by Steven Spitz, PhD

I. INTRODUCTION

I have been extraordinarily fortunate to discover three activities in my life about which I have felt deeply passionate. Each arrived at a different juncture, and each became a lasting source of engagement, pleasure, and meaning. This essay is about their connective tissue.

The first arrived when I was seven years old. During a Saturday morning basketball clinic that consisted mostly of pickup games, I discovered not only that I loved basketball, but that I was good at it and felt unusually at home doing it. I could not have imagined then (or perhaps I already unconsciously knew) that more than sixty years later I would still be playing several mornings a week, or that the game would become a lifelong companion through playing, watching, reading, and talking about it. Basketball became my first enduring passion. (And finally a Knicks championship!)

My second passion arrived when I was nineteen, during the spring semester of my sophomore year of college. At the time I was enrolled in the Wharton School, immersed in macroeconomics, business law, and finance. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of the coursework, but in truth I had entered business school with little reflection about what I actually wanted to study or who I hoped to become. Although the classes interested me, I often felt emotionally and temperamentally out of place among my classmates.

One weekend in April, a roommate showed me a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams. I picked it up on Friday night and could not put it down. By Sunday I had finished it. I knew almost instantly that I was in the wrong major, and probably the wrong school.

I quickly arranged a transfer into the College of Liberal Arts. Entering my junior year, I chose psychology as my major. Accounting and finance disappeared from my transcript, replaced by courses in psychology, philosophy, and religious thought.

My pursuit of psychology, and later psychoanalysis, became my life’s work: another enduring source of passion, meaning, growth, and profound personal and professional connection.

My third passion emerged much later, at around age fifty. I had always loved music, especially folk and rock music centered around expressive guitar playing. For my fiftieth birthday, my siblings bought me two guitars. I immediately began taking lessons and soon started looking for people to play with and joined a jam band.

One day the drummer mentioned that he was starting a jazz group that would meet weekly. Although I had listened to some jazz beginning in college, it occupied only a small place in my music universe. Rather impulsively, I asked whether I could join.

At the time I did not fully appreciate that jazz was not simply another genre of music, but almost another language altogether. While I had become competent enough to function comfortably in a jam-band setting, jazz demanded something fundamentally different: a new relationship to listening, structure, spontaneity, rhythm, and interaction.

I cannot fully explain why I was so interested in joining, but it proved to be one of the best decisions of my life.

Jazz soon became another passion play. I studied it, practiced obsessively, played alone, played with others, joined bands, devoting enormous amounts of time, emotion, and energy to improving. Like basketball and psychoanalysis before it, jazz became not merely an activity, but a way of experiencing myself and relating to the world.

II.      A SHARED AESTHETIC

For many years I have been aware that jazz, psychoanalysis, and basketball share certain essential elements. It is these shared elements that compel me to write about them. Although this paper focuses primarily on jazz and psychoanalysis, basketball belongs in the conversation because it first introduced me to the experience of working creatively within structure – an experience that later reappeared in both the consulting room and jazz improvisation. Applying the perspective of any one of these disciplines to the others can be illuminating. I have found it especially useful, in an expansive way, to bring ideas and attitudes from jazz, and sometimes basketball, into my clinical work. For now, however, I will focus on psychoanalysis and jazz.

Both jazz and psychoanalysis are grounded in structures, traditions, and guiding principles. Each possesses not only a theoretical foundation, but also a distinctive sensibility or attitude: one might speak of both an analytic attitude and a jazz attitude. Central to both is a mode of highly focused and careful listening.

Some of the shared sensibilities, forms, and aesthetics of jazz and psychoanalysis include:

1. Activities that involve following a structure while also departing from it.
2. Activities in which personal experience and subjectivity are central.
3. Activities that depend upon the spontaneous emergence of unconscious material.
4. Activities in which the mutual influence of participants fundamentally shapes the process.

Listening with what might be called a “jazz ear” can provide another way of understanding the patient, the therapeutic relationship, and the analytic process itself. Psychoanalytic work is often centered upon language and meaning – the words patients use to describe their experience. Bringing a jazz sensibility into the consulting room shifts attention toward cadence, rhythm, pacing, tone, silence, and other nonverbal and unconscious dimensions of communication.

A jazz ear sensitizes us to aspects of the interaction that might otherwise remain unattended to: the emotional timing of an intervention, the rhythm of interruption and pause, the recurring motifs in a patient’s narrative, and the evolving emotional “music” being co-created between analyst and patient. In this sense, the consulting room can be understood not simply as a place of verbal exchange, but as a space of improvisational collaboration.

While psychoanalytic and jazz theories provide an overarching framework, both activities inevitably encounter situations that cannot or are not scripted in advance. No amount of theory can fully anticipate what emerges in the clinical moments with our patients. In these moments, analyst and musician alike are required to improvise – to create spontaneously while remaining grounded in an internalized structure.

III.    JAZZ STANDARDS AND PSYCHOANALYTIC SESSIONS

The formal structure of a jazz standard bears some resemblance to the structure of a psychoanalytic session, or a whole treatment as well. They share a beginning, a developmental middle – sometimes analogous to the bridge section of a song – and an ending that may return, emotionally or symbolically, to where things began.

Within this structure, improvisation unfolds. Themes are introduced, revisited, altered, abandoned, and rediscovered. The session, like a jazz performance, develops through responsiveness rather than rigid adherence to a predetermined plan.

When analyst and patient are particularly attuned to one another, the session may begin to “swing.” Something alive and generative emerges that can nourish both participants emotionally and psychologically. We can easily recognize and feel when this happens with a patient. I’m sure this is familiar to all of us.

At other times, sessions feel flat, fragmented, or out of rhythm. These moments too are part of the analytic palette. As Duke Ellington famously composed, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” Making psychoanalytic work ‘swing’ depends not only upon content and technique, but upon vitality, timing, and emotional rhythm. Let me discuss exactly such a moment in my work with a young boy.

IV.    CLINICAL VIGNETTE

This clinical vignette (borrowed and modified from a paper I published in 2008 on the creative process in the therapeutic relationship) recounts a moment of inspiration that came during a session in a somewhat bogged-down treatment with a 9 year-old boy, Dan. I have no idea where this inspiration came from but it brought something new to this treatment that had not been there before.

The poet Hayden Carruth (2005), in an interview discussing the creation of a poem, says:

         Writing must be experimental and not formulaic, if it is to have any invention in it. It must come from a spontaneous act. You start writing and the pen takes over and we used to say the pen guides the poem, the thought and feeling behind the poem. It’s not quite true but it’s a nice metaphor, a nice analogy. A poem is a fragment, a somewhat organized and heightened fragment of life [p. 49].

A clinical moment can be thought of in the same way. Let me describe such a heightened fragment.

One afternoon Dan began to tell me about his having shot a bow and arrow over the weekend. He seemed to enjoy it and I commented upon the fact that this was a sport he enjoyed and perhaps part of his enjoyment related to it not being a team sport. He agreed. He hated conventional 9-year-old boy sports such as baseball, basketball, or football. They were beneath him as a consequence of his not being very good at either team sports or sports with a ball. I then commented that perhaps he liked not only the individual emphasis (he had social anxiety) of archery but also the non-competitive nature of it. He eagerly pointed out that archery was an Olympic sport and perhaps he could aspire to that. “Pretty grandiose,” I thought but did not say. I next said something about man as the hunter-gatherer during prehistoric times and having learned to use the bow and arrow, not for competitive purposes but to survive. The competitive aspect had arrived only more recently, I noted.

Dan:  Well I think it’s been a competitive sport for a long time. Back in medieval times there were archery contests, you remember Robin Hood. Don’t you?

He was dripping with contempt for me. I felt it and just how dumb I was. Although I was trying hard not to personalize it, I was getting a full dose of what it can feel like to be in a relationship with him. Of course he was right and I’m not sure where it came from, spontaneously, out of the blue. In my best Robert De Niro Taxi Driver voice (we had often discussed movies in great depth during sessions)

Me:  Are you correcting me?!  I mean are you correcting me?!  I am wounded. Soooo wounded.

He started to laugh (a rare response) and the effect was

astounding. It was as if all of our intense, and not too far below the surface, tension immediately evaporated, along with his need to be so protective. I think we both felt a huge sense of relief. He responded by sheepishly noting:

Dan:  Yeah a lot of people point that out to me.. I like to correct people. Sometimes they call me ‘Mr. Know It All.’  They usually don’t like it. I know. I know. I can’t help it.

V.      REFLECTIONS

For a brief moment, Dan and I encountered each other more genuinely and less defensively. Immediately, an opening appeared in our conversation that had not been there previously, an opening that I had been struggling to create for some time. I had finally communicated something emotionally important that previously had remained largely unformulated between us.

What occurred in that moment resembled a jazz improvisation. The intervention did not emerge from theory applied mechanically or from any preconceived therapeutic strategy. Rather, it arose spontaneously out of immersion in the emotional and relational flow of the interaction. Like a jazz musician responding intuitively to the evolving structure of a performance, I found myself drawing upon affect, timing, humor, shared cultural reference, and the emotional rhythm of the moment in order to shift the direction of the encounter.

In hindsight it was easy to understand what had happened. Dan and I had become locked in a subtle, but persistent competitive enactment. Beneath our exchanges was a struggle around authority, knowledge, vulnerability, and control- dynamics that likely reflected aspects of his relationship with his father while also engaging my own wish to occupy the position of “knower” in the room. For some time we had been sparring with one another without fully recognizing it. Everything crystallized in or following that one moment.

What mattered was not simply the content of the intervention, but its tone, cadence, timing, and emotional phrasing. The ‘De Niro’ voice introduced playfulness into what had become a rigid and repetitive interaction. It altered the emotional tempo between us and transformed a competitive stalemate into a moment of shared recognition and relief. In this sense, the intervention functioned much like an improvised musical phrase that suddenly changes the feeling, movement, and possibilities within a piece of music and where it might go.

VI.    CALL AND RESPONSE

“Improvisation is not so much a creation of something out of nothing as much as it is the creation of something out of everything-everything one has experienced, everything one knows.”  (Bob Kulhan).

One final jazz concept is worth mentioning. Jazz musicians frequently engage in call and response, a spontaneous musical dialogue in which one phrase evokes another. The process is neither fully planned nor entirely random; each response is shaped by what preceded it. One member of the band creates a phrase in the moment. It functions as a kind of question. Then another musician steps up to provide a musical answer to the question posed. This can be a one-off, short phrase, long phrase or continue at length.

Psychoanalytic conversation often unfolds in a similar manner. Analyst and patient continuously influence one another through a series of verbal and nonverbal exchanges whose meaning only gradually emerges. Like call and response in jazz improvisation, this dialogue is co-created rather than authored by either participant alone.

VII.   CONCLUSION

The deepest moments in psychoanalysis, like the deepest moments in jazz, arise from disciplined improvisation-spontaneous creation occurring within an internalized structure. Jazz musicians do not improvise because they ignore structure; they improvise because structure has become sufficiently internalized that it can be used creatively rather than mechanically. Something similar occurs in psychoanalytic work. Theory, technique, and analytic attitude provide the framework within which the unexpected can emerge, but they cannot themselves generate the living moment.

The most meaningful clinical moments often arrive as surprises. They emerge from immersion in the emotional and relational experience of the session rather than from the application of a predetermined formula. Like a jazz improvisation, they arise from the intersection of discipline, experience, listening, intuition, and mutual influence.

Perhaps this is one reason jazz continues to feel so familiar to me as an analyst. Both activities require us to remain open to what has not yet happened. Both ask us to listen carefully, tolerate uncertainty, and trust that something meaningful may emerge from the interaction itself. At their best, both are acts of spontaneous creation undertaken within a shared structure. And perhaps it is precisely this balance between structure and freedom that continues to make both psychoanalysis and jazz endlessly compelling.

And the beat goes on.

Steven Spitz, Ph.D. was director of WCSPP from 2010 to 2013. He also taught and supervised at ICP and the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis.  Over the years, he has presented and published papers on creativity, the therapeutic relationship, and the Rorschach. He is currently in private practice in Manhattan.  He is continuing to celebrate and savor the recent Knicks championship.