Bruno Walter

March 19, 2017

How Vulnerable Can We Be? Emotional Openness in Therapists and Performers

We get to see public people expressing private emotions on TV. Allowing themselves to be vulnerable. Not only on dating shows. Politicians do it on occasion, including George W. Bush, whose voice cracked and eyes moistened more often than any U.S. President I can remember.

Still, most of us try to stay in control. We hesitate to let down our guard for fear someone will reach into our chest and rip out our already wounded heart. In my experience, however, some of the most touching public situations occur when a self-possessed person displays the courage to live so much in the unselfconscious moment that the voice breaks or tears flow a bit. Before I tell you about my own challenge with this, I will relate two other public examples, as well as describing a therapist’s hesitancy to feel too much in session.

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Fred Spector, a retired Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinist, told this story in 2001 about an event then three decades old:

We were doing the Verdi Requiem and we knew that the mother of Carlo Maria Giulini, the conductor, died (unexpectedly, while he was in Chicago). He walked on stage (to rehearse with us), starts to conduct the Requiem and stops. He was crying and he said ‘They want me to come home (to Italy). What good is that? My mother is dead. It is more important that I have this experience with you and the Verdi Requiem and think about my mother.’ And now he’s got us all crying, the whole orchestra in tears. ‘That’s more important because then I can experience and think about my mother in this marvelous Requiem. … and those were the greatest performances I’ve ever played of the Verdi Requiem, bar none. … We wanted to get that feeling he wanted for his mother.

Giulini was a private, ever-dignified, old world man (born in 1914) for whom this exposure was uncustomary if not unseemly. Indeed, the orchestra and chorus had been instructed by an administrator not to say anything to him about his loss. Such a direction could only have come from Giulini or his wife.

Of course, it’s one thing to be unguarded in an empty hall and another to “lose it” during performance. Indeed, among the greatest sins of public musical or theatrical presentation is to be so moved by the words you can’t do your job: enable the audience to experience emotion while you remain in control. I am aware of one instance alone when the rule was violated, but the artist succeeded anyway.

A 1947 Edinburgh Festival rendition of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) was the occasion. This hour-long song-symphony portrays the transient beauties of existence and concludes in a 30-minute Abschied (Farewell) to a friend and to life, based on ancient Chinese poetry.

The work’s last moments are a whisper of exquisite, heart-rending beauty as the singer reflects on the passing away of human life, while the world itself blooms anew every spring, “forever.” The last word — “forever” or “eternally” (“ewig” in German) — recurs several times, ever more muted against the fading, shimmering, ethereal consolation of the orchestra.

According to Neville Cardus, a critic for the Manchester Guardian, Kathleen Ferrier, the contralto soloist, was “unable to enunciate the closing words.” Moved by the music, she broke down.

Ferrier, a 35-year-old woman soon to become an international celebrity, was then new to this composition and in awe of Bruno Walter, the 70-year-old conductor who had been the composer’s disciple and given the work its world première in 1911. Cardus tells the story of his arrival backstage after the curtain calls:

I took courage and forced my way into the artists’ room, where I introduced myself to this beauteous (unselfconsciously beauteous) creature. As though she had known me all her life she said: ‘I have made a fool of myself, breaking down like that.’

When Walter came into the room she went to him, apologizing. He took her hands, saying: ‘My child, if we had all been artists like you, we should every one of us have broken down.’

For Cardus, it was one of the greatest, most life-changing performances he heard in a long career as a music critic.

Where does a therapist fit in our discussion? He is not a public performer, but must empathize with his patient. Unmoved by the human suffering he witnesses, he is of no value. But what if he is moved to the extreme? Were he to experience the same level of emotion as his client, he himself would become the patient. The room would be occupied by two people equally anguished, both needing support and relief with no one available to give it.

Someone must possess a therapeutic (but not unfeeling) distance from the suffering. The therapist must.

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My own challenge with public vulnerability came in toasting my first child’s marriage. Tears interfere with an adoring parent’s speech at many such events. A guest’s attention is then drawn to the speaker’s unraveling, however sympathetic or touching, not his words about the newly married couple. I wanted the assembly to know what I had to say about my daughter and son-in-law, the better to appreciate them. The language, properly spoken, would externalize the internal, convey emotion, and move the audience.

The problem was, in practicing I could not get through the speech. Time after time I tried, time after time I failed, overwhelmed. Were I to tell you the number of rehearsals I attempted, starting months in advance, I suspect you would not believe me.

The day came — the moment came — and I still had not a single run-through without the internal tidal wave overwhelming my words. Once on stage, however, — finally, finally — the elusive control arrived and the toast went well. I was not as emotionally “present” as I could have been, but the cost of unconsciously distancing myself from my sentiments was the price for moving the audience by words and delivery, not becoming overwrought and a bit incoherent.

Why am I reminded of all this? I just completed a course at the University of Chicago’s Graham School in which our instructor, near the class’s end, discovered her voice cracking with emotion. Sometimes this happens in intimate conversation, frequently in counseling, but not so often at the U of C, and not from this confident and expert guide to literature. She said (to someone else) after the session, she “didn’t know where that came from.”

But, you know what? It capped a great class discussion of a moving novel with a flourish. Sometimes one needs to go with the flow, even if the flow is both figurative and literal.

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The painting at the top of the page is called Tightrope Walker by Jean-Louis Forain(1885). The next image is Australian Artistic Gymnast, Lauren Mitchell at the 41st World Artistic Gymnastics Championship in London, UK, October 14, 2009. The photo was taken by Steven Rasmussen, Explorerdk. The following picture is Gymnast Feet on Beam, January 19, 2008, by Raphael Goetter. All are sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Finally comes Tightrope Walker by August Macke (1914), sourced from WikiArt.org/

September 13, 2015

If Therapists Have Problems, How Can They Help?

Ulysses00005

I’ve never met anyone without problems, in or out of therapy. Some are more serene, optimistic, or luckier, but no one escapes the downside of life: frustration, heartbreak, and aging. What then, despite those troubles, enables such a person — aka your therapist — to help?

Part of his capacity to relate to you is the very fact that he can’t escape either. The counselor and you are members of the same species, no matter how different in significant details. Basic experiences are common to each of you: learning, making a living, finding love, communicating in words, inhabiting a fragile body, losing people, and facing your own demise.

He is also damaged, if not necessarily as severely as you; and ideally, not suffering acutely in the moment he treats you. Yes, there is a point beyond which the one treating needs treatment before he can assist others. Perhaps his own demons are triggered by what you say or do, even how you look. Maybe he will be unreliable or poorly trained, using outmoded theories or failing to keep up with “what works.” A counselor can also be overwhelmed by his own life circumstances and lack the energy to help while he is trying to stay afloat himself.

These concerns excepted, you will still be dealing with a flawed person. Best if he is not also either too young or too old. A youthful counselor is inexperienced by definition. He brings enthusiasm, boundless effort, and (we hope) knowledge of the latest research, but hasn’t spent enough time in the trenches. Still, he must learn his craft somewhere.

Caution also applies to seasoned doctors who just go through the motions or have run out of gas. Too often they are tied to routine ways of thinking and are no longer “alive” to what it means to be in the springtime of life. They, too, should be avoided, perhaps even more than earnest young people who will, at least, invest themselves in you.

Part of my hesitation in recommending young therapists, however, has nothing to do with their limited patient contact. Rather, most have not been hurt enough. To be adequate to treat, life must have its way with us for a time. We need to find out who we are and what life is. Ideally, counselors also need a body beginning to show signs it won’t last forever — to be informed of their own mortality. A future therapist should be humbled by life and find a way to come back for more. His rebound approximates the journey you hope to make yourself, the one on which he will accompany you.

Consider the kinds of preliminary encounters the legendary conductor Bruno Walter thought necessary for making music. Imagine how his opinion applies to a therapist’s need for life experience. The language is fulsome, characteristic of the time he was born (1876), but the message transcends it:

“He who has not experienced the stormy sea with a feeling heart will fail to find the elemental force of expression essential for the Overture of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman … Beethoven’s Scene by the Brook (from the Pastoral Symphony) will sound empty unless the conductor’s own delight in a purling brook and a smiling landscape is joined to the musical soulfulness of (his) interpretation … (And) he who is a stranger to ecstasy cannot convincingly conduct Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.”

Simply put, should you visit a shrink who lacks the education acquired by passing through times both rough and wonderful? Read Homer’s Odyssey and ask yourself how the hero, Odysseus, might have been changed by a 10-year war at Troy, returning home by sea, fighting the Cyclops, and the additional 10-years required to find his way back? Few therapists experience anything close to this, but do learn a few things down a less remarkable path.ulises

A shrink should be like The Velveteen Rabbit, who only became “real” by being worn from use and transformed by love.

Therapists and non-therapists alike are survivors. Indeed, we are all the offspring of shipwrecked fellow men who endured. A shrink without personal acquaintance with travail and romance would be like a Martian trying to understand mankind. Yes, your doc has his own “stuff.” Would you prefer a virgin psychologist, untouched by life as well as sex?

Yet, he must also be different than his patients. A professional combines his training and experience to form an understanding of the “full catastrophe*” of existence. His daily practice allows refinement of the technique required to aid others. Thus, a seasoned counselor’s personal hardships and learning meld with the experience of helping patients (from whom he also learns, especially by making the mistakes novices usually do).

The practitioner ought to know more than you do about the healing art. Moreover, he is useful because he is NOT tied to you at the deepest level. A therapeutic perspective is essential: the dilemmas of your life are yours, not his, nor those of his loved ones. He can keep his head because of this, even though he does come to care about you as a particular person with increasing contact. Therapeutic distance permits him to remain calm and thoughtful in the presence of your pain.

Perhaps, too, the shrink has been luckier than you, without which he could not lend you his hope. He knows good things can happen and the darkness is followed by the dawn, at least much of the time. You are better off for his self-assurance and clarity of mind. They enable him to see the dimly lit road out of the woods. You would not wish him to be looking for the breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel.

None of this is to suggest the counselor is some sort of god. Rather, he is the master of a limited situation — the small chamber in which he does his work. He is also an illusionist, of sorts. If you observed him unshaven, in his underwear, without the mirrors and smoke, arguing with his mate, worried about his kids, upset because the newspaper delivery service keeps leaving him the Tribune instead of the New York Times, then you might think less of him.

The illusion is a necessary one. You overgeneralize and come to believe that he is a wizard everywhere and all the time. He doesn’t stop you, as if he could. You need to believe.

So, dear reader, we therapists are quite mortal. We’ve got our own issues and the bruises sustained on our part-way-completed expedition through life. If we are any good, then we are observant and sensitive. We’ve seen the world’s unfairness. Judgment is set aside for the most part. We are each, as Seinfeld’s George Costanza used to say, “master of our domain,” although in a rather different context than George intended.

Some of our imperfections enable us to help. When we have too many? That’s another story.

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*The facetious phrase, “full catastrophe,” comes from the 1964 movie Zorba the Greek. It has become associated with the book Full Catastrophe Living by John Kabat-Zinn.

The first image comes from the 1954 movie Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus). The ship is a model, not a full-sized boat. An illusion, yes? The movie poster is from the same film. The title role was played by Kirk Douglas. Anthony Quinn portrayed “Zorba” in the 1964 movie and took a supporting role in Ulysses.

September 14, 2014

Feeling Too Much or Too Little: The Emotional Tightrope in Life and Performance

Korean_mask-Hahoe_mask-02

The charming 16-year-old could not watch the news. She was depressed, but not the victim of misfortune. Her parents had not mistreated her, life had not singled her out for unfairness. Rather, she was exquisitely sensitive to the pain of the human condition, to its terror — to the thousand little and big hurts, even those suffered by strangers. The news, with its roll-call of daily disaster, was unbearable.

All of this seemed in her nature, not her nurture.

For those of us not so fragile, there is a choice: how much of life do we let in (with its possibility of pleasure and risk of pain) and how much do we screen out to protect ourselves. Therapy patients, performers, and fictional characters display a range of answers. They are the subject of this essay.

The teen I mentioned was moved by art more than most, particularly those works that captured passing beauty and inevitable loss. The music of Mahler and late Schubert were on her list, along with the authors Virginia Woolf, Audrey Niffenegger, John Irving, and Julian Barnes.

Should this sound too sad, then I will tell you something else: the young woman was truly alive, not so numbed and deadened as the adamant stones that some of our fellow humans become. She perceived drama in commonplace events, while for most of the rest of us, those happenings pass unremarkably.

If we are lucky, our lives might be described as “balanced.” Our psychic doors are open enough to experience at least a partial glimpse of the dazzle and wonder of life, even if pain still finds entry points we hope to have limited to a degree. Indeed, in the music of Mahler and Schubert, my patient found both pleasure and pain.

Are most of us too defended against life and its inevitable disappointment and injury? By comparison to this troubled girl, do we risk a muted and gray existence? Does self-protection come at the cost of becoming unsympathetic to the misfortune around us and insensitive to the overwhelming sensuality of life, as well?

Princeton University psychologist Susan Fiske and her colleagues have evaluated something akin to these questions. Research participants reacted to a variety of photos. She and Lasana Harris predicted their experimental subjects would respond by dehumanizing extreme outgroups like the homeless. Pictures of those individuals produced a type of brain activation typical of disgust — the same kind of cerebral response characteristic of viewing objects, not people. Perhaps, unlike the sixteen-year-old mentioned before, some of us protect our emotions by responding to fellow humans as things. The evidence of history indicates disgust with such “Untermenschen” can lead to casual mistreatment and much worse.

A performance given by the storied English singer Kathleen Ferrier (seen in the newsreel above) and the conductor Bruno Walter illustrates part of our human dilemma: the tension between feeling too much or too little.

A 1947 Edinburgh Festival rendition of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) was the occasion. This hour-long song-symphony portrays the transient beauties of life and concludes in a 30 minute Abschied (Farewell), to a friend and to life itself, based on ancient Chinese poetry.

The work’s last moments are a whisper of exquisite, heart-rending beauty as the singer reflects on the fact that while human life passes away, the world itself will bloom anew in spring forever. The last word — “forever” or “eternally” (“ewig” in German) — recurs several times, more and more muted against the fading consolation of the orchestra.

According to Neville Cardus, a critic for the Manchester Guardian, Ferrier was “unable to enunciate (at least some of) the closing words.” Moved by the music, she broke down.

Ferrier would soon became a celebrated singer in a life shortened by cancer, but she was then new to this music and in awe of Bruno Walter, the 70-year-old conductor who had been the composer’s disciple and given the work its world première in 1911. Cardus tells the story of his arrival backstage after the curtain calls:

I took courage and forced my way into the artists’ room, where I introduced myself to this beauteous (unself-consciously beauteous) creature. As though she had known me all her life she said: ‘I have made a fool of myself, breaking down like that.’

When Walter came into the room she went to him, apologizing. He took her hands, saying: ‘My child, if we had all been artists like you, we should every one of us have broken down.’

For Cardus, it was one of the greatest, most life-changing performances he heard in a long career as a music critic.

Ferrier achieved this without every last word — the rare occasion when an artist triumphs over an important rule: to have emotional expression and emotional control, thus enabling the audience to experience the feelings without restraint.

It is ironic that to recreate emotions one must, to some degree, constrain them; never forgetting she is a singing actress playing a part and not her offstage self or a member of the audience. Ferrier’s failure to observe the rule caused her embarrassment, no matter the generosity of Bruno Walter’s consoling words.

Those of us who are not artists confront our own version of the same dilemma Ferrier faced: emotional control threatening to mute life’s music and dull its pleasures versus emotions undermining the ability to live, and leaving one unprotected from “The Heart-ache and the thousand Natural shocks that Flesh is heir to,” as Hamlet said.

In the theater, the dilemma is depicted in Peter Schaffer’s play Equus, where the audience exits the performance wondering whether the destructive, super-heated intensity of a teenager’s uncontrolled feelings are, perhaps, less a problem than the bound-up, dryly analytic, over-controlled existence of the psychiatrist who treats him.

The Original Poster for the German Film,

The Original Poster for the German Film, “The Lives of Others”

The 2006 Academy Award winning film, The Lives of Others, offers still another example. Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi (East German Secret Police) officer, begins the movie as a friendless man, deadened to everything except his duty. His superior gives him the task of monitoring a playwright. Closely observing the rich intellectual, social, and romantic life of this artist both enlightens the officer and opens up his emotions.

While Wiesler acquires this vulnerability at great cost, he also becomes capable of enlivened human contact and empathy.

What, then, are we left with in this consideration of human emotion?

Dyscontrol, routine. Intensity, flatness. Sentiment versus stoicism.

Over sensitive, insensitive. Excitability versus indifference. Empathy versus disgust.

Dazzled, dulled. Passionate, sterile. Open, closed. Vulnerable, safe.

Or walking the knife’s edge in between.

Your choice.

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The first image includes Korean Hahoe Masks. The author is Julie and the photo was sourced from Wikimedia Commons.