What is it about?
In this response to Palmer, I focus on the potential of creative spaces. In resonance with Palmer’s evocative descriptions of his engagement with painting and its relation to clinical insight, I offer my parallel experience with dance. Immersive experiences in creative endeavors offer to a clinician a mode of intuitive entry into the analytic field of a given treatment. I discuss the need to facilitate, and to hold open, a space for creativity for our patients and for ourselves. Creating connects us—to our self, to others, to internal objects, to our mother-child origins and to the aesthetic pleasures of our first communications. The aesthetic capacity to keep this embodied vitality alive in the analytic relationship is the quality I conceptualize as analytic eroticism (Elise, 2017, 2019). Bringing a creative sensibility into our clinical work significantly informs how we inhabit the analytic field.
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Why is it important?
As analysts, we do well to find any space that promotes access to our creative self, then to bring this self to clinical work, imbuing the analytic field with analytic eroticism. Palmer is enlivened through his immersion in painting. Although dance can express all manner of emotions, for me dance most especially stirs a vitalizing sense of expansiveness, opening the arms, chest, heart. We need our hearts to be open to each patient, which can be quite challenging at times, especially when a patient has closed her heart to us. Our creative sensibility supports openness. When one thinks of caring for plants, we speak of stimulating growth. People, as well, need “growth promotors”. A creative space provides an opportunity to stimulate development and positive change. In the analytic alchemy, when the “chemistry” of the analytic couple finds a vital spark (Winnicott, 1971), the field transforms. A dead-lock, dead end, stalemate, impasse, seismically shifts into movement, motion, emotion—a dance resumes. The clinical challenge centers on keeping this analytic dance alive, in parallel to a mother keeping hold of her libidinal investment in the protection and growth of her baby. In accompanying each patient into living we hope to release “another living subject to the world” (Kristeva, 2014, p. 76). A living subject is a creating being—a creative becoming.
Perspectives
As Winnicott emphasized throughout his work, an analyst’s capacity to relate within and through a personally creative modality provides a particular environment that supports a patient’s contact with the true self. The creative capacities of the analytic pair to imaginatively co-construct a meaningful interchange gives shape to personal experience. The analytic setting and frame attempt to provide a sanctuary for the creativity of the mind/psyche--not to de-limit, but to open, and hold open, a space for something meaningful to unfold from within the self. It is intriguing to consider what kinds of spaces promote the potential of spontaneous gestures: Where is it that we feel permission to move into and inhabit a given space, with the freedom to use it as we will? Certainly, each artistic form provides a space for creative expression, not only the formal arts, but “hobbies” --gardening, knitting, etc.-- can offer space for creative immersion. These spaces typically involve an external location: canvas, clay, instrument, page, studio. Yet whether that external context is present or not, the crucial space to access is in the mind. Once you have found your way to that experience of self, you can take that quality of mind with you, including into your clinical sessions.
Dr. Dianne Elise
Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Creative Becoming: Response to Palmer’s “The Aesthetic Matrix”, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, May 2024, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2024.2345567.
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