In Praise of Fear

CREATIVE MINDS: Psychotherapeutic Approaches and Insights

“Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”

-Louise Nevelson

I would like to say a few words on behalf of fear. This is probably not going to be a popular position. Among my creative patients, and certainly in the culture at large, fear tops the list of the so-called negative emotions. (Once, during my days as a Hollywood screenwriter, a well-known producer told me, “I have no respect for fear.” And if you are as old as I am, you probably remember a TV commercial touting a new deodorant that warned “Never let ‘em see you sweat.”)

Even among some of my clinical colleagues, certain emotional states (like fear) are considered negative. What I would like to address in this column is not only the practical value of fear (“Whoa, is that a sabertooth tiger/armed mugger/road rage warrior heading my way?”), but its therapeutic value when properly framed and understood.

Since I believe feelings are neither good nor bad (and lack any moral or ethical consideration, as opposed to actions), and therefore are merely data pertaining to a patient’s interior world, I posit that the more access we have to them the more authentic we are. I further believe this is just as true for clinicians as for our creative patients.

The engaged, inquisitive and candid artist mines their mind and heart to source their creative output. It is the cauldron out of which any creative work derives its truth, power and relevance. Just as committed clinicians derive their therapeutic understanding from a similar inward investigation and (hopefully) artful expression.

I am reminded of Jung’s advice: “Where your fear is, there is your task.” Lucan (naturally) is more pointed: “Great fear is concealed under daring.”

Both assertions sound good, I admit, but only in the abstract. Because for a creative patient paralyzed by fear—whether in mid-project or mid-career—the felt sense of anxiety, danger and shaming self-recrimination are very concrete. Who wouldn’t want to banish fear?

I certainly did, many years ago, when as an intern therapist at a low-fee family clinic, I was so nervous about seeing my first actual patient that I sought solace from my supervisor. His advice? “Christ, just try to make sure they’re not more screwed up when they leave treatment than when they started.”

With these stirring words resolving all my doubts, I went out to the waiting room to meet my first patient. And suddenly heard the connecting door to the suite of treatment rooms click shut behind me. And I had forgotten my key.

So, sure that this first impression would also be my last with this patient, I conducted my first clinical treatment in a brightly-lit waiting room. Luckily, the slim, pallid woman sitting across from me had a sense of humor.

“That’s the first time I’ve laughed in a week,” she said. "Thanks."

Though the session went reasonably well, and we continued to work together, I still struggled with my fear of “screwing up,” making a mistake, not being sure each and every moment what it was I should do. Until one day, some weeks later, a different patient asked me a question and I answered, without giving it any thought, “I don’t know.” It was at that moment something shifted inside me. Not that all my fears and doubts had been banished, but that I suddenly knew I could coexist with them. Integrate them into whatever skillset I had as a therapist.

Emerson said, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”

It is a nice, jaunty quote but I have my reservations about it. In my 30+ years working with creative patients of all stripes—writers, musicians, directors, painters, costume designers, etc—I have never suggested that these artists can, nor should they try to, “kill” fear. If nothing else, one of fear’s particular values is revealing what truly matters to you. Show me a creative person who is unconcerned about the end result of a work-in-progress and I will show you not a brave artist but a lazy, uncommitted one.

When helping my creative patients address and hopefully integrate their fears—primarily by investigating the meanings they assign to them—my goal is to help them experience these concerns as what Ram Dass simply called “Grist for the mill.” Just one of the ingredients of the psychic stew from which creativity is drawn, as if by a ladle coming up from the depths of our inner world. Again, conceptually easy to understand, but difficult to manifest when in the throes of the actual tumult of creation. The real, sometimes gut-wrenching fear accompanying any intense engagement.

I am reminded of another event in my own life, that occurred many years before becoming a therapist. It is another story from my days as a screenwriter, a story I have recounted elsewhere but I believe bears repeating. Researching the life of a famous mountaineer led to my attempting a climb of the Grand Teton, a mountain peak in Wyoming. Though at this particular moment, I was not exactly climbing. I was sitting on a ledge, a good thousand feet below the summit, shaking. Andy, my climbing instructor, asked me what was going on.

“I’m afraid,” I said, glancing up at the forbidding rock face.

“Good,” he replied. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t climb with you.”

He went on to tell me about his own fears, which were still with him after having climbed all over the world, including 4 trips to Everest.

“Fear keeps you in the here-and-now,” he explained. “Which keeps you alive up here. So, stay in touch with it—and just keep slogging up the mountain.”

As it turned out, staying in touch with my fears was not the problem. It was staying in touch with anything else—everything I had learned in mountain-climbing school, everything I had practiced, rehearsed in my mind a dozen times the night before the climb.

Then, as I found the next hand- or foothold, or made the next traverse, I slowly began to understand what Andy had been talking about. The fear became a part of how I was taking in each moment; a feeling in a mosaic of feelings. Not something to be pushed away, or willed out of existence, but a kind of electrical current running through my experience.

The fear was a teacher. It was a prod, a warning, a partner in each split-second decision. It stopped my breath, which reminded me to breathe again. It tensed my muscles, which reminded me to relax them. At 16,000 feet, with yawning emptiness falling away below me, it focused my attention—and then some—on the inch-wide crack in the rock face, just wide enough for curved gloved fingers to jam in. By the time I had reached the summit, aching and exhausted, the exultation I felt was as much an honoring of the fear that had accompanied me up the mountain as it was the relief of surviving it.

Which brings me back to that producer who said he had no respect for fear. He might as well have said, “I have no respect for an integral part of myself.” Because every healthy person has fear and uses it to navigate in the world, to assess situations and avoid dangerous ones. Even so-called imaginary fears—like the belief you will die if your novel is rejected, or your musical composition goes unperformed—are signals of potential psychic danger, of painful or even intolerable consequences to be avoided.

As clinicians, it is our job to take our creative patients’ fears seriously, and yet at the same time hold them lightly in our hands. Not to enjoin with their terror, but to help them explore and challenge the meanings underlying these fears, such that they can eventually learn the tools to coexist with them.

In my experience, if patients try to sequester their fears, leave them out of the equation, then much of their creative energy—that electric current I experienced on my climb—is drained away. Rather, by acknowledging and mining their all-too-human fears, their work becomes more relatable, vivid, and multidimensional, that it hums with life.

Which leads me again to that windswept summit of the Grand Teton, where Andy and I stood so many years ago. He asked how the climb had gone for me.

“I was half excited, half terrified,” I told him.

“Sounds about right,” he said.

Mr Palumbo is a licensed psychotherapist and author in Los Angeles. His email address for correspondence is dpalumbo181@aol.com.