Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis

Perspectives from Analyst-Artists

George Hagman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138859111
• eBook ISBN: 9781317510154
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Teoria e critica dell'arte

Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis: Perspectives from Analyst-Artists collects personal reflections by therapists who are also professional artists. It explores the relationship between art and analysis through accounts by practitioners who identify themselves as dual-profession artists and analysts. The book illustrates the numerous areas where analysis and art share common characteristics using first-hand, in-depth accounts. These vivid reports from the frontier of art and psychoanalysis shed light on the day-to-day struggle to succeed at both of these demanding professions.

From the beginning of psychoanalysis, many have made comparisons between analysis and art. Recently there has been increasing interest in the relationship between artistic and psychotherapeutic practices. Most important, both professions are viewed as highly creative with spontaneity, improvisation and aesthetic experience seeming to be common to each. However, differences have also been recognized, especially regarding the differing goals of each profession: art leading to the creation of an art work, and psychoanalysis resulting in the increased welfare and happiness of the patient. These issues are addressed head-on in Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis: Perspectives from Analyst-Artists.

The chapters consist of personal essays by analyst/artists who are currently working in both professions; each has been trained in and is currently practicing psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The goal of the book is to provide the audience with a new understanding of psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic processes from the perspective of art and artistic creativity. Drawing on artistic material from painting, poetry, photography, music and literature, the book casts light on what the creative processes in art can add to the psychoanalytic endeavor, and vice versa.

Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis: Perspectives from Analyst-Artists will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, theorists of art, academic artists, and anyone interested in the psychology of art.

1
Coming into being as Artist and Psychotherapist

Keeping self from falling together too soon

Karen M. Schwartz

When I was bored in junior high, before I learned that one was supposed to listen when a teacher spoke, I spent what seemed like hours looking at boys and their shirts, which, in the 1970s, tended to be plaid or striped and colorful. I would redesign the shirts, deleting one color or stripe or aspect of a pattern and visualizing how this would change their look, for better or worse. Thus began my informal and only early training as an artist. Naturalistic observation, intense looking, improvisation, and experimentation informed my eye.

As an early teen, I began a lifelong habit of taking a camera everywhere, and in particular on frequent trips into New York City, about a 30-minute train ride from where our family lived. I wandered the streets with a friend, exploring neighborhoods and taking pictures like those of the New York and Paris street photographers whose work I saw in museums. I became a fan of black-and-white photojournalism in Look and Life magazines and the cityscape photography and photo portraits of Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz, Atget, and Walker Evans. Photography continues to inform my painting to this day in terms of cropping and a preference for unusual angles that camera use brought to the consciousness of painters like Degas.

My unacknowledged ambition to be an artist arose in middle school with the requirement that I choose an elective in the arts, either visual art or music. I chose visual art and found out that I could draw what I saw. Having grown up around New York City in the 1970s and often been dragged to museums by my parents, my principal influences were the great Modernist painters, Matisse and Picasso. So, of course, I saw no problem with simultaneous presentation of multiple perspectives, nor with the absence of traditional perspective in my renderings. Fortunately, my art teacher had no problem with my Modernist vision of what I looked at, a vision that was flat and more true to the way my eye sees line than to exact replication. A dentist’s wife who used his instruments to make jewelry and sculpture on the weekends, she encouraged me with the advice not to change my last name when I became famous. (I have not become famous yet and still have not changed my last name.)

I approached the prospect of college with the idea that I would find a place where I could pursue art and psychology, my two interests. However, having been told all my early life that I had a logical mind and should become a lawyer, I had the idea that the psychology route was closer to my assigned path, the more legitimate adult choice of the two that interested me. I only knew one artist personally and she was kind of unstable. I had no sense of how to craft a life as an artist.

So, I applied to graduate school in psychology and, once committed to that path, found little to no time for painting and drawing, interests I kept alive through college with continued camera toting and art history classes. However, I remembered and missed falling asleep thinking about a painting I was working on and what palette would be best for it, as I had done on a summer semester program in Provence after my sophomore year, my only studio art course in college. Again, as in middle school, during that summer course, I was lucky with my teachers. They did not tell us how to paint or draw. They simply exposed us. They would drive us to Mt. St. Victoire, the subject of Cézanne’s most famous landscapes, and say, “This is what Cézanne looked at.” Then they would leave us to ourselves.

I returned to artmaking by what seemed like chance, when my husband introduced me to an artist in connection with a collaborative presentation comparing the creative process in psychotherapy to that in artistic endeavor. The parallels between these two processes have been a focus of the professional presentations and writing I have done over the past 20 years. I first approached the subject of parallel processes in art and psychotherapy from the position of a brief experience I had with creative writing. However, once I re-entered the studio of my new artist friend, I found myself compelled to look at and make visual art once again. A generous invitation to come paint live models in her studio evoked in me the response of a kid in a candy store. “Use whatever you want,” she would say. That meant full access to her studio of artist materials and, most importantly, provided a model I needed of how one set up oneself to pursue these activities. Though a former instructor at the Maryland Institute of Art, my friend and “could-be” teacher did not try to instruct. Instead, she encouraged me to trust my instincts and to just begin, based on what I saw, and to allow myself to fall into deep engagement with looking. She saw that drawing came to me as a natural outcome of looking and respected that I was making my way authentically.

At this point, I was primarily a once-in-a-while weekend painter who anticipated stolen moments away from practice and family with the eager stealth of a thief. For a long while, I remained very discreet about the increasing time and emotional investment I was putting into art, especially with my psychotherapy colleagues. I thought that doing both would make me seem like a dilettante, someone with expertise in and serious commitment to neither endeavor. But the truth was that I saw artists and psychotherapists as kindred spirits who shared curiosity and a way of exploring human nature and the human condition. As I will elaborate, I have come to see painting and psychotherapy, both, as ways of making sense and making implicit experience explicit and known. And, contrary to my expectations, I have come to find that patients value my experience as an artist. If anything, I consistently find that knowing of my artistic pursuits emboldens patients to risk sharing their own creative aspirations. Knowing that I live in the world as an artist seems to offer hope that my artistic sensibility might allow me to recognize, appreciate, and support fragile buds of creative spirit in the people who decide to trust me with their cherished ambitions to create something original and authentic to them.

Over the past few years, my art and psychotherapy lives have become increasingly entwined. I continue to present papers and write about the way these two creative processes synergize my dedications to both. However, the organization of my time is quite defined and split into a psychotherapy and an art portion of the week. From Monday through Thursday, I am in my office seeing patients and doing supervision. On Thursday evening or Friday midday, I make a transition to immersion in art and studio that lasts through the weekend. The image that captures the switch in focus is that of Clark Kent tossing off his eyeglasses and suit jacket disguise to reveal the Superman get-up underneath. I can be spotted in the parking lot behind my office building pulling off my work costume and donning paint-stained pants and sneakers under my work skirt. I do this in the parking lot so as not to waste time, of which there is never enough. I throw my briefcase into the trunk of my car and head for my studio, located in a large industrial space about ten minutes away. Interestingly, I don’t go from the studio to work, ever. Too much to zip-up?

When I am not in a phase of being clear on where I am headed with my painting, the transition can feel difficult. I sometimes think I am wasting time on Fridays, lingering at the office as I tie up loose ends from the week of psychotherapy practice before letting go of the structured life of scheduled appointment times and 50- minute sessions. The jump into the unstructured format of wide-open warehouse space to create something where nothing exists, not yet, can be daunting. I remind myself that I am not alone, thanks to my time around my artist friend who did not teach me how to paint or draw, but did embody how an artist might be. I am aware that some artists engage in rituals, like lighting candles, to help them cross the studio threshold to tackle the blank canvas that awaits and can intimidate them. When I hesitate to make the transition to the studio, it is the promise of immersion and loss of myself in the work of making things that gets me there. I am drawn in by the selfish anticipation of being responsible to no one but myself, and the prospect of being subversive, at risk to no one but myself, as there are no rules in the studio. There is just me, yielding to the human desire and daring to experience a hand in something bigger and beyond, through the act of creating.

Phase 1: portraiture and psychotherapy – building a sense of self

In my office, most of the week I look intently at seated patients, especially at their faces. (Sometimes I find myself wanting to draw their faces and take that as a sign to get myself into the studio.) I listen hard to their words as I look and absorb what is implicitly, as well as explicitly, stated. So it is natural that I took the human face as my first subject, and then the human figure and gesture, when I sized up and started working more with live models in life-size format.

My early paintings were Expressionist portraits. I worked from my own photographs of people I knew or of strangers, and also from small black-and-white newspaper photos of well-known people. When I could con a family member or friend to sit for me, I worked from life (LOST IN THOUGHT).

Figure 1.1 Lost in thought

Source: Karen M. Schwartz. Mixed media on canvas, 2012

Doing portraits connects to my earlier creative writing efforts and the use of words to create character and convey person in fiction. I associate both of these artistic endeavors, fiction writing and drawing/painting, with the depiction of personhood and the building of a sense of self through the dialogue that is psychotherapy. Loving portraiture as I do (my own and that of photographers and other artists), I am fascinated by what my contemporary psychoanalytic theory of clinical practice, self psychology, suggests to me about the literal building of self that I feel engaged in as a painter of people. Self psychology’s fundamental assumption is that communicating from an empathically informed relational stance one’s experience of another person to that person, over time, constitutes an essential developmental experience that builds and strengthens that other’s sense of self. In my mind, the clinical conversation, verbal and non-verbal, is a record of the dyadic process of the creation of self-experience.

These principles fit well with my sense of what I am doing non-verbally when I do a portrait. I find that looking and drawing is to doing pictures of people what listening and explaining is to the clinical exchange in psychotherapy. I work to capture something essential in a portrait through repeated engagements or “sessions” with a live model or a photograph. I make a series of moves on the painting surface that externalizes my subjective experience of my subject onto a canvas. Then I interact with my own externalized subjective experience, bit by bit, building or finding form. This sequence seems to me closely related to the process of building a sense of self through the relational exchange in psychotherapy. As with a patient in psychotherapy, my experience of a painting subject is filtered through my own subjectivity. Rhythms are established in painting by the elements of time away from the studio between painting sessions, as well as within a studio session, when I step back to look before making a next move. The rhythm of active engagement created by these elements, both as crucial to the painting process as mark making itself, reminds me of the rhythm of listening/reflecting/understanding and responding/ explaining in self psychology-informed psychotherapy. The relational aspects of painting involve the artist’s engagement with the externalized aspects of self, concretized in an emerging visual form, as well as the relationship between artist and model, and between artist and viewer.

Another continuity I have come to realize between my two practices is literal: my hand’s role in the practice of listening and the more obvious role of my hand in my painting practice. That I take notes when I am face to face with many of my patients, something I once swore I would never do, feels like an extension of the use of my hand as an artist. As when contour drawing (a type of drawing that involves looking at a subject and drawing it without looking at one’s paper), I barely look down at my session notes as I write them. I experience writing as integral to listening, an organic extension of the listening apparatus. My hand has become like an organ of the listening process, just as it is intricately entwined with looking and trying to make sense of what I see when I draw. Patients almost unanimously seem to accept this practice of writing as I listen as a part of my engagement, perhaps because it is so much a part of the person I am to apprehend the world with a writing or drawing implement, or a camera, in my hand.

The flow between my process as a painter and as a psychotherapist goes both ways and is ever present. The act of painting other people recruits the empathic skills that I practice regularly as a therapist. One must look hard, delve, and understand on an experiential and sensory level to transform meaning into a visual form that captures something essential and integral that the painting will express or evoke in a viewer. When painting a face or figure, I literally use my body to read into my subject’s pose, posture, facial expression, and gestures. Repeatedly, I will catch myself literally mimicking a facial expression or twisting my own body and shifting my weight to embody what I am trying to capture and put down on canvas. I literally take on what I see and as that experience sieves through my subjectivity, I am inspired to make moves on the painting surface that express the energy and gesture I feel in my body. This empathic reach to connect and know through intense looking and the embodied simulation (Gallese et al., 2007) that connects painter to model to viewer bypasses outside perspective and conscious thought. It is knowing from the inside, implicit knowing, and has earned me the most cherished feedback I have received about my pictures of people: “You paint people’s insides.”

I believe that having concrete reference points in my painting practice for the exercise of empathic reach as a psychotherapist deepens and reinforces the fundamental acts of listening and of imagination that empathy requires. It is through painting that I understand the imaginative reaching into the being of another on a concrete, embodied, and procedural level.

Phase 2: from portraiture to life-size abstract figurative work – freedom within the containing boundary of a frame

My paintings, though often arrived at by Abstract Expressionist means, always seem to come back to the human figure. I moved from doing portraits to life-size figurative works at the encouragement of another key figure in my development as an artist, an Abstract Expressionist painter and an enormously gifted teacher. Yet again, it was my good fortune to come under the mentorship of an artist who encouraged me to develop my unique style. Importantly, he offered me an artistic identity by naming my physicality as a painter and fearless use of materials as related to an Abstract Expressionist sensibility. He encouraged me to size my work up to a larger scale that would accommodate my energetic metabolism and athletic approach to painting. Introducing an element of self-reflection that was curiously missing from my painting practice, he challenged me to think about why and how I was painting what I painted, to make connections between my work and the artists I most admire, and to marry choice of materials and the size of my work, and other aesthetic choices, to painting content and message.

In DIRTY DARA, the movements required to make the large gestural sweeps of paint are visible in the way the paint is applied and in the execution of line and brush stroke. The use of Abstract Expressionist techniques that prize s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Coming into being as artist and psychotherapist: Keeping self from falling together too soon
• 2 To build a new world: Creative and aesthetic choices in psychoanalysis
• 3 Making waves
• 4 Shame and its undoing: A performer’s desire to be found
• 5 Analyst-Artist
• 6 I’ve got a rock ‘N’ roll heart: Reflections of a musician-analyst
• 7 Writing, healing, and being healed: My life in poetry and psychoanalysis
• 8 Reclamation and restoration: Heroes in the seaweed
• 9 On being able to paint
• 10 On being and becoming
• 11 Echo
• 12 The art(s) of witness: through the camera and the psychoanalytic situation
• Index