On the Arts

“‘Paintings on my clinic walls,’” Gershon J. Molad, my friend, colleague, and writing-partner who lives in Israel, once confided about the topic of a possible article. He added, “in search of the out-of-focus ‘white area’—the analyst's autobiography and the dialogue between analysts.” When, much later, the opportunity presented itself for this new section of the journal, I wrote to him, “The art on the therapist's wall, you implied all those years ago, is an empty space where the therapist's autobiography hangs in the air, waiting for the moment of intersection, of recognition, when a patient suddenly ‘sees’ what is on the wall.” And so, his yet-to-be-born article was the first invited contribution.

What has emerged, however, is much more than these early suggestive notions. Circumstance, as it often does, intruded into the compositional process. Always dedicated to an inclusive embrace of the ambient, Gersh Molad has woven his unfolding “autobiography” into a profound meditation on life and death, on love and loss and psychoanalytic work, in the seen and unseen context of art.

That he writes both in Hebrew and in English (his use of English, he says, is stylistically and in essence very close to his Hebrew) suggests that Gersh Molad is at home in the white area between languages. Here, he uses words less to inform than to generate a visual-sensory reverie. Repetitive motifs and their variations are layered throughout, amid a watery ground of sea, river, and sky, the outside representations of a body's interior. Italics designate passages of memoir, an internal conversation that goes beyond the prosaic English word “memory” to encompass a deeper quality of musing and reflection. If we use Lydia Davis's (2003) definition of analysis (“Analysis is observation—or understanding—taken to an extreme, or maybe the point where extremely detailed observation and extremely nuanced understanding coincide,” p. 37), then this article can be said to be “analytic,” but,