Chicago, with its huge collections of art, its distinguished symphony and opera, and its pioneering architecture, seemed an ideal city for reflections on pursuit of the muse. The “In Depth” panel, chaired by Morris L. Peltz, included Salman Akhtar, poet; Stuart Twemlow, who executes black ink brushings in a Zen style; Alice Jones, poet; Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, artistic director of the California Revels; and Harvey Rich, furniture maker.
Peltz opened the panel with his view that there are at least three critical ingredients of the creative impulse and its execution: perception, memory, and a deep immersion within the self. It is there the artist finds his or her muse. But when is a completed work perceived as being creative? It depends, Peltz answered his own question, on three interacting forces. First is the artist's unique vision, which imbues the art, reflecting a deep immersion into himself or herself. The artist must pursue this vision of personal truth relentlessly and ruthlessly. The second factor is the quality of the art produced. Does it focus, sharpen, and in some way enlarge upon that artistic vision? Does it have an original and unique quality that challenges accepted standards and conventional beliefs? Does it have the power to move or even shock the viewer?
The last factor is the viewer. Is he or she moved in some known or unknown way? Is there surprise?
Stuart Twemlow described the intermeshing of his personal psychology with his avocations, among them a lifelong practice of martial arts, Zen and, since 1990, black ink brush paintings. He detailed how these interests have influenced his work and thirty years of psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice. His presentation was illustrated with slides of his paintings, which were astonishingly evocative and beautiful.
Twemlow reflected,
One of the lessons from Zen brushings that has helped me improve my psychoanalytic technique has been an awareness of the importance of being fully, thoroughly, and energetically present, but in a special way, humbly and with a compassionate service to others. … I realize that at heart what one does is an embodiment of who one is and how one perceives reality.
Twemlow contends that an analyst's mind can be trained to focus and move in a much more vivid and intense and alive way, fully present with the patient. His is a Buddhist point of view: letting go of the unimportant pursuits of theoretical concepts and unachievable aims.
Salman Akhtar never feels that he must pursue his muse; on the contrary, he feels driven by his muse to compose his poetry. When she strikes, he must comply.
When a poet writes, said Akhtar, three events must occur. First, the poet sees or hears something that attracts his attention. Next, the poet must pick up his find and hold it for a while. Last, the poet must “clean up” or refine his inspiration. Akhtar identified a similar series of tasks for the psychoanalytic clinician. Like the poet who is overtaken by his muse and must hold and reflect on his inspiration, so the analyst must hold and contain the projections of his patients.
Writing poetry has been a proud tradition in Akhtar's family. His father was a poet, and his grandfather, back through seven generations. Speaking like a poet always feels natural to Akhtar, and he finds himself speaking in this manner to his patients.
How does poetry help pain?
It helps in a number of ways. First, it utilizes a complex mix of defenses. Engagement in such mental work allows the individual to turn the passivity of suffering into the activity of creation. Further, the hitherto traumatizing event becomes the nucleus of cognitive embellishment, mastery, and pride. And creation of empathic resonance in an actual or imaginary audience leads to a sharing of private anguish.
The formal and structural qualities of a poem — its meter, rhyme alliteration, and metaphor aspects — have libidinally gratifying and mentally healing effects. This creates the music of poetry whose developmental anlagen lie in maternal lullabies and nursery rhymes.
Poetry seems to have an uncanny and direct access to the deepest layer of the psyche, which is where mental pain originates and resides. Poetry speaks to the unconscious and facilitates the mentalization of the nonverbal substrate of the psyche.
Akhtar closed his presentation by reading three poems.
For Alice Jones, writing a poem is a complex process initiated on “the first appearance of new words” in her mind: “This always has the sensation of something coming out of nothing as if the words are given. Once they are out and on paper, then there's the endless process of revision, distilling them over and over until they feel right as rain.”
For our analytic patients, words are the principal mode by which they tell us their thoughts. Language is the only tool for the analyst. Analysts have the deep well of their unconscious for all the words they need. Once this well is opened to the analyst, the struggle is to keep it open. Jones imagines a developmental line for the baby as she listens to her mother's words.
Morris L. Peltz is a training and supervising analyst with the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. He manages the Program Committee's “In Depth: Art, Culture, and Politics” program.
“Words mark the mother's place. Her singsong communications to [her] baby become laden with magic and meaning. Words have the power to connect. … This music of talking gets built as a child learns what words can do and begins to play with them.”
To Jones's keen musical car, there is pleasure in merely hearing how the words go together and the texture they create: “I suppose what really makes a poet is the ability to fuse the words, their music, various meanings and delights.”
Jones concluded by reading five of her poems as only the poet who wrote them can read them.
For many years Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer studied music, but she left music to pursue several alternative lives. Mayer grew up with “music as celebration, music in the context of community and ritual — music with people.”
This is what spurred Mayer to found, fifteen years ago, a music theater company, California Revels, in the San Francisco area. She built her vision upon the work of John Langstaff, a remarkable musician in Boston whom she had admired for many years. As Mayer considered what Revels really is, she found herself moving outside traditional theater terminology and considering the idea of liturgy. Liturgy means literally “work of the people” (from the Greek leit, people, and ergos, work).
For Mayer there is something tantalizing about the idea of Revels as “work of the people.”
Every Revels performance contains a few crucial moments which mobilize an entire audience to join the action. Explicitly, the action is scripted as song or as dance. But under the surface, whatever form the action takes, the joining, as well as the action, [has] a distinct function. They aim to ignite a collective human purpose. They aim at sparking the perpetual human endeavor to bring light out of darkness and life out of death. That, if anything, is the essence of Revels.
For Mayer, working with Revels has offered a healing opportunity and brought valuable perspective to her analytic life, even as it has provided marvelous enrichment in its own right.
Harvey Rich was unable to attend the panel. Peltz explained his absence as yet one more of Rich's many alternative lives. He had been invited several weeks previously to be a member of a group of mental health professionals sponsored by the State Department to study “Post-Conflict Cultural Reconstruction: Victims of Torture and the Land Mine Removal in Bosnia.” Rich had the inspiration to send to the panel a videotape which he narrated as he showed some examples of his furniture making.
Rich had never thought about the relationship between his work as an analyst and as a woodworker, but the assignment proved fruitful.
The smell of wood and sounds of construction filled Rich's childhood. Woodworking came into his life about sixteen years ago when he went to the Haystack School of Craft in Deer Isle, Maine. When he recently had to deal with an illness that led to his partial loss of sight, he turned to design and woodworking to regain his balance. There was no question in his mind that no matter how far his blindness might progress, he would continue to design and work in wood as long as possible.
Rich began to understand that similar forces are at work in the clinical situation and in woodworking. The outcome of both art and psychoanalysis is a dialogue between the mediums, be it canvas, paint, wood, and metal, or instinct, ego, conscience, inspiration, and soul of both parties. One can enforce one's will upon the other, but the outcome will be stultified and something less than art or cure.
Rich showed seven examples of his compellingly beautiful and original designs. One example of his negotiation between himself and the medium of wood was in the creation of an eight-foot-long, two-foot-deep credenza. It is made of zebra wood, purple heart wood, walnut, and glass. Rich worked on this table in the middle of his many eye surgeries. He was taken by the idea that the table would be able to bear a good deal of weight without any metal support or connecting parts. That meant no nails, screws, or glue. The design used the weight of the glass top to press down and tighten all the joints. The table accomplished a second goal: Rich regained his balance. One day when talking with a friend, he realized, “I designed an altar table. This table must be my prayer for holding on to whatever sight I could have.”
The last pieces he showed were two analytic couches, one of which was made for his friend and colleague Bob Pyles. Rich tries to visit the place where his furniture will reside. Looking for some inspiration in Pyles' office, Rich found a lovely gooseneck conch-shell lamp that reminded him of the neck of a swan when it sleeps. He designed a swans-neck couch and made it of Spanish cedar.
Rich can no longer say whether psychoanalysis inspires his art or his art inspires his work as an analyst. He says there is a very dynamic and important balance between the two. This process of negotiating two souls, two sets of instincts, and two egos is a humbling and enabling process.