I’ve always felt close to writers. Sometimes, when psychologists become the specialists of data and criteria, I feel closer to writers than to my own colleagues.
Writers imagine what it is to inhabit worlds that don’t exist.
They have perfected the ability to relate to what is not there — my bio on substack is: “I’m here for the hole, not the donut”. I love to look for what’s missing, and find pleasure in exploring shapes through the sign they leave on the sand once they’re not there anymore.
To be totally honest, it’s also because if I see a donut, there won’t be any more donuts.
In the episode ‘Stefano’ of Heavyweight, the podcast host is on a video call with his colleague, and asks her what’s that ladder behind her. It’s a ladder, she says. It leads to nowhere, it’s just decoration. They are also going nowhere with their search of Stefano, climbing a ladder leading nowhere. They see the irony in it. They see what hides behind, above and beyond the ladder: their own frustration, the pointlessness, the search for answers.
As psychologists we sometimes need definitions, but rushing to use confines deprives us of the tremendous power that artists have: imagining.
Induction, prediction, probability, that has all been vital in the things we know today about minds and people, amongst other things. However, sometimes it feels like we didn’t know when to stop taking these at face value. We rely on facts and truths, and we’re left as a result with shapeless sand. Looking too close, sand is made of infinite grains. Taking some distance, we can spot the shapes.
In my workshop ‘Get Unstuck’, that just ended this January, I asked participants to think of their dilemmas and then express the options in a pose. Often there was a safer-but-more-boring option that was seated, and an open-but-off-balance one that meant exploration, with its advantages and its risks.
What I found the most intriguing (and the real core of this workshop) was the role of smaller parts of the body. While the structure is so visibly challenged by gravity, what is that hand doing? What does that finger mean?
It didn’t only interest me because details are beautiful — if the devil is in the details, angels must be there with him too — but because it was the voice of those holes.
The obvious (a tree pose) is not to ignore, it’s not irrelevant. It tells something, often conscious, about where we stand (one or two-legged), and how we own our feelings.
The less obvious (the hand on a knee) deserves another kind of attention, a more cautious one, a more curious, a less structured. It won’t benefit from insidious investigation, but it needs to see patience.
When we step away from staring at the grain of sand, we are confronted with the reality that shapes mutate meaning as soon as the light changes, or if a wave approaches. They also change based on what we are prepared or willing to see, and if we look too closely the’ll shy away. Back to information. Back to data.
As you are standing on your leg, while one is bent and lifted, what’s your hand doing on your knee? Did the knee rise to raise a question? What kind of question is it? Did the hand answer to that question?
The person whose knee was up told me at first: the hand is reassuring those doubts. At the end, when we were cleaning up the space, they came to me and said: I am thinking, I am not sure it was reassurance. I think my hand is telling the knee to shut up. Shh, I don’t want to think about your doubts.
Imagine what a disservice I’d do to those evoked images if I said: what’s the data to back this up?
Our body speaks the language of our unconscious more than we’d think or like. A quick blush crosses our cheeks as something embarrasses us whether we want to make that public or not. The knee lifts and looks like a question mark whether it even knows what a question mark is. We follow invisible guidelines without us knowing.
That’s why it can be so insightful to notice what we see in an ink spot, or even picking random cards and leave the elaboration for later. It shows us something we don’t see. It shows us how much it’s actually there, although we can’t see it.
Empatherapy 