The Risk of Encounter
An existential reflection on how therapy, like art, can allow us to risk a real encounter.
The Audio Reflection
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Risk, Photograph
© Evan Kaufman
In 1970, the visual artist Philip Guston showed a body of work no one was expecting.
For two decades prior he had been a recognized abstract painter. He became known alongside names like Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning. His paintings sold well and by every measure the art world uses, he had arrived.
He then made an unusual choice: he decided to pull back from the work he had become known for and spent time in something close to seclusion. When he came into the light, the paintings he showed broke from everything that came before. The abstractions were gone. In their place: cartoonish, raw, half-scraped images. Tangled legs. Light bulbs. Crudely lit rooms. And running through it, a figure that made the work impossible to ignore — hooded Klansmen.
Guston had grown up in Los Angeles in the 1920s, watching Klan rallies as a Jewish child. He had been on the receiving end of that othering. So when he chose to paint Klansmen, you might expect the obvious move: paint them as the problem out there. But he didn't do that. He painted Klansmen at the easel. Klansmen in the studio. Guston put himself inside the hood.
At first these images are confusing, even shocking, but if you sit with them and start to notice what's happening, Guston is doing something unusually risky. He's saying he cannot cleanly separate himself from the country he lives in. That whatever America is, he is also entangled with it. The violence is not only out there. It runs through him too.
When the work showed at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, most of the critics rejected it. Some called it appalling. They wanted the abstractions back — the safer work, the work that fit the market. Guston could have returned to it. He had every reason to. Instead he just kept painting.
The They-Self
The existential philosopher Martin Heidegger had a term — das Man — that translates roughly as "the they-self." He was writing as Germany turned toward war, watching how people were giving up their own thinking in favor of what the collective wanted. The party line. The acceptable view. The thing everyone agreed on. He watched as individuals handed their agency over to the they and in the process stopped feeling the weight of having to choose for themselves.
Das Man is not unique to that moment in history. It is a temptation, available anywhere there is a crowd to disappear into. It is the move we make when the anxiety of authorship becomes too much, and we let the collective tell us what to want, what to believe, what to make. There is a relief in it. The weight of choice starts to ease, but something essential is also lost in the process.
Guston's whole turn — the abandonment of the safe abstract work, the willingness to be rejected by the people who had been celebrating him — is a refusal of das Man. He had every reason to stay inside what the collective wanted from him. And yet he stepped out anyway.
What Therapy Risks
The dominant trajectory in the field of psychotherapy over the last several decades has been toward what gets called manualized treatment. The most familiar example is CBT — cognitive behavioral therapy. It works the way it sounds like it works: a binder, a procedure, a structured opening, a middle, a close. Worksheets between sessions. Treatment plans that name the problem and lay out the route to its resolution. Apply technique to a symptom, achieve outcome, exit.
For certain presentations these approaches show real results, and I do not want to dismiss that. People in acute distress sometimes need a process they can hold onto. The manual offers that. And a highly structured process can be a relief. But there is a cost.
A manualized session does not ask the clinician or the client to risk much of anything. The shape is already known. The sequence is laid out. Both people can stay inside the procedure and never have to face the actual unscripted thing happening between them. The session can be completed and a real encounter may never have occurred.
This is Heidegger's das Man imported into therapy. It is like a mechanical yet reassuring voice within the field saying: here is the protocol, follow it, and you will not have to sit in the unknown.
The work I find worth doing with clients doesn't follow a script. It asks both client and therapist to be with each other, in whatever way that unfolds. Meeting what is present rather than what a procedure predicts.
Guston could have kept making the work that was selling. He could have stayed inside the version of himself the art world had decided was acceptable. He chose to step out of that, into work that was rougher, stranger, and far more exposed. The paintings that followed were not safer. They were more real, more honest and of course filled with risk.
To me the same applies to therapy. You can run the protocol and produce a predictable result, ensuring the outcome is known. Or you can meet what is actually present, taking a risk to encounter something real, and walk a path that leads toward places unknown.
Turning Toward Freedom
The poet Rilke is standing in front of an ancient sculpture in a museum — a broken torso of Apollo, headless, armless, worn away by time. The poem moves slowly through what remains of the figure, noticing it, being with it. Then at the final line, a turn, addressing the reader directly: You must change your life.
It's tempting to hear that last line as a command, but Rilke never says what to change, or how. There's no direction in it.
It's as if he is naming what just happened. You stood in front of a piece of broken stone and it met you — not the part of you that came to appreciate art, the whole of you. That is the change. Not something to go accomplish. Something already underway in the meeting, something like resonance.
