Becoming Who We Are
Psychotherapy is a time-limited endeavor leading, at its best, parties inward and forward toward fuller embrace of respective lives.
“It’s a wonder to me with all our complexities that anyone ever achieves happiness,” she said. “People like us don’t,” Rank replied, “We achieve it for a moment, and then we change and change again.” (Lieberman, 1985, p. 279)
“The arts,” writes my three-year-old daughter’s pediatrician Mark Vonnegut (2010, p.3), “are not extra-curricular.” It seems so obvious a point as to hardly bear scrutiny. A feeling for literature, music, film, art, to say nothing of philosophy and religion—these would seem to be quintessential attributes of any psychology worthy of the name. Skeptics inclined to feel that nothing exists aside from the vaunted and avowedly “evidence-based” may now take comfort in research that confirms what some of us have known, intuitively, all along. “Authors were psychologists, you know, and profound ones,” proclaimed Eugene O’Neill (cited in Bogard and Bryer, 1994, p. 386), “before psychology was invented.” Who would we forgo on that deserted island of the metaphorically shipwrecked: the novelist or the necessarily reductive and oftentimes self-aggrandizing theorist? Melville or Seligman? The pediatrician’s storied father, Kurt, or Aaron Beck?
This reverie considers psychotherapy itself as creative endeavor on both sides of the therapeutic dialectic and recalls a Nietzschean adage (“self-creation, the most difficult art”) and the injunction he adapted ever so slightly from the Greek poet Pindar: “How one becomes what one is.” The presuppositions and potentials underwriting my thoughts invoke bedrock ontological themes of transience and ultimate insignificance on one hand while holding out for possibility, some semblance of meaning within the void, on the other. These ongoing tensions elicit the apprehension and novelty that inhere in genuine exchange and the reciprocal fashioning of character out of fragment, chance, and hard work. “Life,” Nietzsche once mused, “is only justified as an aesthetic experience.” It is this feeling for the intrinsic, albeit difficult, place of self-creation (a beckoning of, and striving for, a Jamesean “more” or “ever not quite”) that serves as touchstone and beacon for this briefest meditation on psychotherapy and the arts.
The therapeutic situation must in some way function as counterpoint to the pervasive homogeneity and mendacity of our times. (“Many people, few gestures,” observes Milan Kundera (1991) in Immortality, a novel damning in its depiction of just what it is we are up against.) It is a meeting and eventual tension of wills, an occurrence that in its novelty and essential beneficence evokes embrace of broader processes of life on both sides of the consulting room and, hopefully, beyond. The psychotherapeutic situation, it seems to me, ought to function very much as the right book once did for Kafka (1977, p. 16), as he put the matter in a youthful letter to a friend:
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy . . .? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.
Several months earlier, the Czech genius Elias Canetti would one day call the West’s “only Chinese poet,” had written his friend also this: “Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle” (Kafka, 1977, p. 10).
This, perhaps, is the literary equivalent of therapeutic “encounter” as the lynchpin of awareness and change as existentially-inclined psychotherapists like to conceive them, however infrequently embodied they may be. It is the sort of thing Rollo May (who viewed human personality as “a great unfinished artistic project” [Bilmes, 1980] at which we work throughout the course of life) was able to effect well into old age. I remember witnessing a unique admixture of rarified character commingling with what May liked to call “disciplined naiveté” on the very first night of a case conference that met long ago in his living room. Thirty-five years after later, I can recall very nearly verbatim words spoken that evening; so striking was the man and riveting the experience. Despite innumerable meaningful connections I have subsequently had and made in this profession of ours, I have never quite experienced this again. As a young black student once pined in the aftermath of the death of jazz legend John Coltrane, a hole has been left that threatens, ominously, to become permanent. Some excellent music to be sure, but the experience is not quite the same for those who have known subtler refrains, loftier key signatures and codes. How to contribute meaningfully to the literature attending the aesthetics of psychotherapy in an atmosphere tending toward logorrhea and flatness, the bizarre and ironical cults of celebrity and regiment, our age of terminal paradox?
I and thou
In Buber’s Between Man and Man (1965), p. 175), we read a passage both hallowed and haunting in its intimation, among many other things, of psychotherapy as balm for self-becoming already attained and catalyst for that yet to be: “A great relationship . . . breaches the barriers of a lofty isolation, subdues its strict law, and throws a bridge from self-being to self-being across the abyss of dread of the universe.” And in Robert Coles’s (2010, p.181) Handing One Another Along, this literature-inspired thought (one that dovetails, really, quite nicely with Kafka’s) concerning the inviolability of the arts: “How does one live a life? What kind of a life? And for what purpose?” Psychotherapists like May and Coles are aesthetes at heart who take their own moral and creative work seriously and whose written works trace moving and poetic arches over the courses of their wise, gentle rendering.
Turbulence and the humanities
I wish, finally, to underscore the place of struggle in any creative venture worthy of the name. The exemplars quietly informing my reverie were by no means given to insistently upbeat philosophies or easygoingness in either their persons or respective works. James and Rank suffered with bipolar disorders, a continuum of essentially biological conditions that underwrote, in part, their staggering accomplishments no less than their propensities for despond (to say nothing of the reach and complexity of their respective works). James’s (1902, pp. 127-128) thumbnail sketch of the Frenchman whose “general depression of spirits” suddenly yields to “a horrible fear of my own existence” was an autobiographical account of his own ordeal. Rank wrote 12 of the 14 chapters of his masterwork, Art and Artist, incredibly, in a single month. (“Confusion creates art,” observes Rank’s patient-turned-muse, Anais Nin, while noting, additionally, that “too much confusion creates unbalance” [cited in Lieberman, 1985, p. 332]. Concerning Rank’s therapeutic approach, Nin was succinct: “He improvised.”) May’s life was marked by several existential crises that were depressive in nature. As for the medical wreck Nietzsche—well, this is a story unique unto itself. We can see, now that life is winding down, that Robert Coles has, for some time now, been something of a saint.
We are very close here to May’s late-in-life lectures on the “uses of adversity” and the psychotherapist as “wounded healer” and not far at all from the tenor of our present reflection on psychotherapy and the crafting of respective selves. May loved this passage out of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (in Kaufmann, 1954, p. 129): “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” Imagine expressing one’s philosophy so deftly in a literary work! Each of these “artist types” knew firsthand the sacrifices engendered by creativity and the inhabitation of one’s loftier mores, images, and ideals. Not one of them got away unscathed.
Psychotherapy is a time-limited endeavor leading, at its best, parties inward and forward toward fuller embrace of respective lives. “This is my way,” urges Zarathustra (in Nietzsche, 1954, p. 307); “where is yours?” Even in therapy, the client at a certain point is on her or his own. “The individual completes the creative work vastly relieved and more a person than before—but also maimed,” observes May (1969, p. 286); “human progress is never one- dimensional.” Rank (1932, p. 430) writes of the renunciation of “artistic expression” in favor of the formation of the self, implying that it may be possible for the artist to overdose on art. He advocates the benefits of the artist’s placing the “creative impulse directly in the service of [one’s] own personality.“ “Giving style to one’s character,” as Nietzsche (1954, p. 198) eloquently cajoled, “a great and rare art.”
A contemplation of psychotherapy and the arts, do you see?
References
Bogard, T & Bryer, J. R. (1994). Selected letters of Eugene O’Neill. New York, NY: Limelight Editions.
Buber, M (1955). Between man and man (R.G. Smith, trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon Paperbacks.
Bilmes, M. (1980). Rollo May. Cathexis: A journal of the Califoria School of Professional Psychology (pp. 54-60), 3 (1).
Coles, R. (2010). Handing one another along: Literature and social reflection. New York: Random House.
James, W. (1902) The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. New York, NY: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Kafka, R. (1977). Letters to friends, family, and editors (R. & C. Winston, trans.). New York, NY: Schocken Books.
Kaufmann, W. (Ed.) (1954). The portable Nietzsche. New York, NY: Viking Press.
Kundera, M. (1991). Immortality (P. Kussi, trans.). New York, NY: Grove Press.
Lieberman, J. (1985). Acts of will the life and work of Otto Rank. New York, NY: Free Press.
May, R. (1969). Love and will. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co.
Nietzsche, F. (1967). Ecce Homo (W. Kaufmann, trans.). New York, NY: Random House.
Rank, O. (1932). Art and artist (C. Francis, trans.). New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Vonnegut, M. (2010). Just like someone without mental illness only more so: A memoir. New York, NY: Delacorte Press.
Edward is a qualified Mental Health Blogger, based in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, United States.
With a commitment to mental health, Dr Mendelowitz provides services in English, including Consultation, Counselling, Ethics and Philosophy.
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