Katherine Brunkow, MSW
(American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work, formerly NMCOP)
Playing, Creating, Learning
An amusing drawing of Sigmund Freud in tennis whites highlighted the Weekend section of the Wall Street Journal, August 11, 2006. Illustrator Ciardiello showed Freud with eyes on a bright yellow tennis ball, analytic notebook in his back pocket, and a tennis racquet brought back for a nice solid backhand. The article, “Working Out Your Anxiety,” by Hannah Karp, described how Los Angeles tennis instructor Zach Kleiman uses the game of tennis to help his clients work on psychological issues. Discussion of his work included dynamics such as the persistence of conflicts around pleasing and competing with father, analyzing shots for hidden aggression and working through body issues and a mother’s death.
Also in August 2006, a BBC radio program focused on problems in Creative Writing. One of the writing professors described the effectiveness of the technique of Free Writing for his students suffering from Writer’s Block. He explained that this was based on what Freud had discovered about the usefulness of free association—that a seemingly foolish thought or sentence could lead through the mental process of association to something meaningful or even profound.
These two examples suggest familiar human struggles with inhibition that can interfere with the comfortable use of our energy, our bodies and our creativity. Awareness of intrapsychic conflict in both examples shows how our lives and culture have been influenced by Freud’s ideas and, especially, his understanding of the power of the Unconscious.
In my clinical practice as a psychoanalyst, I see daily evidence of people working through such conflicts that disrupt their lives and relationships. An example from outside the clinical domain comes from my work as a consultant to the Peace Corps. The organization’s Office of Medical Services was faced with an important educational challenge. Peace Corps Volunteers, new to countries with a high incidence of AIDS, did not seem to be taking seriously what they were taught in Training about their risk for HIV infection. There were sad stories of Volunteers finding out they were HIV positive, because they simply had not believed that the risks of sexual activity with promiscuous partners or partners afraid of testing could apply to them. What we concluded was that the current approach of providing basic health information and statistics was not challenging the Volunteers’ defenses of denial, counterphobic risk-taking, and youthful grandiosity.
In order to break through these defenses, the Peace Corps Medical Service decided to ask returned Volunteers who had become HIV positive if any of them would be willing to tell their stories in a way that could be used in Training. I was the off-camera interviewer for the project, a training video called “Come Back Healthy.” Five bright, capable, young Americans spoke, in front of the camera, about their idealism, vulnerability and illusions. They explored how loneliness, stress, alcohol use, and longing for human contact compromised their judgment.
That video changed the impact of health training. Peace Corps doctors and nurses told us their trainees sat riveted by the stories. At first, they did not believe these engaging, competent people could make such errors in trust and judgment. Gradually they realized that the Volunteers on the screen were people like all of us, making mistakes and becoming careless at times of vulnerability—in our psychoanalytic language: when their ego functions were compromised.
Without Freud’s model of the ego and its functions and his influence on his daughter Anna’s elaboration of the mechanisms of defense, I doubt that our team would have understood the problem in the same way. The Trainees’ defenses had to be challenged. In a more practical sense for me, the task of interviewing was facilitated by analytic training. It had helped me learn to wait and let a story unfold and to respect the emotional power of the specificity of an individual’s experience. It was this emotional power that broke through the Trainees’ defenses, enabled their identification with the people on the screen, and allowed them to think differently about their own vulnerability.
These examples from sports, the arts, and health education show a few of the many ways Sigmund Freud’s ideas continue to inform us in our play, our creativity and our learning. I think he would have enjoyed that illustrated fantasy of Sigmund Freud playing tennis. In the game of Western Civilization, where systems of thought are regularly defeated, Feud’s ideas have kept the ball in play for over a century.