The Stuff of Thought: Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Mental Health
Author Lucy Ashe mines the depths of the stuff of thought, specifically psychoanalysis, creativity, and mental health for writers.
When I started therapy three years ago, the possibility that the experience might inspire my next novel did not enter my mind. In my first session, I sought help for anxiety about upcoming changes in my life. I could not have imagined that I’d be embarking on an intense psychoanalytical journey through my past, complicated by the intimacies and conflicts in my relationship with my therapist. Writing became a guide through the maze.
I would not be the first person to find inspiration for art in psychotherapy. While I have taken a more literal inspiration and written a novel about a therapist-patient relationship and the dangers of a transference-based dynamic (the process by which a patient projects past feelings and patterns of thought onto their therapist), many artists have been intrigued by psychotherapy, particularly psychoanalysis and its focus on the unconscious. Psychoanalysis invites us to explore dreams, fantasies, the hidden parts of ourselves, and the fears that fragment us and our relationships. These conversations, and the emotions they provoke, have the potential to weave their way into an artist’s life and work.
“Painting is self-discovery,” Jackson Pollock said in a 1956 interview. Like other artists of the 1940s and 50s, Pollock was interested in Jungian psychotherapy, and had been in analysis himself. Freudian ideas of making the unconscious conscious also played out in Pollock’s work, as well as for artist Arshile Gorky who famously said that “The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist’s brush.” In a more direct interaction with the self, the performance and photographic artist Cindy Sherman has, since the 1970s, played with identity, role-playing and self-erasure. In her therapy she explored her compulsion to dress-up, tracing her art back to her childhood.
And yet it is too simplistic, and perhaps overly idealistic, to suggest that psychotherapy can always heal, or that the creation of art is ultimately healing. Many artists and writers were not healed by either their therapy or their creativity. The writer and diarist Anaïs Nin writes of the damage therapy did, reenacting the traumas of her childhood rather than healing them. She had affairs with both her analysts, a repetition of the very issues she was in therapy to heal. Sylvia Plath’s posthumously published poetry collection Ariel is deeply psychoanalytical, an expression of rage about maternal roles and paternal abandonment, and yet the process of transforming pain into art did not help her recover from mental illness.
My own experience showed me that psychotherapy can both harm and heal. While my first two years in therapy were retraumatizing, complicated by my unsettling attachment to my therapist, our dynamic gradually settled and I found a calmer, less volatile approach to our work. It was during those difficult years that I wrote The Model Patient, desperately needing an outlet to help me understand why I was finding therapy so hard. Writing the novel was a compulsion, and I felt as though I could not survive the therapy if I did not have a project where I could translate the confusion of my feelings into something creative. Gradually, as the book emerged and my research for the novel developed, I started to understand the work we were doing, I regained my ability to trust myself and my feelings, and my therapist’s power to make me feel as though I was losing my grip on reality faded.
Three years on, my therapy is beginning to heal. When I think about what has changed, I realize I am becoming comfortable with the idea that therapy provides a place where no thought or desire is too much. Within the containment of the therapy space, the limitations of our social conditioning can be stripped away, layer by layer, until the most tender and vulnerable parts of ourselves are revealed.
This can be frightening work. In a world where we are constantly looking for certainties, psychoanalytic therapy reveals a painful truth: that our knowledge is limited; that we must let go of our certainty about who we are; that we are fragmented, complex, and full of contradictions. This, as many artists have found, is fertile ground for creativity.
In 2015, the artist Martin Bladh took the Rorschach inkblot test as his inspiration for his art text, The Rorschach Test, an exploration of memories, childhood anxieties, fantasies and fears through free-association text and a series of image collages. He follows this with ink blots of his own blood on canvas, with haunting reflections on old wounds, pain, and desire. This is an unsettling work of art, but it reveals how the merging of memory with artistic creation is at the heart of the relationship between therapy and art.
If we think about the art and literature that moves us most, it is not art that gives us all the answers, providing a clear picture of right and wrong, love and hate, good and bad. It is the art that asks more questions than it answers, capturing the tensions inside us rather than soothing our need for certainty.
When I was writing The Model Patient, I was drawn to the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and 50s, partly because this was art with which my protagonist, Evelyn Westbrook, had grown up, but also because of these artists’ interest in the unconscious. Pollock’s drip-paintings and Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain visual explorations of ambiguity were meaningful for me during this time of writing my novel and being in therapy, and I was inspired by the elusiveness of meaning in these paintings. In The Model Patient, Evelyn longs to know for certain what her therapist is thinking. It is in discovering that she is stronger when she stops seeking for evidence of his approval that she begins to heal.
Sitting in the pain of uncertainty causes, for many people, unhealthy rumination. Engaging in art can be a powerful way to turn rumination into reflection. Nicole Nehrig, the psychotherapist and author of With Her Own Hands, writes about the way textile work gives form to thought, as well as how repetitive, rhythmic tasks such as knitting can improve mood and provide a feeling of calm. Psychotherapist Jennifer Cox, the author of Women are Angry: Why Your Rage is Hiding and How to Let It Out, explores the ways creative outlets such as drawing and writing help women unleash repressed rage that has been making them ill.
While formal art therapy developed from psychoanalysis in the 1940s, we have been turning to art as a way to give form to difficult emotions for centuries. When we open a notebook and begin to journal, when we sketch, paint, knit, when we write a poem, a short story, a novel, we join the centuries-old compulsion to transform pain into creative purpose.
Check out Lucy Ashe's The Model Patient here:
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