Before Sue Cho, CC ’10, decided to take a leave of absence from Columbia, she would sit in front of her computer to work, but would become paralyzed, unable to begin.
She felt pressure from the combination of unexpressed anxieties and the expectation of academic excellence. “I’ve been brought up in an environment where emotions aren’t recognized at all,” Cho said. “I never even had the language to talk about it.”
At that point, Cho realized that she needed to take some time off from school to reevaluate her life and her goals. She moved to Seoul, South Korea, where her parents have been living since Cho started college and became involved with the performance art scene there. With the help of both therapy and art, Cho said she became more aware of her deep-seated emotions and how to handle them.
Like Cho, many students at Columbia have discovered that creative activity is a way to tap into their emotions and deal with mental struggles productively.
Joseph Reynoso, a psychologist at Barnard’s Furman Counseling Center who specializes in psychoanalysis and the study of various art forms, especially film, said, “There are ways that writing, that performing, that painting, sculpting are ways for a person to access a part of herself that she may not have any other verbal means to do.”
He emphasized, though, that art is not a substitute for therapy, “particularly when someone is struggling with any kind of chronic suicidality, or chronic sorts of difficulties that could best be helped with any form of more formal therapy or medication.” Used as a supplement to therapy, creative expression may help students deal effectively with challenging emotions and situations and can even help them learn more about themselves.
Channels of expression
Alex Cook, CC ’09 and an architecture major, took an etching class last spring and said it was more challenging than any other class he has taken. “Dasha [Daria Shishkin, the instructor] asked me to tap into emotions and feelings that would lend credence to the work, that would make it apparent that it was valuable to me, so that it would be valuable to other people as well,” he explained.
Cook said he thinks that this is what makes good art: real personal involvement. After spending the last two summers training to be an officer, he plans to join the Marines after graduation.
“I used the opportunity to channel a lot of the personal feelings I have about my life decisions, about joining the Marine Corps, about going to war, about being taught that my job is to kill people,” he said. “It helped me to find pride in the things that I was doing because it gave other people an opportunity to see how much I cared about them. They saw how much time I invested in making the art that concerned those decisions.”
Reynoso said he encourages his patients to try art, but added, “Often you don’t have to dig so deep to find that they used to engage themselves creatively.” Students will often say they used to draw, or sing, but don’t have time for it any more.
This was the case for Cho.
“I always thought of art classes as kind of extraneous. It’s not academic, so I always put it off,” she said.
But when these students engage their dormant creativity, Reynoso said, “A lot of times, people will surprise themselves by what they actually produce, artistically. A lot of our experience does happen on an unconscious level, particularly emotionally.”
When Cho first got to Korea last April, she described herself as “lost,” saying that she found an internship with a law firm to please her father. But when the internship was over in September, she thought of an experience she had had when she was in first grade and her mother brought her to a woman’s festival. There, Cho saw a Korean dancer perform a nude walk in front of a large audience on a rainy day.
“She seemed like a being and not a person,” she recalled. “In my memory, I felt like there was no rain: there was a shield around her, and she wasn’t getting wet. It left a strong impression on me.”
Remembering this, Cho decided that she wanted to start nude modeling and began working at a creative nude models’ association. She also began taking film classes, and incorporated the two, making a film about her experiences as a model. The film had no words, and Cho said that instead, “It was about myself and how I was expressing myself.”
A woman whom Cho now describes as her mentor—a well-known avant-garde Korean dancer—saw Cho’s film and invited her to perform in one of her pieces. Cho performed a nude walk, like the one she had seen as a child, in front of a large audience. She describes the experience as liberating. Each one of these steps, she says, is part of her healing process: she has been able to express the difficulties she was experiencing without words, and has prepared herself to return to Columbia. “It’s more sincere,” she said of her performances, “and more communicative that a thousand words.”
Dealing with failure
Sometimes, though, the fact that art is so personal can be detrimental.
“When the odds on the table are that you are trying to create something that is going to be beautiful and impressive to everyone that sees it,” Cook said. “It’s so easy to become frustrated when you are unable to convey the message that you want.”
Often, this frustration happens when students are studying art as a discipline and more than just a hobby. Reynoso said: “Here there are so many people who are in school to be an artist, so it gets so merged with pressure and competition.” He said that when art becomes someone’s work, it can actually become in some way part of the difficulty they’re dealing with.
In the end, Cook said that he couldn’t take another art class, because as much as he enjoyed etching, he felt it was too much of a responsibility. “Maybe that’s the downside,” he said, “If you take it [art] more seriously than a hobby, and you fail, it’s very hard to come back.”
When the correct balance is achieved, not only can art help students cope with their emotions in a different way from traditional therapy, but, according to Reynoso, the self-examination that comes with therapy can help students improve their creativity.
“Therapy and treatment can often enhance one’s artistic creative process and more directly address and manage many of the emotional conflicts and states that an artist is consciously or unconsciously confronting with varying degrees of success,” he said.
