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The Voice on the Couch
by Matthew Gurewitsch
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''YOU know the old saying,'' a German diva once remarked. ''The theater is a madhouse, and the opera is the ward for the incurable.'' She ascribed the remark to Mahler, who should have known. His symphonies are rife with turmoil, he did time running the snake pit known as the Vienna Court Opera, and he consulted Freud -- just once -- in a moment of existential anguish.
(read more here...)
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The Walking Cure
Choire Sicha
Christopher Shinn,
whose new play smells
like a teen spirit, has
just one vice left: analysis.
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Each morning for nearly a month, the playwright Christopher Shinn has left his Lower East Side apartment and walked the four miles to Playwrights Horizons on West 42nd Street for rehearsals of his sixth play, "On the Mountain."
(read more here...)
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Artists are concerned about anything interfering with their creativity, including therapy, as described by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison in her book, TOUCHED WITH FIRE:
(Dr. Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University)
"There must be serious concern about any attempt to reduce what is beautiful and original to a clinical syndrome, genetic flaw, or predictable temperament. It is frightening, and ultimately terribly boring, to think of anyone - not only writers, artists, and musicians - in such a limited way."
In an article appearing in the New York Times, April 21, 2002, The Mind Inside the Madness, John Forbes Nash,Jr., the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and schizophrenic whose struggles with mental illness were depicted in the Oscar-winning feature film, "A Beautiful Mind" was quoted as saying "To some extent sanity is a form of conformity. People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better...To some extent, people who are insane are noncomformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives"
In another article of the New York Times, March 13, 2002, entitled Analysts Reading between Authors' Lines, a symposim of writers and psychoanalysts addressing the relationship between fantasy and fiction called "The Apocalyptic Imagination: Daydreaming in an Era of Nightmares." ---- questioned "fantasy after Sept. 11. Can writers still allow themselves to have apocalyptic fantasies , or are there new limits?"
"On the face of it, writers and psychoanalysts are made for one another. Psychoanalysts are concerned with memory, guilt, anxiety, dread, longing and puns, as are writers. (Think of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Woody Allen.) In 1907 Freud wrote an essay called "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" in which he suggested that the two were alike, with one crucial difference. Daydreamers completely hide their fantasies from the world, while creative writers disguise them and turn them into stories."
"The purpose of the symposium, said Dr. Sandra S. Leong, one of the organizers, was not to cure the writers of feelings of inhibition they might be having after Sept. 11, but to understand "the complicated relationship between trauma, fear and mastery at the heart of all creative endeavors."
The synposium concluded with the idea that "There maybe some solace for writers in composing their stories, but the real comfort is having people listen to them and respond."
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