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Loneliness and connection play in the analyst’s mind like light and shadow from a candle. The light from a moment of meeting, the shadow from our concomitant loneliness. Loneliness is born, or at least exacerbated, by the asymmetry of our analytic commitment, as well as from the chill of Covid-informed finitude that surrounds us now. Art can take us deeply into this loneliness, but also, by its very existence, offer an antidote. “Ah Bartelby, ah humanity” writes Herman Melville at the end of his story of a lonely law firm copier who secretly lives in the office—shockingly universalizing his character’s outsider suffering. During the 3 years of the Covid Pandemic, the line between healer and sufferer has only further blurred. How are we to live now? flashes from our patient’s eyes. I don’t know, our eyes answer. At the end of the day, the horizontal light catches in the early fall poplars; the key turns in the lock; the office hall is empty; the other therapists are still working remotely.
More and more I have turned to poetry, both making it and reading it, for solace. A friend writes of her difficult fall season—forever tinged by her son’s untimely death—then copies out, in the same email, Keats’ “To Autumn,” as if she could rest her head against the opulent descriptions of harvest abundance. “I want you now/To disentangle yourself from fear and shame,/And put an end to speaking like a dreamer,” Beatrice tells Dante at the end of Purgatorio, speaking, across eight centuries, our deepest hopes for our patients.
The claims of art sometimes seem overblown. To counter this kind of generalization, I asked some therapists who love to make and experience art to write personally how it helped their personal and professional survival. They have generously opened up their studios and private lives. Heather Ferguson writes about being a drummer, how her sense of rhythm and musicianship helped her penetrate the two-dimensional wall of Zoom. John Paddock writes of sitting in a ro