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THE FACILITATION OF MOURNING THROUGH ARTISTIC EXPRESSION: THE POWER OF AUTHENTICITY
Stefanie Solow Glennon
On September 30, 1998 I lost my husband after a 2 1/2 year battle with an aggressive cancer. We had been together for 28 years. After planning a memorial service and during dogged attempts to resurrect a life, I wanted to sing. I had sung throughout childhood and adolescence and had worked as a professional singer for a several years before attending graduate school. I didn’t analyze what I was doing nor did I make a conscious decision, it just seemed to happen.
I found myself hearing in the songs--that I had known all my life--references to death and mourning I had not heard before. These were the songs I wanted to sing. I perfected these songs as best I could, focusing on expressing my own feelings through the lyrics of carefully selected songs. Soon, I found that as painful as singing the songs was, it was a healing pain. I would always resultantly feel more whole.
My mourning process was aided by submerging myself into the music and lyrics. There was something about putting pain into an aesthetic container--attempting to create beauty and form from chaos--that resulted in an inner calm that I began to rely upon.
I decided to record these songs--so as to have a record of these intimate autobiographical moments for my children, grandchildren and close friends. While rehearsing for the CD--before I felt ready to go into the studio--I invited a few friends into my home to hear what I was doing. Each was profoundly moved. When I finally made the CD (the process took almost two years), everyone who heard it reported that it made them cry.
As a psychoanalyst I wondered why. I had been concerned that the songs were too repetitive, morose, unrelentingly sad and, at worst, self-indulgent. But as a dear friend who attended a rehearsal told me, listening to the songs facilitated access to his own sadness and pain over losses in his life. He said he was grateful for the experience and considered it a gift.
What is the mechanism? What is it in artistic expression that moves, releases affects in the artist and stimulates personal responses in the listener or viewer. Anthony Storr, in Solitude; A Return to the Self, speaks of the creative act as both expressing loss and helping the sufferer to overcome it.
The creative act is a way of overcoming the state of helplessness which is so important as part of the depressive state. The act of expressing emotion gives the sufferer some sense of mastery, even if he or she is not particularly gifted.
The music, poems, paintings and other works that loss has inspired may bring solace to others who have suffered similar pangs. Wilma Bucci, a psychoanalytic researcher, speaks of “emotional communication” that occurs both within and outside of awareness. She speaks of it as transmission from “affective core to affective core.”
Allan Schore, who has written about a neurophysiological template for unconscious communication of affects, illustrates the role of right hemisphere transmission to the right hemispheres of others and calls it “the transfer of affects.” He states, “The right cortical hemisphere, which is centrally involved in attachment functions, is dominant for the perception of the emotional states of others. It is also dominant for subjective emotional experiences.”
In a Channel 13 Documentary, the renowned cellist, Yoyo MA stated, “The biggest performing lesson of my life was to get on the stage and be myself. Performing is the moment in which I will find the way to tell you what I need to tell you.” Yo Ma’s phrase “need to tell you” illustrates an interpersonal dimension of self-discovery, i.e. how one discovers thoughts and feelings in the telling, or in the singing.
Jessica Benjamin says, “I write in order to know myself. I can be in a self-forgetful state when I start writing, waiting to see what the writing itself will reveal.” Similarly, singing helps me to know what I feel. Although I sometimes search my internal computer for a song to express fully what I consciously am experiencing, at other times I am surprised by the song I‘ve spontaneously chosen, not having known in advance that the emotions expressed through the song were what I was feeling.
In a NY Times segment on "Writers on Writing," Diane Ackerman describes how writing poems daily helped her to ”corral the unruly emotions that arose during intense psychotherapy. It’s an old story, better told than I tell, how artists shape what hurts like hell.” She continues: “My favorite poems are ones that conjure up the mood that sponsored them. They’re bookmarks allowing me to re-feel.” I have listened to my own CD when I have had the need to re-visit my feelings about the loss of my husband.
Shen Wei quotes the Chinese choreographer Anna Kisselgoff: “My dancers must understand what I believe as an artist and as a human being. If they trust what I do and believe what they are doing is truthful, the quality that comes out is honest." Her review was entitled “With His Heart in His Imagery.”
Without affective truthfulness, an experience or expression (artistic or otherwise) is deadened, rote, or feigned, certainly not growth enhancing and not likely to connect affectively with the Other, whether the Other is the viewer, the reader, the listener or the analyst.
What I find of great interest is our ambivalent relationship to our own affects. We seem to constantly be monitoring the amount of affective stimulation we can manage and have at our unconscious command. Ed Levenson writes about “unconscious consciousness," a stock-pile of defense mechanisms with which we block access to these feelings. Denial, dissociation, repression, reaction formation, negation, etc. all designed to protect us from what our psyches fear are potentially overwhelming affects.
Freud spoke of the psyche’s need for a protective shield or stimulus barrier; like a single neuron that needs protection from too much electrical stimulation. Freud stated: “Our relation to the world, into which we have come so unwillingly, seems to involve our not being able to tolerate it uninterruptedly.”
When our affects are stored away or blocked off, the resultant experience is one of feeling deadened, not fully alive and somehow out of life. Many of us have been reminded lately that the most painful symptom of PTSD is an emotional numbness, a withdrawal and avoidance of close emotional ties. Freud stated that people often “Turn away from reality because they find it unbearable."
I find myself intrigued with the as yet unanswerable question of just what is psychic trauma. Psychic annihilation can sometimes be feared with almost the same degree of terror as impending literal death. Why should affects feel potentially lethal?
The psyche shuts down its affects as a defensive maneuver, fearing that current reality is just too much to affectively bear and as a result closes down vulnerability to feelings, The person, in varying degrees, is left affectless. Then the feeling of deadness becomes the new fear. For to feel affectless is to feel detached, unconnected, not present and in extreme form may lead to clinical depression or psychosis.
Thomas Ogden focuses on a basic drive toward aliveness:
Every form of psychopathology represents a specific type of limitation of the individual’s capacity to be fully alive as a human being. The experience of aliveness is a quality that must be considered as an aspect of the analytic experience in its own terms.
Human beings press to feel alive; to be enlivened. This is the reason people spend so much money on theatre tickets and works of art--and stand in line for any performance or exhibition that has been called exciting. They want to laugh, to cry, to get chills, i.e. to feel.
Bion saw the goal of psychoanalysis as the capacity to “experience experiencing" and Stephen Mitchell spoke of opening up “new experiential options." Yet under certain conditions we are afraid of being overwhelmed or, in extreme cases, annihilated by our own affective reactions.
Another question arises: Why should dissociation of affects have such a deleterious effect on our sense of well-being or mental health. Part of the answer must be that repressed or unformulated feelings attached to trauma or extreme states of unpleasure do not go away. As Alice Miller said, “They live somewhere in our cells.”
And they can fester and contaminate unless an outlet is found for their expression. I do not mean a linear, energic release phenomenon, as in catharsis, but some form that can be molded from them, an aesthetic form which serves as a container and thereby helps dissolve the need for dissociation and numbness.
Why unexpressed or unformulated affects do not go away even after many years, we just don’t know. We don’t even really know what feelings are. The neuroscientists can locate areas in the brain that are activated when certain emotions are experienced, but what emotions actually are, i.e. how physiological or biochemical correlates can result in the experience of an emotion, requires a leap that has not yet been made.
To sum up: authentic artistic expression can facilitate not only the process of mourning, but the emergence of emotions that may have been defended against. Further, heartfelt self-expression has the power to access emotions in others. In my life, personal insights and moments of being profoundly moved have come from pianists, singers, orchestral works, movies, theatre, paintings, poetry and novels.
I have noted that the role of emotional honesty in artistic creations (both for the artist and his audience) is similar to the therapeutic action of psychoanalytic work. Anthony Storr observes: “When a person is encouraged to get in touch with his deepest feelings, some kind of rearrangement or sorting out process occurs that brings with it a sense of peace."
A friend suggested I illustrate what I've described by playing some of the songs from my CD. Since the CD is 45 minutes long, I will present only four songs - about 7 minutes - the first two expressing the feelings of loss and loneliness and the second two expressing a positive focus on what I had vs. what I lost. The rest of the CD traces a process of coming through pain to an experience of wholeness or stable sense of self.
Towards the end of the CD people have been able to discern hopefulness and a conviction about going on in life--a feeling I thought would never fully return. Yet none of these thoughts about the process of mourning were articulated or even formulated. I just felt myself going along a path toward a better state of mind that was in part accomplished--and certainly expressed--through the music.
To listen to the songs go to http://www.drstefaniesolowglennon.com where you will see a “music list. Click on each of the songs individually, preferably in the order in which they appear. I hope the songs will clarify what I've discussed in this paper.
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