OUT OF MY MIND

ON INTUITION.

You know that feeling you have when you realize something? You notice it, perceive it, sense it, immediately, you feel it on the inside? You have a hunch, you feel it in your bones, you have an inkling, a sneaking suspicion, a sense, a gut feeling, a presentiment. You just know something without knowing how you know it. Intuition. Your sixth sense. Felt and known. That is intuition. A communication from the right hemisphere of your brain. The one responsible for sub-symbolic communication and for the processing and regulating of emotion. The place where the unconscious lives.

Many people follow their intuition, others have a difficult time trusting it, because they cannot pinpoint the source of their knowledge, of how they know, so they may dismiss it. Some would say that the former are right brain people and the latter left brain people (for more on this check out this link- http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/). That is to say, each of our brain hemispheres has its own window for affect tolerance. The right hemisphere in our brain deals with deeper, more intense and extreme emotions and their regulation. Those emotions that are encoded in relational memories and are felt but not necessarily translated into  language. The left hemisphere of our brain deals with moderate levels of arousal and behavior that is under our voluntary control, behavior that is known to us and can be talked about and known because it has been mediated by thought and action. But I get ahead of myself.

In the past ten years, more and more books and authors have begun talking and writing about intuition as a sixth sense, and the fact that our first impressions and choices are usually right. Usually, but not always. Why is this so? The short answer is: because information is filtered by a number of areas in the brain, all of which have developed and been impacted by our experience, particularly our early relational experience. This may help us or lead us astray. Current neuro-biological research confirms that our early relationship to our caretakers is the catalyst for brain development and lays the foundation for how our brain will grow and perform. More to the point, it accounts for how we will experience our feelings and manage our emotional states.

Back to intuition. In order to attend to our sense and feeling of something we need our bodies. We cannot recognize a feeling unless we have an embodied experience of it. Think about it, where do you feel your anxiety? Your fear? Your sadness? Butterflies in your stomach? Lungs closing in on you? Limbs tensing up? A heavy heart? It takes a specific change in our body, a felt experience in order to connect to our internal self. We need a body to experience feelings. The ability to link our felt experience to our thoughts allows for some recognition and integration of sensations, feelings and cognitive states which in turn allows us to regulate and manage our emotions. In order to attend to our intuition we need to be able to listen to our bodily sensations, to feel them and experience them. Only after we feel it can we follow through on it, or not. Feelings translate our ongoing life-state (including our dream states) so that it can be understood in the language of our mind. So what happens if you can’t feel it?

Often in illness, particularly chronic illness, there exists a state of ongoing emotional dysregulation because illness may make it difficult to hold onto bodily sensations (and to experience one’s body in an organized way), further disrupting one’s experience of one’s own body and wrecking havoc with the person’s ability to identify feelings as well as regulate them. In other words, the ability to recognize feeling states is in itself regulating of them.

Psychoanalysis has long viewed affects as the raw material of internal life. Rage, panic, anxiety are all examples of disruptive affects which interfere with our ability to modulate our emotional states. Such affective states activate our right hemisphere, whose window for intense affect tolerance is greater than the left hemisphere. Feelings differ from affects in that they represent a form of unconscious perception that is based on the original template of our emotional life. A feeling is a separate sense. As such, it comes about internally, speaking through the body. It is ours alone, although it develops within our early relational context and history, and gains its relevance and meaning there. From a neuro-scientific point of view, feelings are a set of homeostatic, regulatory reactions, which unfold within us and represent our body involved in a reactive process. Think of them as body-maps speaking to the brain. Feelings speak a language that is not based on words, but instead, on internal sensations which are interactive and relationally determined. Feelings differ from emotions in that emotions link affects with thought, ideas and memories, and as such, are more complex and a step ahead of feeling or sensing something.

Intuition may very well be what connects the “life of the limbs” – a metaphor from developmental psychology which speaks to the sensori-motor organization of our bodies- to the life of the mind. The one cannot exist without the other. And perhaps intuition offers a bridge between the two. Intuition. A presentiment. I like this word because it captures what I am trying to write about here. Pre- as in before, sentiment– from the French for feeling, emotion, sense. So before we can actually put something into words and think about it, we have to rely precisely on our feeling, our sense of it. Before we can speak or think about something we know it because we can feel it and sense it. There you have it. Perhaps we could say that this is our very own extra-sensory-perception. Our sixth sense. That is, if we can manage to tune in.

 

ON BEING AUTHENTIC.

When it comes to authenticity, be careful what you wish for. I say this, because being authentic is a lot more trouble than not being so. But it is also more rewarding, nurturing, freeing, and full of possibilities for emotional growth. Ultimately, authenticity is the key to life and our experience of it.

As of late, authenticity has become one of the hip words in the field of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. It is rightfully thought to be one of the major movers of the therapeutic action, based on the belief that all of us are looking for an authentic other who can respond to us and get to know us in that way. Someone who can tell us what we are like on the basis of his or her relationship to us. This is a huge departure from the original idea of being a blank slate for our patients, and of interpreting the various meanings of their personal history on the basis of what we have come to understand. Authenticity involves not only using our experience of another to understand much of their experience, it also involves translating the personal into the professional: relating our experience in an honest and real way. So that it can be known to the other person – as an experiential pivot into their relational history. Such a communication involves speaking from what we feel on the inside while in relation to another, and doing so without stripping it of emotion. In therapy it also involves what my colleague Philip Bromberg has aptly termed “stumbling along and hanging in” particularly when what we experience is not so clear and cannot be put into words, but we know that something important is going on, and it is going on in the moment and within the relationship. As analysts we are no longer relying on the blankness of our canvas but instead working deeply within its texture, feel and make up. Human to human. No longer privileging a cognitive interpretation of what might be, on the basis of history, but instead, of what is in the mutual experience of the moment. Thus the recent interest in the person of the therapist. Working in this way means that the therapist is a translator of sorts: working beyond words with intuition and emotion, and within the moment-to-moment sensorial register of the relationship.

Ultimately, being authentic requires being familiar with our own canvas and being relatively comfortable sharing this with others, or at the very least, finding a way to communicate through it, in spite of whatever discomfort this may bring us. The rub is, that while attempting to be authentic there is always some part of us that resists. Oy! The good news is, that people, particularly people that have needed to negotiate relationships by becoming sensitive readers of what is not said, can always recognize the inauthentic. They just know. This applies to both therapists and patients. And this makes a huge difference as far as what happens next. Despite the discomfort that it may cause us to be known in this way, it is our attempt to be authentic that provides an opportunity to shift old patterns and bring about change.

These ideas deeply affect the way that a psychotherapy is conducted, as well as the way that we think about symptoms and psychopathology. It embeds our response to trauma and adversity into a deeply humane experience and takes it out of the medicalization of mental health. We are living at a time when many of the theories underlying psychological functioning are being mapped out neuro-biologically by science as lived realities. Freud would be ecstatic about that, despite the fact that it monumentally alters many of his original ideas about how psychoanalysis needs to be conducted. I think he was just way ahead of his time. But I digress. The fact that neuro-scientists are now able to see what happens to our nervous system and brain when they are impacted by trauma has shifted the focus of analytic treatment to the regulation of affect within the relational matrix.

It turns out, that through our initial relationship with our caretakers we develop certain parts of our brain and nervous system, which can only be activated and turned on within a relationship. Within that interactive context we begin to experience ourselves as engaged and engageable with another. We begin to read, respond and interact with others and this relational interaction accounts for much of the structural development of our nervous system and brain. It accounts for the way that we will experience and process emotions with others. So the quality of the relationship matters. You can see the implications of this. If, our initial experiences have failed us or traumatized us in some way, this will affect not only how we feel but also how adept we become at regulating our emotional responses to others and to situations in our life. In fact, it probably accounts for how we view life. Much of this is laid down within the first year or two of life. Scientists who study brain structure and function are now able to explain and study what psychotherapists have worked with all along, and give us clues as to what is helpful and what is not. Thus authenticity – it is all about what happens in relationships and personal interactions. About how meaningful relational exchanges can help us alter and redefine our behavior and experience, and through these exchanges with an authentic other, change the workings of our brain and nervous system. A shift at the cellular level!

Lest you think this is some new age incantation, check out the reading list (Neuroscience) on this site for the scientific sources, and it is definitely not exhaustive. This is real, exciting, and it impacts all of us. Expect to hear more on this topic!

So what is the password for authenticity?

ME as experienced by YOU.

YOU as experienced by  ME.

Password: relationship. For it is only in the context of a relationship that we encounter the opportunity to be authentic. Margaret Williams said it best in her wonderful story The Velveteen Rabbit:

“What is REAL?” the Rabbit asked the Skin Horse one day. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, you become Real. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and you get very shabby.”

“I suppose you are Real?” said the Rabbit.

“The boy’s uncle made me Real many years ago,” said the Skin Horse. “Once you are Real, it lasts for always.“

SPEAKING IN TONGUES.

It has occurred to me that all of us speak in many tongues. There is our everyday language, how we speak to others in the course of our day. There is our professional language, for me, the language of psychoanalysis that I share with colleagues and patients. There is the language of emotions, dense with feeling and affect. The language of the body and the senses. The language of art, or music. The language of science. Or the language of spirituality. And for those of us that are multilingual, there are different languages that come to represent our experience and what we want to say in various ways, bathed in many tones and expressions, each with a particular and individual history which manifests differently in each language.

In thinking about the many and various ways in which we communicate, I have begun to think about how, despite the particular language we use, the meaning or purpose is often the same. Take for example the language of psychotherapy and the language of spirituality. In my work I have found that I speak differently to different patients. Some of this has to do with their use of language and what particular words or ways of thinking make sense to them. But some of it has to do with the fact that when it comes to helping someone who is suffering, there are many different schools of thought, and therefore many languages that address the issue and try to arrive at the same goal: to alleviate the suffering and offer alternatives.

The first time that this became clear to me was when I read Mark Epstein’s Thoughts Without a Thinker. In this book he compares and contrasts psychotherapy with Buddhism, highlighting their common goals despite the fact that they are arrived at through  different languages. It got me thinking about how important it is to hear things in a way that we can understand, a way that touches us deeply and bathes words with individual meaning and significance.

Take for example the idea of pausing before responding, something Pema Chodron has written about. Pausing gives us an opportunity to connect to where we are in the moment, to stop before we respond, and in that pause consider what it is that we really want to say or do. In the language of psychotherapy, this means being conscious, being in the moment and able to consider our actions, thoughts and feelings. Or the Buddhist idea of non-attachment, which would translate into psychotherapy language as the concept of secondary gain: “what purpose is this serving for you? Why is it so important to hang onto? What is it getting you”? We could also take the language of Alcoholics Anonymous and their twelve step program, each step of the program consists of variations on the theme of consciousness, surrender, taking inventory and making amends. Coming to know and understand who one is and what one can do if one remains present and takes authentic action. All of these coincide with the goals of good treatment. There may be many languages that speak to one’s experience: spiritual ones, philosophical ones, physical ones, group modalities and so on. Some of these, like meditation, address ways of arriving at awareness and self-regulation on one’s own, while others, like psychotherapy involve an ongoing experiential exchange with another. As a psychotherapist, being able to move between and betwixt languages and ways of thinking and experiencing, offers the flexibility to contact different people and different areas of functioning in different ways. Somewhat akin to being able to move across and within different cultures. Think about it. What makes sense to you?

Many of the concepts that I have come to regard as important in my clinical practice have come around again and touched me deeply through the physical practice of yoga or through my reading of Eastern philosophy or neuro-biological research, or through my experience of a particular piece of music, or through ongoing conversations and exchanges with patients, colleagues and loved ones.  Each of these languages carrying something known and re-discovered through their evocation of what they happen to touch in me. I think it is so for my patients as well. And perhaps for you. The language may be different, the path may vary but the outcome is the same. We feel as if we have discovered something, or arrived at something, and from that something possibilities abound. What is important is that we find the language(s) that makes sense to us and that helps us to elaborate who we are and who we want to be. In this sense, we are all multilingual and full of possibility.

 

HOME.

The dictionary defines home as the place where one lives. This definition refers to the concrete place that one lives in, but it applies, just as well, to our internal home, and to the feeling all of us have of being home. I am referring to the experience of home, which can occur when we encounter something that speaks to us intimately, like a work of art or music, or a person with whom we feel recognized and known, at home with ourselves while in relation to them. What is this feeling of home that we all have? What is it made up of?

Home is about the familiar. Yes, from the Latin familia. It is related to our family of origin, to what has become known to us in a most intimate way. Our experience of home holds the beginnings of our experience of intimacy- the original blueprint. Home is about something one knows and responds to instinctively, from the inside, often a felt something that needs no words to be noted, felt, and understood. The feeling of home speaks in a personal language, the language of our senses. An intimate language that begins before we can use words, and in relationship to a primary other. So if home is about what is familiar to us, because of our early experiences with our family, and it is a feeling that speaks through our senses, then home must also encompass memories of lived, relational experiences. Home is about experiences that make us feel known from the inside precisely because they access our internal experience.

Let me count the ways:

1)    There is the smell of home. Ever notice how a particular aroma catapults you back into a particular place or situation? Or a particular craving?

2)   There is the feel of home. Clean, organized, messy, shiny, dingy, scary, safe, warm, cold, etc.

3)   There is the sound of home. It might be silence, or noisy streets, or music of a particular kind. Or the sound of fighting and screaming. Sounds that take you back to a lived feeling.

4)   And then there are the visuals of home. Sight is tricky because we rely on it and privilege it over other senses. Many of our memories are organized around it. So the visuals may pertain to the way someone moved, walked, stood. Or they may pertain to environmental things, like trees, colors, rooms, houses, etc.

So there it is. The language of home. Strung together in our own, idiosyncratic way, and made up of numerous moments of interaction with intimate others, stored in memory, and distilled into our feeling of home.

I am making it sound pretty idyllic, but it is not always so. In fact, the feeling of home often involves what was good as well as what was not so good. And our senses will alert us to all of it. Home, for better or for worse.

The feeling of home often continues to play a part and even dictate what we do in our adult lives. Perhaps not consciously, but as an important part of our lived experience and who we are. Home, and the way it speaks to us internally, is involved in many of our choices: who our lovers and partners are, who our friends and confidants are, what we do, how we live, where we live, etc. This is because home is about our early history.

Think about it. What happens to us early on influences our ability to live in the world. Who do we trust? How do we make decisions? Do we want to come home or get away from it? As a psychoanalyst, who is in the business of helping people revisit home, in order to understand the why’s of their present lives, I think the feeling of home is often responsible for the repetition of certain experiences and behaviors in our lives. Because it is familiar and known. Because even when we are aware of this, we might continue to revisit home in the hopes of doing it differently this time around.

Ah! There is always a rub it seems. In this case, it involves separation. Leaving home so as to do something new. Understanding home so as to make your own home. So that each visitation into the feeling of home explains another piece of our intimate make up, and perhaps releases its hold. “I’ve got a feeling we are not in Kansas anymore,” said Dorothy to Toto, while looking around at Oz, and indeed, separation and leaving home can feel like being a stranger in a strange land. On the other hand, Dorothy also said, “There’s no place like home”. I could not agree with her more. There is no place like home because it is ours in its entirety. Ours and ours alone, and it holds much of the magic of who we are and who we can become.

 

MALE OR FEMALE? VIVE LA DIFFERENCE!

After I finished reading the Sunday New York Times article on the feminization of psychotherapy (click the following – Need Therapy? A Good Man is Hard To Find), I was once again reminded of how wedded we have become, particularly in America, to the idea of equality. Don’t get me wrong, we have had to work hard to leave stereotypes behind, and advance our thinking regarding inequality in many areas-  work, pay, gender roles, – all the stuff that has been at the heart of the battle of the sexes. But, when it comes to psychotherapy, it has always seemed to me that gender can make a difference in treatment. An important difference. Good to see it in the New York Times!

It goes without saying, that a good therapist should be able to work in all areas of human behavior regardless of their gender. Furthermore, many believe that it should not make any difference whether a patient works with a woman or with a man. One’s personal dynamics will play out in the therapeutic relationship regardless. Perhaps this has come to be a commonly held belief in my profession because we like to think that as therapists, who we actually are, (including our gender) is of little consequence. What matters is how we listen, respond, who we are and become in the clinical hour. Yet, for all the hours that I have spent sitting with patients, I have always been aware of who and what I am (a woman), and the fact that this makes a very important difference to my patients, men and women alike. Sometimes a man needs a man to talk to, and sometimes only a woman will do. And vice-versa. It may have to do with the patients’ preference in regard to their need for safety and understanding. It also, may have to do with particular issues, usually to do with sexuality and identity. And it is not only patients who have gender preferences. Many a time I have received a call from a colleague, which started with, “ I am calling to refer Mr. or Ms X, I think they would benefit from working with a woman”. So it turns out that there are many of us out there, who believe that gender does make a difference, and that it should be observed in our work. In fact, the person of the therapist makes a difference. Gender is just one of the factors. Age is another factor that seems to affect the choice of therapist.

From a clinical perspective, there are various gender dependent dynamics that may be difficult to work out in same or different sex, patient-therapist dyads. Take for example, a man who struggles with his masculinity and finds other men too aggressive, or competitive, or downright frightening. He might choose to work with a woman. Or a woman, who has difficulties accepting her body and does not identify with what being female, means or implies to her. Sometimes we need our therapist to embody our experience, and this is easier to do when the therapist is the same gender we are. Granted, patients are making an assumption on the basis of sex- he will understand me better because he is a man, or she must know how this feels, because she is a woman. Such assumptions are not necessarily always true, there is the person of the therapist to consider, but they do influence the course of an analysis. Patients’ often endow their therapists with abilities that they need to believe in, in order to do their work.

As an analyst my education served to consolidate my belief that women and men work differently in the consulting room, and that they do so because of their sex and its identity defining implications. This is quite a feat in a profession that has minimized sexual difference and grew out of Freud’s notion that we should attempt to be blank screens for our patients. Aha, blank screens, that’s right. This idea always seemed a little wacky to me, even though I admit I tried it. I tried, but it never worked for me, or for my patients. We might attempt to provide a blank screen, but the original canvas it is stretched upon makes a considerable difference.

Early in my career, I developed an interest in, and explored the issue of the analyst’s gender as an important variable that can facilitate the expression of certain aspects of the patient’s experience of masculinity and femininity (click – see Ceccoli, 1999; 2000). Analytic listening is necessarily filtered through gender, and the differences between men and women reveal themselves at the level of listening.

As men and women we have very distinct and different experiences growing up. Yes, many of them are culturally determined. But many of them are biologically pre-set.  Biology is a sexed reality and is reinterpreted psychically on the basis of socio-cultural realities. Furthermore, the psychic representation of sexual difference, and the maturational unfolding of physical femininity and masculinity have particular (and different) developmental consequences for sexual subjectivity and desire. For example, sexuality and aggression are experienced in gender specific ways.

All of this to say that gender makes a difference. We cannot ignore our bodies, their sex, and developmental histories, and we cannot privilege them over our social and cultural experiences. They go hand in hand despite the tension this might create. Contemporary psychotherapy and psychoanalysis has come to address the person of the therapist as an important variable in treatment. It has begun to look at the many factors, which constitute and go into the therapeutic relationship and the facilitation of emotional growth. As such, who the analyst is, including their gender, age, level of experience and therapeutic orientation are factors to be considered in every analysis .

Differences are important. Vive la difference!

 

ON LIES AND LYING ON THE COUCH.

I have been thinking about lying, and particularly, about lying on the couch, and the possibilities of why, anyone undergoing psychoanalysis or psychotherapy might be moved to not tell the truth. Therapy is, after all, a way of understanding oneself and ones’ personal history or personal truths. So at first blush, it makes no sense at all to think about lying in this context. Or does it?

I believe it was Freud who considered lying as the first act of privacy. Think of it: that moment when we first discover, as children, that adults cannot read our minds. In that moment, we are in fact separate from them, and have our own individual thoughts, which are not immediately known to an other. WOW. As children, this must feel like magic; as if we have discovered our personal invisibility cape, which protects us from discovery and affords us some room to move, to be, well, private in our thoughts. I imagine that for some, if not all children, the first lie must feel like an omnipotent act. An act that provides immediate separateness through the establishment of an invisible boundary. So far so good. Thought of in this way, lying can be seen as a necessary developmental accomplishment. A personal achievement, which helps to establish necessary boundaries with which to navigate the interpersonal world.

But what happens when lying becomes an ongoing way of negotiating our relationship with others and the world? Here I think, we are seeking relational short cuts. The liar enters relationships with a need for control, and this leads him/her to manipulate others toward a particular understanding or experience. Ever wonder why you feel a little crazy when you discover you have been lied to? Such manipulation often interrupts the natural flow of possibilities between people, and  through the lie, such possibilities are lost, creating instead repetitive interactions that follow a predictable pattern. Lying shuts down personal vulnerability and replaces it with predictability. Thus, the person who lies habitually reinforces a state of isolation by disallowing the possibility to be known, again and again, replacing it with a rehearsed version of an acceptable persona.

So what is at the heart of lying? Fear. Often a fear that began and was nurtured in childhood, and holds relational memories of the self as wounded and vulnerable, as well as experiences that rendered the self as bad, and unacceptable to loved ones. As adults, this translates into a fear of being fully known by another through the many interpersonal possibilities that arise within relationships.  It translates into a fear that our unconscious will betray us within the matrix of relationality. That we will become known for exactly who we are.  Yikes!  And then there is shame. Shame envelops the liar in a labyrinth of secrets and silences, which serve to further isolate them from any chance of intimacy, and the complexity of authentic human interaction. Shame reinforces the pain of childhood experiences and forecloses connection.

So why lie on the couch? The opportunity to look at oneself within the context of an authentic relationship can be fraught, even when that relationship is a therapeutic one. Any discussion of lying necessarily involves addressing the truth, not as an ‘objective truth”, but as a personal narrative which defines who we are. Often our truth can be terrifying, re-awakening self states that hold pain, hurts, and the “not me” parts that do not fit in with who we want to be, and are thus temporarily (magically?) exiled through the lie. Speaking our truth(s) to another brings past and present into the room and makes it possible to address it interpersonally, and as experienced by both participants. Giving voice to our truth makes us vulnerable to another in the same experiential way that precipitated lying to begin with. And therein lies the rub: while lying begins as an act of privacy, it continues as a protective interpersonal maneuver, and the experience that it attempts to occlude has to be negotiated and addressed relationally. In vivo.

Lying can be done with words or with silence. We lie because self- experience can be too shameful, painful, frightening, overwhelming and unbearable to be spoken and dealt with, too potentially traumatizing to relive, even through the spoken word. Lying gives the illusion of safety, but at a price: it robs us of a part of our history, and a part of ourselves. It makes authentic relationships difficult if not impossible. Lying simplifies the story and reduces the meaning and complexity of human experience. Bringing lies into the open re-activates all of the feelings that necessitated them initially – perhaps this is why lying occurs on the couch as well as off the couch.

In the consulting room, we are always in interaction with many truths and un-truths about remembered and lived experience. What we can count on, as therapists, is our experience of the other and the various and multiple ways in which we relate to each other and each others’ emotional and cognitive states regarding particular events.  I think of these moments as relational experiential truths: they are felt even before they are fully understood and put into words. The truth that we seek to encounter and make available in treatment, is one in which there is the space and room to consider many possibilities, including the ones that may lead to a lie or omission, and make choices that free our patients to become real and in sync with who they are and how they want to live. This is necessarily an ongoing process that is mutually negotiated.

The essence of the psychotherapeutic relationship and its potential for cure lies in our ability to continually refine and redefine the personal truths that are spoken, experienced and lived at any one moment. Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are knowledgeable travelers in the terrain of conscious and unconscious experience, and most of us are committed to going the hard way with our patients, the way that is feared and perhaps not yet known, but moves within the possibilities of human relationship and connection.

 

ON SPEAKING AND FINDING OUR VOICE.

 

Much of the psychotherapeutic hour is based on dialogue. On putting our experience into words, as an attempt to communicate to another what has happened, what we feel, what we remember. The interchange that ensues in each clinical hour is particular to the experience of each patient and their analysts’ experience of them. Each clinical moment is constructed on this dual, shared experience and each participant’s ability to find the words to communicate it. As such, our speech is performative: an articulated action meant to make contact with another person, as an invitation to be known.

As I have written in other blogs and professional papers, it is often the case that words fail us. That they are not enough to convey the complex and deep meaning of our experience. At such times, we may convey meaning and experience through silence, or a look, a movement, or by acting in a particular way that invites the other into an experience that is known through its shared feeling, but has yet to be articulated and understood. All of these pertain to the psychoanalytic situation, in which it falls within the analysts’ purview to find words that are adequate enough to capture the multiple, layered meanings of personal experience, and lead to some mutual understanding. We always come back to words, to narrative, to dialogue as a way of connecting to others and elaborating ourselves – as a way of being known and understood.

We rely not just on words, but on the way that they are spoken, and here, it is our voice that takes center stage. Our voice, with all of its dense inflections, tones, rhythms and accents, adds color to our words or neutralizes them altogether. It provides a direct experiential link between emotion and feeling and thought. It bathes words with affective expression, which bestows diverse meanings and alters the strict definition of words. This is something that music and vocalists have always known – alter the harmony and it changes the meaning of the melody, alter the rhythm and you shift the emphasis, add coloratura and you create an individual thrust  and intensity,  sing a duet and you enter into a musical conversation or argument. Vocalists can modulate their voice to convey different intentions, which reach inward and affect us deeply, calling forth our own, personal experience. Musicians do this through their instruments and their interpretation of the score. The pliancy and elasticity of our voice changes and shifts the meaning of words so as to make them capable of expressing a myriad of  messages and implications. It is our voice which carries the emotion and rounds out the sharp and constricitve edges of language.

The human voice is a complete, amazing and powerful personal instrument. Through the use of our voice we add emotional texture and expand the potential of words and what they can convey. With our voice we fill in the area of language that is porous, in which the possibilities are literally endless since they involve the full spectrum of emotional life and experience. Psychotherapy provides a space where one’s voice can develop and change, where it can resonate with the different meanings of  personal history and life experience and its echo in the present. Often, finding our voice when in dialogue with another, ushers in new possibilities for being and a new understanding of our history and past.

Our voice is like our calling card. Hello world, (it says), here I am, and this is how I make myself known, this is how I want you to know me, this is what I want you to understand about me. Our voice moves our personal aesthetic forward toward others, engaging them in different ways. It provides the means for the elucidation of who we are and what we are about. We can use our voice to clarify meaning, alter it, or obfuscate it. Furthermore, with our voice we can draw attention to or away from specific situations and information, as well as engage others intimately or keep them at a distance. Our voice is ultimately, the carrier of emotion and the bridge from our internal experience outward, into the world and into our relationships with others.

Hmmm….It certainly underscores the meaning of  the saying: “it ain’t what you say, it’s how you say it”.

 

 

WHY WE NEED ART.

Several weeks ago I wrote a blog about language and its limitations. I was essentially addressing the area of our experience that is not language bound, or if it is, it is bound to a language of affective experience and emotion, which cannot be captured in words, and often, disrupts logic and our sense of self-cohesiveness. The power of feelings to agitate and overwhelm us lies in the fact that they are a communication which contains a relational memory trace within it, embedded in the very fabric of the emotion. Or put another way, we learn to experience our feelings in relation to another, and we learn to understand them and navigate them within that relationship. Thus, the meaning(s) that we assign to a particular emotion, and the words that we chose to talk about it all come about through and within a relationship. Because affective experience has its own language (feelings) and its own logic (relationship based) words are often not enough to capture it. And this is where art, in all its manifestations, comes in.

Art provides us with a form of aesthetic communication that bypasses language while accessing personal experience. It dwells in an area of experience where words are not enough yet deep meaning is present. The aesthetic experience that art captures and translates for us speaks through rhythms, tones, and traces that are not yet coded through spoken language but are perceivable through colors and frequencies, a register of the senses, that is yet to be defined by language and defies a particular meaning. Think of how deeply a particular painting can touch you, or how transporting a novel or poem can be, stirring our imagination and our hearts. Or music, which is capable of providing an extra dimension to reason, rationality, logic and language by filling in for what words alone cannot possibly capture. Think of Opera as an example of bringing emotion into dialogue musically, the harmony changing the meaning of the melody, the rhythm varying its intensity.

The first inkling I had regarding the power of art to access and elaborate emotion came to me early on, through my studies in music. It was through various classical composers that I learned about the depth of my own feelings and how easily accessed they were depending on what I was listening to or playing.  Artists know this well, and they communicate and speak through art so that the rest of us can be stirred and touched through their aesthetic movement to our own. Perhaps this is one of the reasons we all have our personal, favorite composers, painters, choreographers- our individual interpreters of the movement of our own aesthetic sensibility. Bottom line: emotions and the language of affect are better apprehended and expressed through art in all of its various forms. We need art and artists to capture and interpret internal experience and shape it into a corporeal state that speaks to us directly and from the inside.

In my previous blog (I Do, I Do…) I wrote about relationships as involving a deep exchange between people which reveals intimate and previously unelaborated self-states about both partners. I invite you to click on the following link, and experience what I wrote about through the choreography of Mats Ek, in a three-part piece called Smoke. It says so much more through its movement than I could possibly capture in words. Enjoy.

[youtube width=”690″ height=”558″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hik5QkWz0fc[/youtube]

[youtube width=”690″ height=”558″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTaFQlGJbWA[/youtube]

[youtube width=”690″ height=”558″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PapxE1xTWM0[/youtube]

 

I DO I DO! On relationships and commitment.

What does it mean to make a commitment to another, to be in an intimate  relationship with another? Beyond the vows that we make, the intentions that we have in our heart, the passion and attachment that we may feel, what is commitment really about?

Our culture tells us that relationship and commitment are something to aspire to, and are about love, trust, communication, partnership, and companionship. Ok, so far so good, who would not want that? But as a psychoanalyst I know, that relationships, and our ability to make a commitment to another, involve more than the elements that might make for  good relations. And furthermore, that the ability to commit to another and stay committed, turns out to be a real test of character, but not in the way that you might think.

When we commit to another, we commit to knowing them deeply, from the inside. Relationships involve an ongoing, intimate exchange between two people, who come to know each other and themselves through their experience of each other within the relationship. When we are involved with another, we not only come to know them, we also come to know parts of ourselves and our character through our partners’ experience of them. And this is the dirty little secret about relationships: they put us in touch with parts of ourselves that we might otherwise never know. Most often, this surprises us; through our relating to another we may find out that we are many things we do not like about ourselves, or want to be –impatient, bossy, critical, mean, etc.- aspects of our selves that are only activated within ongoing intimacy and may seldom, if ever, make an appearance in other situations and/or less intimate relations. Features of ourselves that may be saturated with shame and kept out of awareness, but return within the dance of intimacy as parts of our early relational language. After all, our blueprint for intimacy becomes established in infancy through our interactions with our caretakers. When we enter an intimate relationship in adult life, we bring with us many early intimacies that will likely become activated in our relationship with a significant other.

When we commit to another, we commit to bearing their character and the many articulations of their very being, through our experience of it.  We commit to our processing of the particular aesthetic of the other through our experience and interaction with them. We in fact say to our partners: this is what you are like. The truth is, that we are also known and elaborated, through the others’ experience of us. It is our partners that can tell us a great deal about who we are in relationship to them. And this is what accounts for rupture in commitment: who we become to the other and what it says about us, may not be who we want to be. There is such a thing as a bad match: individual characters relating to each other and foreclosing possibilities for the recognition and elaboration of each other, playing out a version of intimacy based on the past and their history. This is also why bad relationships can wreak havoc with our sense of self: they validate our worst fears and entrap us in repetitive interactions.

There is an old Freudian saying that we tend to marry our parents. The modern version of this, is that we are drawn to what is familiar and known at some deep, intimate level. In this sense, the character of our partners (and friends) will affect which parts of us are engaged and how – celebrating and supporting our personal aesthetic or foreclosing it. Even “good” relationships are a strain to bear, because they necessarily involve us in a deep, experiential character exchange where we come to know ourselves through the other and in relationship to them, and vice-versa. The ability to stay committed to another involves a process of mutual recognition, as well as a continuous elaboration of each other, that is capable of repairing interpersonal ruptures and validating individual experience. Ultimately , it boils down to who we want to be in relation.

TAKE A PAUSE.

We are inclined to move, to think on our feet, to react, to keep pace with the world around us. We are invited to multi-task, a word that did not join the English dictionary and vocabulary until recently (at least not as related to human activity) to accommodate our cultural need to do. And to do many things at once. The more the better, as proof of our ability to be productive. This in the name of efficiency, but at what cost?

From a psychoanalytic viewpoint this is all wrong. While we can attend to many things at the same time, we cannot engage fully with all of them. From my chair, it is one thing at a time, with full attention to the person, and as many dynamic elements in our interaction as possible, as well as my experience of them. Being conscious, and staying attuned to our thoughts and emotions, as much and as often as possible, helps us engage fully in the world. So that we can be present. Every moment a new opportunity to do so.

Pema Chodron, a Buddhist monk with a gift for making difficult issues and emotions understandable and workable, speaks about the need to take a pause in our lives. She has turned the ability to pause into the art of reflection. Chodron counsels us to take a pause often. Particularly when what we want to do is react. Specifically when we are overwhelmed by our emotions. She advocates pausing, stopping and taking a breath. Taking a moment to consider. When we stop, we have the opportunity to consider and reflect. We take notice of ourselves and our reactions, as well as the situation surrounding us. Consciousness and our ability to connect to it, is in the pause. When we pause we have access to our consciousness. When we pause we have choices. When we pause we can choose a direction, we can create a conscious path of action. We can change what we do and what we think.

The psychoanalytic situation is built around the idea of making space and taking time to attend, to listen, to get to know, and to consider our history and the circumstances of our lives. Most of us enter psychotherapy because we are in pain, and we are looking for a way to change. The journey that psychotherapy involves is about self-knowledge and understanding, and about using that knowledge to reconsider our lives and create change. To find new ways of being and experiencing ourselves and the world. Often this involves observing ourselves in interaction with others, and reflecting on our behavior. It involves attending to our emotions and our thoughts. Over time, it is the practice of reflection on our behavior that allows us to change it. A prolonged pause if you will, that gives us time to reconsider who we are and who we want to be. But one need not be in therapy to practice the art of reflection. Pausing before we act or react gives us the opportunity to change direction, to think before acting or speaking, to include what we know and use that knowledge, along with our feelings, to consider the situation anew and perhaps act differently.

When we pause we have the opportunity to attend to the details that often get lost in the big picture. And details are important to all of us. In fact, when we do not attend to the details we run the risk of making mistakes, and worse, of hurting others and ourselves. Pausing allows us to consider the details as well as the overall picture. It is a simple practice that yields big results.