Psychoanalysts, authors to discuss trauma

[Doug Millison]

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=05022002-125339-2461r

Psychoanalysts, authors to discuss trauma

By Lou Marano
Published 2/5/2002 1:20 PM

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 (UPI) -- A panel of psychoanalysts will host three major
literary figures to explore the effects of traumatic events on the creative
imagination.

New York University's Psychoanalytic Institute and the Psychoanalytic
Association of New York will launch their new Creative Writers and
Psychoanalysts Series with a panel titled "The Apocalyptic Imagination:
Daydreaming in an Era of Nightmares" on Feb. 23, at the NYU Medical Center.

Dr. Shelley Orgel, one of the analysts who will provide commentary, told
United Press International in a telephone interview that the impetus for
the panel was Sept. 11 -- how people respond to a shared cataclysmic event
-- but that had changed. He said Dr. Sandra S. Leong, who leads the
committee for the new series, "got the idea of asking some analysts and
some writers to have a dialogue, but it turns out it's going to be about
their work."

Of course, the work of the three writers was not written in consequence of
the Sept. 11 attacks but rather reflects a view of the world shaped by
emotionally traumatic events.

Robert Stone, author of "Damascus Gate," and winner of the National Book
Award for "Dog Soldiers"; Denis Johnson ("Jesus' Son," "Seek"); and Jim
Shepard ("Batting against Castro," "Nosferatu") will read from their
fiction and participate in a discussion with Orgel, a clinical professor of
psychiatry at the NYU Medical School; Jane Kite, Ph.D., of Boston; and Dr.
Salman Akhtar of Philadelphia.

Kite has written recently about Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," and Akhtar
has published five volumes of poetry.

Psychoanalysis, developed by Sigmund Freud and others, is a branch of
psychotherapy based on the assumption that mental disorders are the result
of the conscious mind's rejection of factors that persist in the
unconscious as repressed instinctual forces.

Orgel said that thinking has "correctly" changed since the 1940s and 1950s,
when many believed that it was necessary for the artist to suffer to
produce good work. "Or that somebody had suffered some particular childhood
trauma, and their attempt to master that trauma led people who were
creatively endowed into a certain kind of work. And one could trace that in
their work.

"I think that's correctly become much less narrow in its cause-effect
relationship," he told UPI.

However, recurring themes do reflect attempts to master what seemed
terrifying or overwhelming at the time, Orgel said.

For example, the psychiatrist said Robert Stone's characters are often
attempting to overcome past trauma and their own self-destructiveness.
Orgel said Stone's father disappeared when the writer was 6 months old,
that when he was a young boy his mother became psychotic, and that she was
in and out of hospitals for a number of years during which Stone lived at a
Catholic boarding home for boys "and had a terrible existence."

Orgel believes Stone's childhood has exerted a major influence on his fiction.

Stone has been quoted as saying that creative writing is a defiance of
meaninglessness.

Akhtar, a psychoanalyst on the panel, said that emotional trauma could
inhibit, release, or give specific content to the creative imagination.

That content can be universal or idiosyncratic, depending on the extent of
the trauma. "It can do many things," he said.

Jane Kite, also on the panel, said: "Traumatic events don't inhibit the
creative imagination forever, but there's an initial response to trauma
that shuts things down." It's the work of the imagination, she said, to
find mastery over those things and "opening them up again" in the service
of creativity.

Kite said the panelists would comment on writers whose work embodies this
theme. "People whose minds sort of work that way."

But the psychological mechanism is not confined to artists, Kite said.

"Artists have certain kinds of imaginations often that can rework trauma
and express it in a way that feels more controlled." Kite said clinical
practitioners see all kinds of traumatized people who have who have used
their minds and their memories to make sense of the trauma and convert it
into something not so traumatic in memory.

"It's the same process. ... The point is it's important to go back through
trauma in one way or another and find ways to metabolize it."

The psychoanalyst said that writing about trauma doesn't eliminate it "in
any ultimate sense, because whatever we've been through and what we have in
our minds stays with us." However, she said that sometimes the act of
writing about trauma "can transform the internal experience of it into
something that one can live with. But often it can't," she said, naming
Jerzy Kozinski and Primo Levy among "a number of quite eminent writers" who
have killed themselves.

In creating fiction, Kite said, the writer strives to externalize feelings
and thoughts -- sometimes in a kind of relentless way -- that can then be
seen differently. Then "the residue inside is often changed."

But Kite said it's "a kind of a myth" that writers are more troubled than
other people. "They have different kinds of imaginations, and they use them
to write with rather than being unhappy in some other way.

Using Tolstoy as an example, she said the great novelists have "a balance"
-- an ability to see things from all sides.


Copyright © 2002 United Press International