On Not Being Able To Paint

That’s my art desk. It is suitably smeared with paint and certainly looks like I spend a lot of time there. But…

My brother is a painter. He paints trompe l’oile – which means fool the eye. Here is one of his paintings. 

 

Painting by Ken Fuller

Not my style but he is good at it. Somehow that he is an artist and was also my mother’s favorite led me to avoid art, focusing instead on intellectual pursuits. Still something in me kept wanting to paint and draw. My brother once said that anyone could draw, which was not encouraging to me at all. I took the art classes in school that were required but once finished with them I turned away from painting or any kind of art for many years. I think the last thing I made was a paper mache dog that I meant to be a dachshund but looked sort of like a weird brown worm with legs and ears.

Maybe a class would help

I lived in Portland, Maine for a long time. Portland is the home to a well regarded degree- granting art college. In the early 90’s I decided to take a drawing course through their continuing studies program. I hoped to find a class for people who did not think of themselves as artists, a class that would support and encourage people like me who wanted to draw but were intimidated by the doing of it. I did not find that — the people in the course saw themselves as artists and then there was the critique of every assignment. I dropped out.

A couple of years later my good friend and I found two wild wonderful women artists who were offering classes for people just like us. And it was just what I needed. Supportive, encouraging, full of laughter — a place where my very timid artist self could creep out and start to experiment, to express myself in paint.

Along the way I discovered that I love art supplies. I loved accumulating tubes of watercolors and oil paints. Lots of them. Brushes. Paper. Canvases. I was a very well supplied pretty unproductive artist. After a while the class died out. I painted a little more. I used them in my analysis. But away from the class, just on my own I struggled to paint anything. And then I stopped. And then I gave away all my supplies.

Fast forward to the last few years when I discovered the wonderful world of online art courses. I began again to accumulate art supplies. My lust for paints and brushes and the like was reawakened. I even did a few of the projects. But I still felt inhibited. And besides I was finishing my book. I watched every video. I liked the idea of mixed media. Images of potential projects would come to me but they never came to life on paper, mostly because I hated that I couldn’t bring into being what my mind’s eye saw.

Painting and Analysis Intersect

In addition to being a therapist, I was also in Jungian analysis for a long time — we ended just over 3 months ago. It was where I could struggle with my demons and learn more about myself. You might think that therapists make good therapy patients but really, not so much.

One of the features of Jungian analysis is opening to express feelings, experiences creatively — in art or poetry or writing or dance — a transformative process. As I said above, drawing and painting I kind of consigned to my brother. He was good at; I believed I was not. But writing — now that is a different story, I write easily and without fear, unlike what happens when I attempt to express myself in pigments on paper. Whatever I painted, I then looked at with a critical eye, a judging eye rather than seeing it for what it was, an effort to express something.

My analyst kept urging me to paint. And I would — for a while and then I would stop again. It was an ongoing struggle for me. I understood that the very fact that writing came so easily to me made painting important for my growth, not as an artist but of my self.

Recently I remembered a book I read at least 30 years ago — and truth be told, did not really understand when I read it. It is a bit of a classic published in 1950, written by Marion Milner, herself an analyst. I dug out the book, On Not Being Able to Paint. And began to read it. There in the foreword was this:

It is fascinating for the reader to follow the author’s attempts to rid herself of the obstacles which prevent her painting, and to compare this fight for freedom of artistic expression with the battle for free association and the uncovering of the unconscious mind which make up the core of an analyst’s therapeutic work. The amateur painter, who first puts pencil or brush to paper, seems to be in much the same mood as the patient during his initial period on the analytic couch. Both ventures, the analytic as well as the creative one, seem to demand similar external and internal conditions. There is the same need for ‘circumstances in which it is safe to be absent-minded’ (i.e. for conscious logic and reason to be absent from one’s mind). There is the same unwillingness to transgress beyond the reassuring limits of the secondary process and ‘to accept chaos as a temporary stage’. There is the same fear of the ‘plunge into no-differentiation’ and the disbelief in the ‘spontaneous ordering forces’ which emerge, once the plunge is taken. There is, above all, the same terror of the unknown. Evidently, it demands as much courage from the beginning painter to look at objects in the external world and see them without clear and compact outlines, as it demands courage from the beginning analysand to look at his own inner world and suspend secondary elaboration. There are even the same faults committed. The painter interferes with the process of creation when, in the author’s words, he cannot bear the ‘uncertainty about what is emerging long enough, as if one had to turn the scribble into some recognisable whole when, in fact, the thought or mood seeking expression had not yet reached that stage’. Nothing can resemble more closely than this the attitude of haste and anxiety on the analyst’s or patient’s part which leads to premature interpretation, closes the road to the unconscious and puts a temporary stop to the spontaneous upsurge of the id-material. On the other hand, when anxieties and the resistances resulting from them are overcome, and the ‘surrender of the planning conscious intention has been achieved’, both – painter and analysand – are rewarded by ‘a surprise, both in form and content’.

I sat down this morning and looked at a blank piece of watercolor paper. Nothing came for what felt like a long time. And then I began to make marks on the paper. No image in mind of what I wanted it to be. I just let the brush make marks until  I felt done.

As my analyst did, I often suggest to my patients that they paint or make collages or write or dance or work with clay. Most often they, like I, balk, resist, say they don’t know how or what they create isn’t any good. For some of us the road to being able to express ourselves is long and often hard, but it is worth the journey.

Maybe you can paint something today? Or write something? Or go inside a dream and explore it? Try it.

Fee — another piece of the frame

It’s almost the beginning of a new month with bills to be paid so let’s consider money and therapy.

Therapists that I know generally do not like to talk about money and fees. Most of us came to this work out of a desire to help others. And we often become uncomfortable with the business aspects of being in practice. The training programs I am familiar with make no mention of the business aspects of practice. So most of us went into, and many continue, practice with too little knowledge of and attention to nuts and bolts issues like fees.

I don’t recall ever considering how much money I could or would make as a therapist. In fact I had no idea when I began. That wasn’t a factor in my decision. Certainly that insurance did not cover therapy when I began practice meant that fees were lower and expectations about income more modest.

I recall something the analyst Donald Meltzer said at a workshop I attended years ago. When he was asked about third party payment for analysis, he first said that we must remember that he who pays the piper picks the tune. And though he and his colleagues were at first envious of analysts elsewhere in Europe where analysis was covered by insurance, gradually he came round to seeing that they were not better off as they had to contend with the intrusions of authorities who could change the terms under which analysis was covered without warning. Then he said that anyone entering this field planning to drive a luxury car and make a lot of money should reconsider becoming a depth psychotherapist because this work demands sacrifice on the part of both patient and analyst and that often means adjusting the fee. 

Setting fees is not a science. Fees and the business aspects of private practice are not taught in graduate school. There is not very much written about fees either. So we have to have a sense of what other therapists in our area and with our training charge, what we are comfortable charging, and how to handle those who cannot afford full fee. As someone who works long term with patients,  I do negotiate fees to accommodate need. I went through a process of determining for myself how much is enough, what I am comfortable charging patients. 

Yes, greed plays a role

Greed is an issue here; greed in the sense that no matter how noble some of our motives for being a therapist are, it remains the case that it is how we earn a living. And if we don’t get paid, we don’t eat. Therapists who rely on the compassion of strangers to provide for them are most likely going to have to find a job to pay the bills. I know of only one writer who has been willing to talk about the issue of greed in psychotherapy — Barbara Stevens Sullivan has a chapter on it in her book, Psychotherapy Grounded in the Feminine Principle. Any time I have attempted to raise the issue among clinicians, I have been met with ferocious resistance and complete disavowal of even the slightest whiff of greed as part of what we do in charging for our time.

I learned from Sullivan about the place of greed in the Tibetan Wheel of Life; greed is one of the three root delusions at the center. For therapists, denial of the importance of money and being paid can be a potent source of problems. Being unconscious about the importance of money in one’s life places a person at risk of being in the grip of unconscious greed. Openly acknowledging the importance of being paid and the desire to have enough money to live well creates the opportunity to consciously think through the issues.   Once I became comfortable with the fact that indeed I do not do my work out of the pure goodness of my heart and that I do enjoy being paid for what I do, the whole issue of dealing with fees became much easier.

Like many, I had felt almost guilty charging for my time. And as a consequence, for a long time, I set my fees too low and I was lax in collecting and in dealing with issues with patients about money. In fact, in my own discomfort with the whole subject, I was modeling for them that money was a somewhat taboo topic and I was unconsciously encouraging them to be as reluctant about paying me as I was to acknowledge that I wanted to be paid. My plumber seemed to have no problems letting me know what he charged for the work he did and that he expected to be paid on time. Nor did my dentist or my attorney. So step one was acknowledging that earning a living is what I am about, as much and often more than any of the noble aspects of working with people. This is a tough thing for a lot of therapists. How can I be “good” and openly embrace my desire for money?

Then comes the problem of what is enough? If a new patient tells me she cannot afford my full fee, we work together to find what she can afford. The fee settled on needs to be enough without either being too little or too much. 

When less is more

“The sight of evil kindles evil in the soul — there is no getting away from this fact.  The victim is not the only sufferer; everybody in the vicinity of the crime, including the murderer, suffers with him. Something of the abysmal darkness of the world has broken in on us, poisoning the very air we breathe and befouling the water with the stale, nauseating taste of blood.” Jung, 1945. After the catastophe. Coll. Works. 10

Please take care of your self. 

Does therapy help?

“… the principal aim of psychotherapy is not to transport the patient to an impossible state of happiness, but to help him acquire steadfastness and philosophic patience in face of suffering. Life demands for its completion and fulfillment a balance between joy and sorrow.” C.G.Jung

This isn’t what most people think should be the outcome of therapy — that happiness is not the goal. One might ask then “Does therapy help?”

Someone who knew me when I was 25 and knows me now would not notice too very many things different about me except that I am heavier, my hair is silver and I am wearing glasses rather than contacts — all external manifestations of age and the life I have lived. Someone who knew me very well then and now might notice that I am calmer, less prone to sarcasm, more contemplative a little less ready to express my opinions,, warmer, maybe more confident. They would recognize my delight in words and that I have a dry sense of humor. That I am a bit shy and reserved, keep a pretty tight zone of privacy around myself. But on the whole, I would likely seem more relaxed.

The changes I have experienced in my life as the result of a long and successful analysis are interior, and though they shape what others see, they are most likely unknown to others. Those inner changes were hard won. The forces against them from my early life were fierce and did not go down without a ferocious fight. Through those hours and hours with my analyst, I began to be able to see the destructive bits and then to be able to not act on them, to let them go by, like bubbles rising in champagne. I still have moments of feeling like I used to feel, but I see it, I feel it when it happens and I now have the freedom to make choices that do not feed those moments and so they do not grow into hours or days as once they did.

How are the changes sustained? they are sustained by my recognition that I have more and more of the life I want. That I have friends who love me. I have a wonderful husband who loves me without reservation, who has never uttered an “If only you …”. I have kids who have grown into terrific adults and are now my friends as well as my much loved children. I have work I love. I changed my family habit of not quite completing big things when I returned to school and got my PhD. I remind myself that I acted on my dream and wrote a book. All of those things act powerfully to reward my efforts every day and so every day that change becomes easier to sustain. It is as if I used to be standing in a room facing the corner, believing that I was in a prison from which there was no way out. Working in my own therapy let me know first that there was a way out, then that all I had to do was turn around and walk out the open door and then that the prison was of my own making in the first place. 

Does therapy help? It can … if you are wiling to stay the course and do the work.

The Inward Gaze

“A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words….To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.” Orfan Pamuk 

I ran across this lovely quote about writing some time ago. While I write — here, in my journal, and in fits and starts on various pieces I hope someday to publish, I struggle to think of myself as a writer. A few years ago, an editor friend of mine told me that the difference between a writer and a person who writes is that the writer works on what she writes, revising and editing and struggling to find the right words to say what she sees or feels. A person who writes — well, that person just writes. For the longest time, I rarely wrote more than one draft of anything and the thought of revising came only when someone else told me I needed to do so. But I took those words of my friend seriously and began to think of what I write as worthy of more attention and energy from me. Of course, now I must learn when to stop and allow what I have to just be as it is, even though it is not exactly what I hoped. Baby steps.

Anyway, recently when I read that quote again, I thought of writing and my own journey as a writer, but I thought also of the process in analysis and therapy. Because it seems to me that he describes that process also. In analysis, the gaze also goes inward and the effort is to transform the images and feelings and memories into words which eventually transform experience and, by opening new possibilities, make change. And we do this work with “patience, obstinacy, and joy” — though the joy sometimes comes late to the experience.

Whatever Comes To Mind

“The relation between doctor and patient remains a personal one within the impersonal framework of professional treatment. By no device can the treatment be anything but the product of mutual influence, in which the whole being of the doctor as well as that of his patient plays its part… Hence the personalities of doctor and patient are often infinitely more important for the outcome of the treatment than what the doctor says and thinks.”  C.G.Jung CW 16  

We ultimately behave with a therapist the way we do with most important people in our lives, with the same kinds of assumptions about the therapist and about ourselves. And we do so unquestioningly. Every week at least one patient tells me she “knows” what I think or feel, which she almost certainly does with others as well.

It is true that it is difficult for the therapist to respond to feelings and issues that the patient does not talk about. All rumors to the contrary, we are not mind readers! This underlies the basic therapeutic dictum that the patient should say whatever comes to mind.

Now of course, this is difficult for most of us, conditioned as we are by social norms, by rules we have learned from our parents. Remember Thumper in Bambi.”If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”? Most of us operate on some version of that in our relationships and avoid saying things to another person that we think might make them uncomfortable or angry with us. But therapy is a place where Thumper’s Rule needs to be suspended. So, if you don’t tell the therapist you don’t feel cared about, there isn’t much the therapist can do to help you with that. Similarly if you are angry with the therapist, have sexual feelings toward him or her, or any of the myriad of other feelings and thoughts about the therapist you might have. It all belongs in therapy. Putting those feelings into words is a key  part of what therapy is about, after all, because that opens the doorway to understanding where they come from and how to deal with them in ways that are helpful rather than destructive in life.

There is no magic in therapy. We meet. The patient talks. I listen and reflect what I see. Rinse and repeat.

The Fruitless Quest

But who, if it comes to that, has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? So long as a woman lives the life of the past she can never come into conflict with history. But no sooner does she begin to deviate, however slightly, from a cultural trend that has dominated the past than she encounters the full weight of historical inertia, and this unexpected shock may injure her, perhaps fatally. C.G. Jung1

There is a lot that Jung wrote about women that we might disagree with —I know I do. But I think he hits something important here. Think about what has happened to women who deviated from the course of things and choose to run for President. All have encountered exactly what Jung says above: But no sooner does she begin to deviate, however slightly, from a cultural trend that has dominated the past than she encounters the full weight of historical inertia.

Deviating from the cultural norm gets one tagged as pathological. In the West it is no longer the case that a woman is expected to eschew ambition and stay at home raising children and caring for the home. Though a considerable portion of people in the US still subscribe to the notion that a woman’s place is in the house, but not the House, it cannot be denied that our horizons are wider than they once were, wider even than when I was a young woman. But it is still expected that a woman conform to the image of ideal femininity, that is be slender and visually appealing, mostly to men.

If Thine Eye Offend Thee

Few of us realize that we do not see unmodified images of people, especially of women, in magazines, film, or television.  The images of those we see as ideals, as possessing the looks we should aspire to are not real. We do not see those woman as we would see them were we to encounter them in the supermarket or on the street. 

…it is the photographic image— both the moving image on TV and film and the still photograph— that has created the new visual grammar. Its effects should not be underestimated. They are changing the way we relate to our bodies. John Berger’s prescient statement that (bourgeois) women watch themselves being looked at has been transmuted into women assuming the gaze of the observer, looking at themselves from the outside and finding that they continually fail to meet the expectations our pervasive and persuasive visual culture demands.2

We are bombarded with altered images, thousands per week — images that convey an idea of a body which does not exist in the real world.  Cosmetic surgery as a means to attain this non-existent ideal has flourished in this environment. Cosmetic surgery as a consumer option is becoming normalized. In some communities women casually discuss, even compete over the procedures they will have. To not get one’s eyelids “done” or have Botox injections to smooth wrinkles, to not alter themselves is taken as a sign of self-neglect.

The surgeon, both authoritative and solicitous, becomes the arbiter on female beauty. As he acknowledges the pain his patients feel, he demonstrates how he can change different aspects of their body for them, enabling them to reach the beauty standard he has himself set. In his engagement with them, he gives them the body they could never imagine they would have. He is confident and persuasive. He responds to their wish with gravity but also as though they were choosing their dream holiday.2

The beauty industry and the diet industry reap profits in the billions of dollars each year as women pursue the hopeless quest of achieving the perfection of the images placed in front of us thousands of time each week, of sleek flawless bodies which seem never to age. It is also worth noting that 90% of cosmetic surgeons, the “arbiter[s] on female beauty”, are male and 90% of patients seeking such surgery are female.

The Wrong Body 

What does it mean when a person says she is in the wrong body?  We hear this most in an indirect way when any of the legions of women unhappy with their weight go on diet after diet in a largely fruitless quest to release the thin woman they believe lives inside them, a thin woman trapped in the wrong body. What does that mean? The effort to find “the right body” leads to all manner of surgical solutions, ranging from the cosmetic procedures to removal of most of the stomach in order to lose weight. In other words, the quest for the right body easily leads to mutilation of the existing body. Though little noted, bariatric surgery has an unexpected consequence of significantly elevated risk of suicide post-operatively. Among patients who have undergone bariatric surgery, the suicide rate is 6-7 times higher for people who have had the surgery than those who did not.3 Suicide risk in this group, people desperate to obtain and inhabit “the right body”, suggests that in at least a significant percentage of them, the body itself is not the problem. But in a society that finds efforts to pursue perfection through surgery acceptable if not admirable, there is little critical examination of what taking that pursuit to such dramatic lengths means nor of the inherent danger of the entire notion of the perfect body.

…the very problems the style industries diagnose are the same ones the beauty industry purports to fix. They are handmaidens in the process of deconstructing and reconstructing our bodies. And the purported fixes are offered as solutions which we can’t help but wish to take advantage of. The solutions entice us. We do not see ourselves as victims of an industry bent on exploiting us. In fact we are excited to engage with and reframe the problem: there is something wrong with me that with effort exercise, cash and vigilance— I can repair. I can make my offending body part( s) right.1

1.Jung, C.G., (1964). ‘Woman in Europe’. CW10, p. 130

2. Orbach, Susie. Bodies (BIG IDEAS//small books)

3. Castaneda, D., Popov, V.B., Wander, P. et al. Risk of Suicide and Self-harm Is Increased After Bariatric Surgery—a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. OBES SURG 29, 322–333 (2019).

 The image above is a reproduction of a sculpture found in an alcove in an underground temple on the Island of Malta, dating back approximately 6,000 years ago.

Signs of hope

Yesterday our Governor, Janet Mills, announced the next stages of measures for dealing with COVID-19. While the usual number of people grumbled that restrictions remain in place, still she brought a ray of hope that eventually much of what was will return. Or will it?

 Many speak of returning to normal but the normal we once knew will not be ever again, if only because we now know what it is to live through a life-threatening pandemic, knowledge we cannot bury. And we do not know what the new normal will be because we will still be living under threat of new waves of illness from this virus. And what effect will having lived like this, with daily reminders of the death toll, seeing masks on the faces of friends and loved ones, knowing now that touching each other or our own face can be life threatening? We have all been and continue to be experiencing trauma on a mass scale. What will be the lingering effects of that trauma?

And what of school children missing a quarter of the school year with uncertainty still about how next year will run? In my own family, my granddaughter is a high school senior — all the hoopla attendant to the ending of that phase of school is missing. She is supposed to be off to college in the fall — how will it be open? So many questions and we adults cannot provide definite answers.

New words have entered the collective vocabulary — Zoom, zooming, social distancing among others. We visit even doctors and therapists like me via video conferencing. We wrestle with tired eyes from much more time in front of screens.  A friend and colleague of mine died(not from the virus but that was of course the first question) and a memorial for him was via Zoom.

I have seen among fellow therapists on social media speculation that the new normal may well not focus so much on sessions face to face in our offices, but will remain in significant part on various video platforms and telephone. Telemedicine is not going to go away, especially for people in rural areas.

And will we return to shaking hands or hugging or will we evolve some new way of embodied, yet touch-free greeting?

Certainly the last great pandemic of 1918-1919 left its mark and surely played a role in what became the roaring Twenties. What do you imagine will follow from this?

Please take good care of yourselves. Masks are far from a fashion statement but they help. And even as restrictions are lifted, be out and about with caution. We are a long way from being out of the woods. To help cope with anxiety and fears and other feelings, if you don’t already, start writing a journal. Write down your dreams — I will be talking more about dreams next time.

And please share your thoughts in the comments.

 

For this Sunday- Three Things To Remember

Here we are near the end of April. In Maine, snow is forecast for tonight into tomorrow. Spring snow is not rare here, but this year maybe more than any, it feels cruel. It feels as though spring with green and flowers and leaves on the trees is being withheld from us. So this morning I bring you this from Mary Oliver:

As long as you’re dancing,
you can break the rules.

Some times breaking the rules is just
extending the rules.

Sometimes there are no rules.

So find some music that makes you move, and dance.