by Ben Diamond, Psy.D., Managing Editor

Do I remember the painting? I want to have remembered it. I know I saw it, but was it in New York or Boston or Palo Alto or Philadelphia? I know it was purple, and rectangular, and huge, and vibrating, and by Rothko. Maybe it was I who was vibrating.

Whatever else I remember, I remember the painting’s electric purpleness and I remember being arrested in awe before it. I had to sit down–it struck a chord in me that hadn’t been struck before, anxious, overwhelmed, fearful. There was no hiding before that massive purple expanse. It demanded stillness, and so I sat, pulsing, humbled by its indescribable beauty.

Writing about this experience in a public-facing way, I tried hard to get the facts right. I looked online for an image of the painting, refusing to trust my memory, thinking that my experience would be legible if only there were names and dates attached to it, facts to point to. Or, that it needed framing on the order of citation, a source to credit–and hide behind. I think now this urge reflects some unease about revealing the place where this experience really lives in my mind, which is not in the world of facts, knowledge, or citation. Why the resistance? I seem to want to have something more to say than, “This was an experience beyond words,” as if that weren’t enough, and this wanting is another way of hiding from what the painting actually revealed: the frailty of description, the naked vulnerability of the encounter, my powerlessness in the face of a new part of myself. 

I learned something about these discoveries from a near permanently hospitalized woman with Schizophrenia, whose chronic psychosis resisted chemical and psychological intervention until her death this past January. Her extraordinarily creative, relentlessly psychotic reverie betrayed a complex, resilient, stubborn, deeply loving, deeply related human being who taught me far more about when to keep my mouth shut than about what it means to know, do, or say things correctly. I was fortunate to learn from her that she didn’t want or need facts. She didn’t need me to make sense of her, to theorize or interpret her, or think of her as down there, in the depths of her psychosis. She needed me to hold her hand beneath the vast dark ocean until both our lungs burned.

When we do psychotherapy, we often want to say something that hits just right. Sometimes this desire shields us from something, from the actual incomprehensibility and irrationality of the unconscious, from the unknowable otherness in our patients and ourselves. Perhaps we should be more like that painting, full of awe and humility and presence, still and silently vibrating.