By Fern W. Cohen, Ph.D.
Some time ago, in the midst of revising an article under consideration by a psychoanalytic journal, I had reluctantly agreed to relinquish a musical metaphor in the concluding paragraph that compared the role of the analyst in the psychoanalytic process to that of a figured bass. It was, the editors had written, a striking analogy, but they believed that it introduced a "discordant" note in an otherwise "mellifluous" paper. In their suggestions for "fine-tuning," they felt that the rather obscure technical term would require explanation in an already longish paper and they encouraged me to end on a different "note." If the bad news was that they stood firm on their editorial ground, the good news was that they had accepted my article for a forthcoming issue of the journal. Furthermore. Since I had been "beating the drum" for my conclusion, perhaps I could come up with another paper and expand on it there?
Elated as I was by the acceptance of my first article ever in a professional journal, I hesitated to yield: the passage had materialized in a burst of energy as I was completing the paper, not unlike an interpretation that floats up after much analytic work. The article had centered on the complex effects on me and a patient of my presenting her case in an ongoing seminar during training, and I believed the metaphor captured much of what I wanted to convey about the unique interplay that might unfold within any analytic pair. Besides, its inclusion, I believed, was not a question of theory but a matter of taste. Having grown up with a father who had settled such disputes with a philosophical shrug as he humorously intoned, de gustibus non disputandum est, as author, I was tempted to make a case for leaving the metaphor in.
Over the course of the unexpectedly felicitous process that had occurred following my submission, I had found the editors' suggestions helpful: the article had become more focused, if, surprisingly, longer than the original. At some point when I wrote that I feared I was incapable of sufficiently containing myself, they had even suggested cuts, thanking me for my generosity in accepting them. The journal's editors had become my editors, or so it seemed to me. However, as a junior analyst and first-time author on the cusp of a professional publication, I did not feel justified in testing whatever prerogative, if any, I might have.
As for the proposal that I come up with another paper to expand on the musical metaphor. However flattering (and it was), it felt too much like an assignment from another lifetime and I was quite certain I could not write an article at someone else's prompting, even to explicate my own. Beyond that, I could not get past the suspicion that it was an offhand idea proffered in the spirit of the duetting that had evolved between us.
This, I realized with some dismay, I was loath to end. For its own sake and also because—already overtaken by the sense of depletion I often felt after completing a piece of writing—I was haunted by the conviction that I would never again find anything of substance to write about, that this first time might be my last. Not that I ever really chose a topic; of late, it seemed that topics were choosing me. Or rather, had started to choose me when I decided to keep a journal some five years earlier, intending to record my dreams.
At the time, I had just resumed psychotherapy, hoping to address a recognizable pattern of mistakes in my work. I had also just learned that my father was terminally ill. The vast sense of distance that had long permeated my relationship to him—a legendary and revered figure in the legal world consumed by his love of his work—was resurfacing. At the same time, although a creeping workaholism also seemed to be invading my own life, I anticipated that twice-a-week therapy would be sufficient to address matters of work and my father's approaching death.
Wrong and wrong again!
Coasting on the memories of a classic psychoanalysis from another era and little recognizing how much unfinished business there was, I was totally unprepared for the wrinkle in time into which the therapy, soon become a four-, then five-times-a-week analysis, would plunge me. Despite all I had learned in the intervening years, I was caught off-guard by a near-overwhelming transference. As distance and separation from my analyst bordered on intolerable, even from session to session, my journal became a diary of containment and a transitional object. And as I struggled with the intensities that erupted in the treatment, mostly about the pervasive presence of my father in my psychic universe, alive or dead, writing became an imperative. Even more recently, I had started to believe that there might be an audience for it beyond my own need to tell all in the best possible way.
In stunning contrast to an earlier period in my life when I felt I couldn't possibly know enough about anything to fill a page and would obsess for days before I could commit a sentence to paper, I now found myself flooded with words and thoughts urgently demanding to be captured lest they disappear. Pressure was a constant and in fact, when my best work emerged: lines, initially scribbled on napkins or whatever else was handy, almost never required revision. I had even learned to keep pad and pen court side when playing tennis with my husband, to claim those promising fragments that, unrecorded, would throw me off my game. With considerable amusement, I had identified this as my Clara Schumann phenomenon, a reference to an ancient film in which Schumann, in concert, rushes at ever-increasing tempo through her husband's new piano concerto to get to her nursing infant who is howling with hunger behind the scenes. Regrettably for me, but much to my husband's delight when we are playing tennis, even with a lead, unlike Schumann, I am not always able to take control to a triumphant end.
I write by hand on smooth lined paper with a favorite ballpoint pen. Usually, I cannot proceed until a sentence or section reads just so, juxtaposing rhythm and tone according to some standard I am hard put to explain. I have been known to use a package of looseleaf paper in a sitting, writing and rewriting, crumpling page after page—proof for me of the vitality of ghosts—my father painstakingly handwrote his legal opinions, revising them over weeks, over and again. Exhausted afterwards, he would often quote Thomas Alva Edison about genius being only one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Of course, he was identifying with the latter although as I got older, I thought I could detect some element of pride at the many hours he had spent before putting an opinion "to bed." Be that as it may. For me, obsessive struggling is pure impediment. I usually cannot get past it until I have reached midpoint which is when I have a recognizable piece with a beginning and a middle, indexed with "post-it" notes in an informal filing system that staves off a possible panic that I might have lost something essential. Not long afterwards, a conclusion will emerge, as did the metaphor of the figured bass.
Midpoint is also the juncture at which I learned to put into type what I had so compulsively penned. Seeing my writing in print affords me enough distance to feel some objectivity about my creation, which, if not perfect, is definitely loveable to me. To say that the feeling is resonant of pregnancy is stating the obvious, although it was quite some time before the similarity occurred to me. It bears mentioning, however, for it marks the onset of a phase of writing that brings with it the sweet satisfaction and impatient contemplation that allows me to tolerate the working through until my creation comes to term. This is especially valuable in those moments of doubt to which I am prone.
With the printed page, there also comes a profound sense of solidity about what I have written. It is real. I can read and reread it and frequently do, all the while making minor changes and adjustments, battling a teasing counterpoint that what I am writing might only be nonsense, full of meaning only to me. Then I must also throw myself into the arduous task of clarifying what I have articulated initially only for myself; now I want others to be pulled along by the irresistible flow that has seduced me. Worse. At this point, the desire to be published sets in.
For all my efforts, feedback in the form of publication had come but once before. That was a vignette I had delivered at one of many memorial services for my father, along with my sister, Justice Thurgood Marshall and other legal luminaries. Recorded on video, the talks were later compiled in a volume dedicated to my father. Since mine however, was such a very small part of a larger prestigious whole, its publication was considerably diluted for me by the nagging, if familiar sensation, that I might only be a tag-along on the coat-tails of famous men. On a good day, while I could be amused by my princess-and-pea sensitivities, more seriously, I recognized the struggle between my emerging sense of self as a writer and my tendency, somewhat diminished by my analysis, to defer to authority, especially men.
Disagreeing with men was not something I did readily, if at all, and I was just coming out from under issues of awe in relation to men of stature in their field. This was an extension of my childhood certainty that, no matter how much I might learn, I would never know enough or measure up—in the version of the day, to senior analysts who seemed to write as effectively and sensitively as they worked.
As a candidate I had undertaken my current analysis and training locked into a conception of the analyst as the authoritarian one who knew and the analysand as the one who did not. While much of this had to do with transference and my father, it also reflected my experience as an analysand in the fifties and sixties, when the ideal of the analyst as a neutral, opaque mirror had been carried to such distorted proportions that it nearly obliterated the existence of a reciprocal pair. That first analysis, though extremely helpful, was in retrospect, woefully lacking in the mutuality and the development of analytic trust that I had now come to believe were as central to the process as transference and resistance. Moreover, I was discovering a global warming on countertransference which was supplanting the extreme orthodoxy that had taken hold after Freud's initial formulations—which was that countertransference was solely unresolved neurotic conflict on the part of the analyst.
Such expanding perspectives were extremely promising to me. I had come to training convinced that only if I could learn and "master" the rules could I be a good-enough analyst, and by extension, that I would have to shape myself to others' standards to measure up. Along with my analysis, contemporary literature and discussion with colleagues were reinforcing the awesome prospect that I might be able to be my own person and yet be clinically correct in the psychoanalytic situation. I was beginning to recognize that one might use aspects of oneself in a way uniquely tailored to the dynamics of each analytic pair. That realization also signaled to me that I might find a place for myself in theory and practice without feeling slavish or rebellious.
It was all this that coalesced when the metaphor of the analyst as figured bass took shape: the analyst as a constant accompaniment with variations of her own key and tempo, responding to the unique melodic line of the analysand, around which the analysis might play itself out. Whether figured bass or analysis, inherent in the paradigm is the centrality of structure, with elements of freedom and flexibility within. As Freud might say, it is not "wild analysis," or, in the words of Bradford Marsalis, jazz saxophonist: "You don't play what you feel, there's only freedom in structure, my man. There's no freedom in freedom."
Whether the editors had been serious or playfully teasing, in order to write an article elaborating my metaphor, I would have to deconstruct it first and that would run counter to the compelling gravitational force that had become the heart of learning for me: making connections. It was this current that reflected my growing ability to differentiate myself from my father's excessively rational ways and the long shadow he had cast over my confidence in my ability to think. But even glaciers do move and melt, however imperceptibly and incrementally: in-session with patients and in play (my writing), metaphors of surprising fit were starting to surface, another sign that something had started to loosen up in me—the freedom to say less, not more. All too aware of my tendency to say and to explain too much, one liners were what I was after and I wanted to remain faithful to the economy of my metaphor, which after all, had been an impressionistic leap.
I would just as soon have tried to explain why I loved music or Bach as first among many. No way could I find words to articulate what it was that held me willing captive, nor could I possibly explain why I was so moved by the mysterious element of controlled passion in his work. In college, hoping to plumb those mysteries, I had talked my way into an advanced theory course on Bach, somewhat lost amidst the knowledgeable music majors. Although I learned theory, analyzed key progression in chorale preludes, compared differences in musical form and instrumentation, even wrote a chorale, I never came closer to what it was that held me captive in love.
But if I couldn't elucidate the intricacies of that love, I could fall back on taste or my own passion, which, after all, one need not be a scholar to defend. And of course, no one had really asked me to do any such thing. It certainly was not what the journal editors had meant in suggesting, whether seriously or casually, playfully or for the purpose of placating me, that I write an article on the analyst as a figured bass. They did, however, strike a modulating chord—they had called my attention to something I'd never quite registered before—to the consistent use of musical language and imagery, which, permeated my work. Indeed, I was amazed at the degree to which a concern about rhythm and sound pervaded my efforts; even more, at the extent to which my wish to conclude with a musical metaphor was a profound condensation of my love of music, with who I was, and where I was in my development as an analyst and writer.
On some level, it did not come as a surprise to me at all. Having been involved with music almost all my life, it seemed natural and inevitable that its terms should have so worked their way into my writing. After all, was I not the person who had been emboldened to ring the doorbell of a neighbor from whose apartment I had heard the strains of chamber music to ask if he, a skeptical violinist, would consider playing with me, a duet-starved pianist? He did, and our playing had inaugurated another renewal of active music for me immersed with small children and other necessaries of my life.
If at first, I had been tempted to improvise a riff for the editors conveying why I could or would not write the article as suggested, given a tendency to explain myself and a conviction that I must, the editors had, unwittingly or intuitively, had sounded the theme of a fugue. Not only had they exposed me in a most benevolent way, they had lured me back to an essential beginning—Miss Chasins, my piano teacher, a centrifugal force from the start.
An impatient seven year old, I had begged my parents to let me take lessons over their protests that I was too young and should leave the piano to my older sister for a while. Sibling rivalry for sure, but also something more. Having sat in on her lessons with the charismatic Miss Chasins, I could not bear to be excluded from the opportunity to create those magical sounds.
Miss Chasins drew people of all ages into her orbit: she taught by inspiring, by demanding the best, and by the sheer magnetism of her love of music and interest in her students. Key to her alchemy of passion and discipline was her conviction that anyone could learn to play musically and well, whether a simple minuet or a sonata of difficulty and length. Talent helped but diligence counted as much; if one had an ear for tone and rhythm, so much the better, but without musicianship, even the best of technique would sound hollow.
Ask any pupil of Miss Chasins and he would tell you that the greatest shame was to be accused of pie-an-er playing. Piano playing, the real thing, was about coaxing fingers in a seamless legato, mastering a crescendo or diminuendo gracefully, bringing out an inner voice or letting the melodic line speak for itself; it was about the lucid use of pedal, and accenting without jabbing the keys; it was about giving a rest its full due, and about quality instead of quantity, a half-page well learned. And, it was about playing a piece that one might have happily thought "finished," only to be stopped as Miss Chasins fiercely circled an offending passage, penciling in fingerings or instructions until they threatened to obscure the notes below.
Someplace, I still have those old-fashioned lesson books with the speckled black and white covers, in which Miss Chasins would assertively write our weekly assignments: "Work on legato passage in Chopin, make sure to accent the first note in the L.H." "Memorize the first section of the Bach; bring out the middle voice, single hands to the end of the page." "Don't rush!!!" "Watch wrist!" "Sing out left hand in Haydn." "Pedaling!!!" Notations, not unlike a figured bass.
Mention a fiver to any one of Miss Chasins' pupils and he or she will groan: a fiver, a suspense-filled semi-torture, was the remedy for a mistake—playing the offending measure perfectly, five times in a row. It was invariably during the fourth try that a finger would slip and to this day, the thought of a fiver tends to make me hold my breath. One might claim (as I often did) that it was only tension but there was no getting around Miss Chasins' exquisite scrutiny, although there were plenty of times I tried.
Often I approached my weekly lesson with dread. Although I loved to play, I hated the loneliness of practice and frequently was ill-prepared. No matter. Soon enough would come the part of the lesson I loved best, the moment I had worked and waited for. This was when Miss Chasins would play pieces all the way through so I could decide what I wanted to learn next. Then I would be transported: her strong and supple fingers would take over the keyboard, walking a firm legato, caressing a melody or punctuating it with sturdy, staccato strokes, simultaneously filling me up and stirring my hunger to play; then she was playing just for me.
"It ain't what you do, it's how you do it," Miss Chasins would say so often during a lesson, that one pupil had fondly stitched the words on a sampler, wrapping them around notes on a signature bar. Framed, it hung on the wall opposite the keyboard, a loving admonishment to us all. At a memorial service after her death, full of good music and tears, I reminisced about the sampler for I had particularly loved the incorrect grammar and the possibilities of humor it had brought to learning for me. Now I have it, faded with age: several days after the service, it came to me, a special delivery gift from her family.
Unlike many piano teachers, Miss Chasins never held recitals and even though we polished our work, we rarely performed it. An exception was the piece I had learned to perform for my graduation from elementary school—way past memorization until it flowed through my fingers on to the keys. I played it confidently and well. Even now, I could probably still play the beginning staccato chords of Polish Dance by Scharwenka and relive the sense of accomplishment from that day. Miss Chasins was in the audience and I knew I had done us both proud. In those years, it was perhaps the only time I felt special and different in the most positive sense of the words.
It was the first and the last time I performed in public. Soon after, Miss Chasins married and moved away. Though contiguous only in time, performance and loss would irrationally collide in my mind for years. Although I was definitely upset when I learned that my lessons with Miss Chasins would end, at the time, I had little comprehension of the enormity of her impact on me or the loss—except that I continued to be disappointed with the several teachers I tried after she left, even the one to whom she had referred me herself. That inhibition lifted somewhat only when Miss Chasins' brother Abram, a composer and pianist, stepped in and asked me how I was doing. Startling everyone, including myself, I burst into tears. This prompted Abram to turn me over to his wife, a concert pianist who taught me dispassionately for a number of years. During this time, I became quite technically proficient, although I was so awed by her accomplishments in the music world, that I always felt awkward and intimidated during my lessons with her. But I did love music and for a while, that was enough to sustain me.
With the departure of Miss Chasins, clearly I had lost much more than weekly lessons and fivers. I had lost a relationship that had filled a void of whose magnitude I had been scarcely aware. In a family where reason was the standard by which all was evaluated, even had I been able to verbalize my inchoate feelings that something was lacking or amiss, there was no one else in my universe who might have understood. Except Miss Chasins. She had paid attention, she had made demands, and she had made me feel real.
In my senior year of high school, Miss Chasins returned. The event was bittersweet, occasioned by the death of her husband whom I thought I had liked but unknowingly had hated for taking her away. For that one year, we resumed weekly lessons, but they were never the same. In part, life had intervened: I was at a stage where practicing competed with homework, basketball, friends and the anxious requirements of applying to college. Now I understand that I had used that busyness to mask the disaffection and ambivalence engendered by Miss Chasins' having left. Now I understand that I felt abandoned and hurt by a first love along with the anger and sadness attendant on loss.
Still, I continued to play. At college, hoping to translate my enthusiasm into disciplined practice for myself, I had tried for a time to take lessons from the too-remote professor who had taught the course on Bach. Finally I settled down to practice in the music dorm. There, surrounded by music majors who practiced endlessly and talked music into the night, I closeted myself in a sound-proof cubicle, playing old pieces, sight-reading new, practicing for what I wasn't sure. By then I was in the throes of a depression, and other than crying, practicing was the only thing I was able to do.
It was during the height of this depression that some instinct took me during spring break to visit Miss Chasins, still energetically giving lessons, tie-dyeing scarves and offering something to eat. Attuned as ever, she was. Quite ignoring the visible signs of depression that had made me very thin and caused everyone else to respond with either alarm or studied avoidance, she asked, "Do you think you'd have time to practice some duets this vacation?"
Without waiting for an answer, she began to leaf through the pile of music on her piano, then sat down to play, motioning me to join her; it was all so casual and wonderfully irresistible as Miss Chasins pulled me firmly back into her field of force with a parade of lyrical jewels. In a lovely example of the principle of multiple function, my defensive refuge in music had turned me into a proficient sight reader and stood me in good stead.
That experience marked a shift away from the disaffection that followed Miss Chasins' having moved away, but it was many years before I played with any regularity again. Instead, I sometimes practiced, found willing partners by chance, playing only when life and time allowed: I worked my way through a literature of trio sonatas, Handel Organ Concertos, and four-hand arrangements of Bach, finding whenever I could, a flutist or violinist (and once, to my delight, a handsome cellist-lawyer with whom I had hoped to play duets of another kind as well). Occasionally I would arrange a lesson with Miss Chasins in the intermittent pattern that I had adopted long before, that is, until she acquired a second Steinway grand. With their gleaming curves nested within each other, they filled her tiny apartment with possibilities I couldn't resist. It was time to settle down, I thought, with a regular weekly slot—to play two-piano music, maybe even Bach. Or, most especially Bach. Alas, it never came to pass.
Although she was seventy-five, none of us had ever expected Miss Chasins to die, victim of a fatal heart attack and not the chronic assorted minor maladies of which she had complained over the years. By that time, my eleven year old daughter was about six months into her lessons, just beginning to carry on a generational shift.
As for me. This time I mourned Miss Chasins' loss with a depth of feeling and level of awareness that had been denied me when she moved away. Although regular lessons seemed to keep eluding me, as always, I intended to resume when time and life might allow. Did I not keep my fingernails short and clipped, as Miss Chasins did, forever in readiness to seize the moment should it arise? In the meanwhile, other forms of duetting have evolved.
Transference, it has been said, is ubiquitous, as are repetition, enactment and working through. Call it what one will, at what point does it become the real thing? Although my experience in writing that journal article was definitely in the here and now, what really lay at the heart of my resistance to go along with the editors' recommendation to leave out the metaphor, was my reluctance to have the duetting come to an end.
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