email website@lapidus.org.uk

monthly reflection on current Lapidus-related issues

September

frustration and absorption

Participants in a creative-wellbeing group comment that the artistic process is 'frustrating'. Is this a negative statement? Frustration is not a comfortable experience. What is it doing in a therapeutic setting?

Over three months of weekly sessions, creative fruits appear. Diverse and delightful creatiions in words and materials. Frustration is part of the mix. It stands alongside pleasure, discovery and delight. It does not go away.

Is frustration is an important component of creative process? Wrestling with materials or ideas, trying to shape words into a form that is satisfying enough, striving to make some sort of pleasing whole? And can frustration sit equally well within a therapeutic creative group as any other creative activity, where the aims extend to include affirmation and pleasure for participants, as well as their wellbeing?

Adam Phillips, the child psychotherapist, literary critic and essayist, wrote an article this month in 'The Guardian' entitled 'The Happiness Myth' (see below for link) in which he observes that:

'If we want to talk of a right to pursue happiness there needs to be a prior right, as it were, to feel frustration'

and

'For better and for worse, being able to feel our frustration is the precondition for becoming absorbed. When this is impossible the pursuit of happiness tends to take over. The right to pursue happiness may be, at its worst, the right not to feel frustrated. And if frustration is not allowed to take its course, to take its time, there is no absorption, only refuges from unhappiness. The child is fobbed off with happiness when what she really wants is to get her appetite back. The right to the pursuit of happiness can be a cover story for the wish to hide.'

Phillips quotes author William Golding in his novel 'Lord of the Flies'. The character Henry, who leaves the group of children to go to the beach, becomes 'absorbed' in observing small creatures at the water's edge 'absorbed...beyond mere happiness'.

'Absorption' is key to creative activity. And without the tussling, the throwing out of this, the reclaiming of that, the dissatisfactions, the redraftings and reviewings, anyone engaged in creative activity cannot reach a state of absorption. Frustration is a 'step on the way' to becoming absorbed. It seems both humble and human to expect an experience of frustration as a kind of 'clearing' before the focus and rewards of dedicating time and space to creativity begin to show.

Creative absorption, unlike meditation, involves physical interaction with the sensory world's textures, colours, words, sounds - and limitations. Clay gets wet and too slippery to mould, the right word is elusive, the thing you are trying to say keeps escaping. Creative writing process is likely to involve the voice, the hands and the heart - and patience.

Unlike other pleasurable activities such as playing a sport or chatting with friends, this asks of us that we also - simultaneously - attend to our inner worlds, that we notice the solitude inside ourselves, where our uniqueness can begin to find expression.

The job of the facilitator of therapeutic writing or art is arguably to accommodate both frustration and pleasures for the group. And to tolerate both him- or herself. Every writer knows moments of joy during the act of writing. The contribution of these moments to wellbeing can be more clearly identified following a discussion such as that promoted by Adam Phillips, about what happiness really is.
© F Hamilton

Adam Phillips on 'The Happiness Myth'