Editor’s Note: This edition of Impulse was compiled prior to the breakout of the war in the Middle East.  

I have a painting in my house that I affectionately call My Psychotic Flowers. I bought it years ago when a beloved antique store was closing. This unframed painting cost eight dollars and was leaning on a bench haphazardly, in the back of the shop. Perhaps it was not expected to be sold. I fell in love with it immediately. The images stuck out in aggressive 3-D blobs all over the painting. These blobs resembled shapes of indiscernible flowers. There was no identifying form or color. Maybe the only identifying theme was the boldness of the strange, alien-like flowers that took up most of the painting. Something went wrong here was the message. An object exploded and resembled figures of something familiar while blurring boundaries between fantasy and reality, between horror and beauty.

I imagine a friend asking me why I would want to live with psychotic flowers. A good question! How do we come to live with the artifacts that we do? What kinds of objects are we willing to live with and what do we choose to let go of? What speaks to us on some deep, primal level without a clear sense of why? I have been asking myself those questions for years in my own analysis and while listening to my patients’ stories. These questions assume that we choose consciously and wisely. That the questioner can live inside their story and outside. It assumes there is an observing ego. It assumes the privilege of consciously looking and knowing one’s truth. I started the year by asking the writers to focus on the theme of what stays inside and what takes up space on the outside. This theme has morphed into what stories we live with, what stories we live inside of, and what stories we can think about.

My patients come to me dripping with feelings and symptoms, yet it often takes years to uncover the stories that shape their psychological terrain. Often patients would rather tell themselves that they are selfish, needy, greedy, and spoiled than acknowledge this wild idea that they are enraged with their caregivers for the sufferings they endured in the early years of their lives. So they cut, burn, starve, vomit, and use drugs to stay away from living inside their truths.

On his recent visit to Freud’s Museum in London, a colleague sent me a picture of Anna Freud’s letter to her friend. In her letter, she states that one of the most important qualities of a psychoanalyst is the “love of truth, including scientific truth as well as personal truth.” She went on to say that appreciation of these truths should be, “higher than any discomfort at meeting unpleasant facts, whether they belong to the world outside or to your own inner person.” What a task! Perhaps a lifelong task – distinguishing truth from fiction; fantasy from reality. But maybe, just like My Psychotic Flowers, those aspects can find a way to co-exist. Or not….