A psychotherapist paints

In my seventies but still active as a psychologist / psychotherapist / group analyst, I had for years struggled to find the time to fully explore my other lifelong interest: painting. More than that, the two interests had at times clashed, competing for primacy. Was I, at heart, an artist rather than a psychologist? Was my career choice a compromise, an act of social conformity rather than a true calling? I felt privileged to have had a long and fulfilling career in the NHS, and in 2015 was awarded the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists award for services to mental health. And I had gained some recognition as an artist, including exhibitions in London. But the artistic voice inside clamoured… it wanted more.

Faced with the prospect of lockdown at the start of the pandemic in 2020 – contemplating isolation and restriction, the spectre of illness and mortality a constant presence – gradually I realised the unexpected gift of time. I had an extraordinary opportunity not only to bring these two interests together, to paint more than I had ever done in my life, but most of all to discover a new synergy, a new way in which art and psychotherapy could converge.

This culminated in my writing my new book, A Psychotherapist Paints: Insights From the Border of Art and Psychotherapy, which documents this journey, providing an autobiographical narrative and 50 reproductions of my paintings.

Revisiting my past

This was also a journey of personal discovery, revisiting my past and the shadows of family trauma and their consequences.

The story goes back to my childhood in South Africa in the early days of apartheid. Not only was the country shot through with racial tension, but my parents were Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, my father losing family in the holocaust, my mother escaping the frozen wastes of Siberia where her family lived as political exiles. Put a rather fragile, traumatised couple, with very little social support, into the cauldron of apartheid South Africa and what do you get? A highly anxious, conformist family, struggling to survive in a very different culture, with an increasingly repressive and punitive government.

This atmosphere may explain the social constraints that affected me as a child growing up in a small, remote, dusty town in the western Cape. Talented artistically early on, I had little if any encouragement: if anything, an injunction to conform, to fit in, to be a boy in the most conventional sense, not to dabble in frivolities, not to reveal anything that might smack of femininity, all of this reinforced by the tenets of both orthodox Judaism and the oppressive Calvinist regime of the South African Dutch Reformed Church.

Faced with the prospect of lockdown at the start of the pandemic in 2020 – contemplating isolation and restriction, the spectre of illness and mortality a constant presence – gradually I realised the unexpected gift of time.

Later, I began university studies in psychology, with a growing interest in clinical psychology, but I was keen to hold onto both psychology and art. My art teacher was adamant, however: 'You can't be both. You'll never succeed as an artist if you think you can dip in and dip out. Make up your mind'.

Fast forward to London, 1968. Now a clinical psychologist, I had come to London to study psychoanalytic psychotherapy but, unexpectedly, had won a prize in the annual South African Artists of Fame and Promise competition – a bursary to study art abroad for an intensive year. I arrived here in conflict. Once again, could I do both? Confused, lonely and depressed in my first few months – it was my first trip abroad and away from a close-knit family – I opted for the safer course of getting a job as a clinical psychologist in the NHS.

This was in various ways a wise choice, but it postponed, marginalised my calling as an artist. Yet I kept the artistic fires burning, attended evening courses at art schools, painted regularly and was confident enough to hold several solo exhibitions. But the dilemma remained. I still felt torn. As retirement approached – I retired fully from NHS employment in 2020 – the prospect of increased time to paint did not in itself resolve the conflict. Although time was important, somehow the conflict went deeper. It was as if a need for wholeness, for some form of integration, persisted. Then came the pandemic, lockdown, and the question of how I would spend the many days at home.

The paintings

My painting had until now followed a certain path. I was a painterly painter, relishing the sheer juiciness of oils, focusing on pleasing, colourful subjects, such as landscapes, seascapes, and still life. People often admired my work, found it beautiful, bought it. But it began to feel facile, as if I was a people-pleasing-painter. Where was the psychology?

In my psychotherapeutic work I had become well-known for exploring the darker aspects in my writing, notably on group processes (e.g. 1996's The Anti-group: Destructive forces in the group and their creative potential; and 2015's Beyond the Anti-group: Survival and transformation). Was this what was missing? Was this why I felt a sense of incompleteness, even fragmentation? The pandemic, with its threat to survival, calling into question our lifestyles, our responsibility for environmental rupture, highlighting the destructive trope in wider humanity, created an atmosphere in which I could – and would – confront myself as an artist more fully and more fearlessly.

In the course of the next two years, I completed five series of paintings on specific themes – dolls, the deserted city, fragile nature, dancers, and four women. Each theme had both an autobiographical and social narrative. The paintings were mostly very different from my previous work. I now painted on dark backgrounds, the colours more sombre, the mood more challenging.

For some time, I regarded the five themes as separate, chosen rather arbitrarily. Then I embarked on a series of online presentations of my paintings, to groups of people ranging from six to close to 100. Reflecting a vital part of my work as a group analyst, I was keen to use the potential of groups to open a debate about the paintings, to explore and discover, and to help me find myself in the intensity and variety of images. Increasingly, these groups illuminated the paintings and the dilemmas that had haunted me most of my life, and I realised that a powerful narrative ran through the work.

[BPS members can download the PDF for all paintings]

Dolls

Through an interest in Victoriana, I painted a series of approximately 40 images based on vintage dolls. These paintings (including Figure 1, Vicky) elicited a striking diversity of responses, and as they multiplied I realised that the perceptions of the doll-child configuration reflected what has been described as the discourse of childhood. Three categories emerged – the loved/lovely doll/child: the monstrous or feared doll/child; and the abused/ abandoned doll/child. I could see these now not just as pictures of dolls, whatever their visual properties, but as objects of projection that revealed something of the complexity of childhood through the symbolic relationship to dolls.

Further, the images evoked memories of respondents' own childhoods. A participant used the word 'revivification' to describe the process: the images brought alive memories and associations of the past.

A German professor recalled how, in the post-war years, she buried her dolls in the garden and exhumed them weeks or months later to see what damage they had sustained. This was a little girl's way of dealing with the half-spoken rumours about the war: the mass burials, the exhumations.

The paintings were mostly very different from my previous work. I now painted on dark backgrounds, the colours more sombre, the mood more challenging.

Not all the responses touched on such profound memories, but trauma and loss, and their inter-generational transmission, became a thread. I became aware of my own unconscious reasons for painting the dolls. I too was visiting my ancestral past, particularly the vein of traumatic loss and displacement, echoed later in a series of untoward losses in my adult life. More than that, in very personal terms, I realised that I was seeking an understanding of my parents, my mother in particular, and how, hardly acknowledged, she had survived her own painful childhood, her isolation in South Africa and the loneliness of an unhappy marriage. The dolls were the conduit to these hidden lives and hidden history.

The Deserted City

This series was a direct response to the spread of the pandemic, specifically the early images of devastated cities in Europe: the ravaged towns and cities of northern Italy, in particular. These were cities I knew and loved. I was shocked by the scenes of empty streets, devoid of human life, entire communities swallowed up in their homes, now barricaded from the world. Deserted streets, tightly shut doors and windows, contamination and death everywhere.

The painting 'Town on the city outskirts', with its looming presence in the sky [see above], is emblematic of the series. The bird, rather like the visitation in Camus' The Plague, is another ambiguous image. Is it a bird or an angel? Is it an angel of death or an angel of mercy? Another image, 'Man with a mask', recalls Munch's painting 'The Scream', executed about a century earlier at a similarly frightening time of transition. In Munch's own account, he described his experience as a 'scream through nature'. It was as if the whole world, the environment, was in upheaval, in torment.

This struck a deep chord in me. I came to see the series of paintings as illustrating an environmental force wider than Covid itself. I perceived it symbolically as the universal mother, devastated herself, unable to provide safety and containment. This configuration, of both the personal and the environmental mother, containing and uncontaining, became a thread through all my paintings.

Four Women

This was the fifth and last series of paintings. I set out now to explore directly through painted images my mother Bess' life.

There was a particular focus: her difficulty in realising herself as a woman in the context of her near life-long depression. She had ample potential, loved to study medicine and diet on her own, loved gardens. But she was of a generation of women who had few if any opportunities outside the confines of the family home. Yet, through her appreciation and generosity to me, she instilled a belief in myself, in my creativity. She was, in Christopher Bollas' terms, a transformational object.

In this series of paintings, I attempt to give her something back, something of value, to recognise her as fully as she deserved, perhaps to be her transformational object. I did this in a curious way: by setting her amongst three other women, all of whom had achieved powerful identities in their worlds: Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa, and Jan Morris. The paintings of all four have a developmental thrust: they show the young woman, the middle-aged, and the old, tracing the paths they chose and how they found – or didn't – themselves.

The key painting is 'Bess as Bride'. Bess got married in Johannesburg the late 1920s, a beautiful but troubled bride. Her parents had opposed her marrying my father, for reasons that seemed selfish and unfair. Desperate, she had eloped with him to the rural Cape, then came back to Johannesburg to have a conventional wedding, barely supported by her own family. This early rejection became the template for painful marital tensions and a life lived in shadow and regret. What she did have in common, though, with the other three women in the series, was courage: the courage to be herself, to defy convention, to choose her own path. In spite of her difficulties, she was a good mother, sensitive, loving.

The online groups to whom I presented this series were very moved by the story. They expressed not just sadness for Bess but recognition and admiration in a way that gave her visibility and status: to position her amongst the best.

Reflection

As the artistic momentum I experienced during lockdown began to taper, and the presentations to online groups ended, I realised how much the theme of mother pervaded the implicit content of the paintings. The idea, a sort of dialectic or parallel, of the fragile personal mother and the ravaged environmental mother, as reflected in the spoils of plague, climate crisis and war, had become more prominent in my mind and in the groups' consciousness.

In all, the artist and the psychologist in me had finally come together. The force of understanding I experienced – as did others – convinced me of the synergistic potential of these communicative modes. Word and image could both contain and reveal something deeper than either alone.

The gratification I felt over this was in part related to my age: the discovery that creativity in later life is more than possible and, further, that it can help to illuminate some of the confusing and painful strands of development. Erik Erikson, in his formulation of the 'seven ages of man', describes the dilemma of the last stage of life as one of 'integrity vs despair'. In these terms, integrity is not a moral concept but one that denotes the coherence of a life fully lived. The five series of paintings and the opportunity to share these with others had helped me in the quest for integrity.

About the author

Morris Nitsun was a consultant psychologist, psychotherapist and group analyst. 

We were shocked and saddened to hear that Morris died on 10 November, shortly before we posted this article, after a sudden acute illness. 

If you appreciated his article, donations in Morris's name are welcome to:

Pulmonary Fibrosis Trust
Morris Nitsun Fund
Nat West: Sort Code: 60 04 53;
Account: 13603604

Cheques to this fund at:

Pulmonary Fibrosis Trust
Lichfield
WS14 9DZ