The Great Mistake

Bij

ONCE I SAW A WOMAN READING SOMETHING I HAD WRITTEN about the destruction of the World Trade Center. She was crying. The description of my experience working with a survivor, along with her own memories of what had happened on September 11th, had made her cry. She didn't know that I was the writer, or that

I was present and watching. While I felt happy that I had touched her, I was distressed by her sorrow. I thought about introducing myself, but I didn't want to interrupt her experience; most of all, I was reluctant to make myself known.

Creating art, whether stories like the World Trade Center piece, paintings, or merely doodling, helps me figure things out and survive. The process teaches me about myself and others and enables me to work more deeply in my practice. A doodled drawing of the tough, burly patient I saw in my office earlier in the day turns into a picture of a little kid, sitting in an empty space on an old-fashioned milking stool—I guess he needs to be fed and I'm the invisible cow. Will I be there for him? Will I feed him? What was his mother like? The pretty young woman sitting cross-legged on the floor turns into a hunted animal, and I might be the trap. “The art of trauma is created through the presence of a dialogic relationship, and facilitates the continuance of this relationship with its viewers or readers” (Laub & Podell, 1995, p. 996).

Milner (1957, 1987) wrote extensively about the parallels between creative experiences and the psychoanalytic process: “…emotion, feeling, consciousness. … Their shared essence is the body” (Damasio, 1999, p. 284). The art product, which includes the mutually created analytic process itself, serves as a “witnessing presence” (Rose, 1966; Robbins, 1987). “The act of creation [thus] implies a need to externalize, to objectify and to communicate, both in the artist and in the analysand” (Beres, 1957, p. 416).

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