therapeutic self-experience, which can be seen as a further basis in the training process. With this art therapy programme, the Sigmund Freud Private University contributes to the intensification of artistic, psychotherapeutic and artistic practice-oriented art therapy in Austria.

Curriculum for the five-semester Master’s programme (accredited):

• Curriculum_Art_therapy MA.pdf (in German)

4 semesters, with a degree in academic art therapy:
Total € 11,568.00 or € 2,892.00 per semester or € 482.00 per month (plus 2% processing fee)

5 semesters, with a Master of Arts degree:
Total € 14,460.00 or € 2,892.00 per semester or € 482.00 per month (plus 2% administration fee)

Admission fee: € 480

Contact Finance and Controlling:
Mail: ptw-accounting@sfu.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 798 40 98 304
Opening and telephone hours: Mon-Thu: 10:00 – 15:00 / Fri: 10:00 – 15:00 (Fridays only available by phone.)
Address: Freudplatz 1, 3rd floor, room 3002

Winter semester 2025/26

VVZ VIE-KT 11 5.Semester WiSe 2025+26.pdf

The lecture notes of the ULG Art Therapy can be found in the password-protected area Art Therapy – internal.

• KT contact Lecturers (PDF, in German)

• 4 semesters: academic art therapist
• 5 semesters: Master of Arts, MA (accredited)

Past graduation ceremonies

• Graduation Ceremony 2025
• Graduation Ceremony 2024

Graduates

Since 2015, 142 graduates have completed the university course in art therapy and have since been shaping creative development processes in various professional fields.

Master’s theses ULG Art Therapy (PDF, in German)
(as of July 2025)

Publications by art therapy graduates

• Jutta DENNSTEDT: The effect of art therapy interventions on the resources “self-management”, “self-efficacy expectation” and “sense of purpose” in inpatients with alcohol dependency
• Rinata GÜTTLEIN: Intermedia art therapy – problem discovery through the embodiment of night dreams by means of photography

Past events

• Online lecture on art therapy in the context of neurological and quantitative assumptions
• Book presentation Creativity, Aesthetics and the Unconscious. An encounter between art and psychoanalysis
• Conference 2023: At the interface of art and psychotherapy
• Conference 2022: Art meets the psyche
• Conference 2021: The psyche as a place of creation – when images come to consciousness

Some works by our art therapy students:

• Book At the Interface of Art and Psychotherapy by Georg Franzen & Karl-Heinz Menzen
• Book Psychosentheorien in der Psychoanalyse by Anatol Möller
• Book Creativity, Aesthetics and the Unconscious by Marie-Theres Haas (co-leader ULG Art Therapy)
• Book Holzskulpturen selbst gemacht und Website by Vinko Nino Jaeger
• Book Kunsttherapeutische Stichworte by Manfred Blohm, Katja Watermann (ed.)
• Journal Musik-, Tanz- und Kunsttherapie, with contributions by Karl-Heinz Menzen, Georg Franzen and Karl Hoermann, among others
• DGKT-Journal – German Society for Artistic Forms of Therapy
• Book The Archaeology of Art Therapy by Karl-Heinz Menzen
• Website of Eva Wolfram Ertl, group and psychoanalyst, artist
• Book A Song in Praise of Beauty by Leslie De Melo
• Book Zur Psychodynamik kreativen Gestaltens by Georg Franzen, Ruth Hampe and Monika Wigger
• Selected publications by art therapy lecturers
• Book Das Vor- und Unbewusste – Im Zentrum der inneren Bilder by Karl-Heinz Menzen
• Book Three on a Bench by Karl-Heinz Menzen
• Book The symptom as an image by Karl-Heinz Menzen
• Magazine Art & Therapy
• Video Art therapy – approaches and professional fields
• Video Perspectives on art therapy
• Interview with Prof Menzen What is art therapy?

• Cathedral Museum
• Gallery Gugging
• Caritas Archdiocese of Vienna

University Programme Clinical Art Therapy, MA (CE)
Faculty of Psychotherapy Science
Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna
Freudplatz 3, Room 301
1020 Vienna
kunsttherapie@sfu.ac.at