The fascinating article by Paola Palmiotto about the architect Frank Gehry. Palmiotto article shows the examples of his works and refers to the pieces of documentary texts and interviews about Gehry and the video „Sketches of Frank Gehry”. The article shows the importance of creative process in relationship to the process of inner transformation and the meaning of psychotherapy as holding environment for creative and transformative processes.
A great reading for both therapists and creative individuals.
From the article:
„I always liked working with my hands, I still remember, I must have been eight years old, my grandmother had a bag full of carpentry scraps with which she fed the stove and occasionally it toppled to the ground and with those sticks we built roads and palaces. I had so much fun. And when I was faced with the dilemma of what I wanted to be when I grew up, I kept remembering that game and intuitively I thought : maybe I should do something like that.”(from Sketches of Frank Gehry – S. Pollack 2005)
Frank Gehry affects us the way he narrates, he shows us his emotions with honesty, something that we rarely encounter in famous people. The fatigue that makes letting go of his creature, like every parent with their child who begin their own life. The embarrassment that he feels when he concludes one of his projects: „Oh God, how could you let me do this!”
This is not to create the myth of Frank Gehry, this is just one example. Each patient has his own path. The transformation is a process that often turns out in retrospect, looking back and realizing how it changed since then. The transformation can be realized by acquiring new horizons and new visuals, emotional changes or in the way we show respect to others, even without becoming a celebrity.
Paola Palmiotto
Paola Palmiotto is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and Jungian analyst. She works with dreams, drawings and sand, which can help us access to a language of images. She has a private practice in Mantua.
She is a professor at the graduate school in analytical psychotherapy Aion in Bologna and teaches „Psychological Types in the visual arts”. She wrote a book “The pre-patriarchy in Sumerian mythology – a symbolic reading according to analytical psychology” – 2009, Persiani publisher.
Read more at Paola Palmiotto’s website
Tags: art, creative process, Paola Palmiotto, transformation