“It's a psychologically risky profession,” said Eric Nuetzel, speaking of acting. He was winding up a discussion in San Francisco of his work as an actor, director, and producer. In the early 90s, after having become a psychoanalyst, he returned to the theater as a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis.
“There's something similar,” he said, “about acting and psychoanalysis, and it doesn't have to do with inauthenticity. It has to do with authenticity and it has to do with using yourself as an instrument, being able to go to the places that are ver y uncomfortable within yourself for a larger purpose.”
Before attending medical school at St. Louis University and becoming a resident and chief resident in psychiatry at Columbia University, Nuetzel worked in the theater. He is currently an adjunct professor in the Department of Performing Arts at Washington University—where he is also on the faculty in the psychiatry department—and teaches courses such as tragic drama and psychoanalysis, and film and psychoanalysis. He intends to return to his work in the theater once he has served as chair of the Board on Professional Standards.
“Trying to understand the psychology of the production process,” Nuetzel says, is how he got back into the theater after his psychoanalytic training. His ideas about the transference and countertransference relationship between actor and director helped propel his studies. He initially wrote about the theatrical experience from the point of view of the director, but rediscovered the issue of confidentiality. He “offended” his fellow actors by the personal material expressed during the personally and affectively intense production process. So, in order to publish his ideas, he returned to acting and wrote about himself.
The most central paper of this time, he said, was “sort of a case study of my experience acting in [Sam Shepard's play], Buried Child.” In it he plays a priest engaged in an affair with the mother in “a very disturbed family,” with themes of incest and infanticide. Lois Smith, a noted New York actress then playing the wife on Broadway, came to the APsaA workshop at which Nuetzel presented a paper on the subject and discussed it with the group in attendance.
Nuetzel said his work in the theater has taught him “a great deal more about group process and group dynamics. I also think of the work in the association as political theater.” But he distinguishes sharply the roles of theatrical director and those of institute director and BOPS leader. “You have to have something in mind,” in each of these activities, “that you want to get to,” but sometimes the director of a play has to “be a dictator,” while BOPS and institutes work necessarily by “consensus.”
Turning to his vision for psychoanalysis, Nuetzel spoke of the necessity to have research play a greater role in the field. At the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute, he has worked on a study in which 10 psychotherapy patients fill out questionnaires on their subjective experiences weekly for one to three years. The large number of data points, he said, enables the researchers to draw statistically significant conclusions.
Their results show that improvements in their self-reports depend on their feeling positively about their therapist and being challenged by him or her Neither by itself is sufficient. The research, while funded by a grant to the St. Louis Institute by the Summerfield Foundation through a local board member, is being carried out collaboratively with the psychology department at Washington University. Nuetzel said they are almost ready to pull their data together into what they hope will be a publishable paper
Nuetzel pointed out that research is the mission of the Board Committee on Research Education (CORE), which is designed to increase awareness about the value of empirical research and is also intended to help spearhead research efforts within institutes and within the Board.
St. Louis in the nineteenth century was a key crossroads: the North, the South, the West, and the direction Neutzel says he has always, in his heart of hearts, favored, the East, meet there. It is a city where today a highway sign points one direction, Memphis, and the other, Chicago. Nuetzel says that growing up and living at the confluence of cultures has influenced his pattern of thought. One night in San Francisco he had a very stimulating dinner with two cousins of his wife, one, a Jungian analyst, the other a member of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He tends, he said, to “take a broad perspective and think about different points of view.”