Essential Others and Spontaneous Recovery in the Life and Work of Emily Carr: Implications for Understanding Remission of Illness and Resilience.

Artist Emily Carr 1A majority of paintings by Emily Carr are in the permanent collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Others may be viewed in the National Gallery of Ontario and the British Columbia Archives in Victoria, BC. They are also available as photographed reproductions on the web at vancouverartgallery.bc.ca. 1 (1871-1945) has attained iconic status in Canada and throughout the world for her prodigious output as a painter and writer of the Pacific Northwest. This article describes how the arrival of three "essential others" at pivotal moments in middle life helped lift Carr out of a serious, lifelong depression and nurtured and inspired her creative output. I propose that Carr's productivity and psychological recovery were facilitated by sequential, cumulative input from these generative human contacts. The creative partnership formed between an artist and her muse has features akin to the patient/therapist dyad, ranging from sparking new and healthier adaptations, to reshaping the internal landscape via internalization, to facilitation and promotion of unique talent. This psychobiographical study of Emily Carr is a vehicle for clinicians to further contemplate elements imbedded in our daily work that give rise to greater resilience, spontaneous recovery from illness, and personal transformation in the lives of our patients.

INTRODUCTION

Emily Carr is one of Canada’s most beloved artists. After an initial period of study and high productivity, for years her creative capacities were stymied by unrelenting depression. A second period of artistic and literary achievement began in middle age when three individuals who served as “essential others” (Galatzer-Levy and Cohler, 1993) encouraged Carr’s unique talent as a painter and writer and helped her to flourish. Her subsequent remission of depression and creative transformation spawned enormous output in two different media. A case is made that the fortuitous arrival of three essential others in Carr’s life were requisite, vitalizing figures whose interest, encouragement, timely confrontations, and practical assistance were indispensible in lifting the artist out of severe depression and career stagnation.

These pivotal figures also assisted Carr in personal, psychological, and creative development, making her work known to a wide audience in her homeland in which she attained iconic status. Hundreds of vibrant paintings of the Canadian landscape of the West and its Indigenous People and seven autobiographical books, totaling nearly 900 pages in length, etched her figure into consciousness as one the mid-20th century’s unique and prolific contributors of North American art—a figure whose potential was nonetheless dangerously close to remaining unrecognized and never cultivated. In this article I assert that without the input, companionship, constructive critiques, and championing by her essential others Carr’s body of work would likely never have come to fruition, let alone be available for enjoyment and ongoing scholarship. Although this is the first psychobiographical portrait that I am aware of Emily Carr, it draws extensively on a number of extant biographical books, papers, chapters, and references in an attempt to arrive at some tentative conclusions about the resurgence of personal and professional growth after her much-touted psychiatric disturbances that serendipitously and remarkably ameliorated in middle life.

Understanding Carr’s “spontaneous recovery” from depression without any treatment as would be most commonly rendered in the current age (medication, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis) and the significant personal developmental and creative changes that transpired has obvious implications for analytic practice. These include but are not limited to a better understanding of how: (1) the potential that one’s most significant life achievements may occur well into middle age after a period of truncated or stymied productivity; (2) the so called “spontaneous remission” of depression or other emotional disorders may occur more than has been reported in the analytic literature, and may be found to have been assisted by essential others when clinicians and researchers look carefully for them in the life history; (3) a therapist/psychoanalyst may serve as an essential other who fosters and promotes creative development and productivity; and (4) this usually conceptualized background role of the analyst may be most influential to clinical recovery and growth in some of our patients.

Understood in this way, as “essential other” the psychoanalyst fosters healing in the patient by quietly facilitating the individual’s unique talents and abilities. The intuitive concept as expanded upon by Galatzer-Levy and Cohler acknowledges the role that others have in promoting development over the entire life cycle. Expanding upon Kohut’s use of the term selfobject, Galatzer-Levy and Cohler observe how among psychoanalysts the term retains an implicitly primitive, preoedipal meaning and function. They emphasize the essential other’s influence on post-oedipal development—the conscious and unconscious functions that assuage emotional suffering, repair the self, and even help navigate healthier interdependency among human beings. It is these factors of adult metamorphosis under the aegis of an essential other that I wish to bring to light in Carr’s life and to suggest that the concept merits further inquiry when analysts attempt to answer the query, “What works for whom—and why?”

Applied psychoanalysis of historical figures like Emily Carr has garnered significant controversy in our field, criticisms ranging from how the evidence from which conclusions are drawn is simplistic and overly subjective to what may be even misleading and distorting of the methods, goals, and objectives of psychoanalysis (Lawton, 1988). On the other hand, psychological biographies also have a laudable history within and outside of the field of the practicing psychoanalyst. They serve to cultivate understanding of the lives of notable persons (Erikson, 1958, 1969; Valiant, 1993) and the factors that potentiate “self-striving, integration, differentiation, and authenticity” (Kavalier-Adler, 1993, p. 58) in the lives of the less gifted.

In his seminal article on the topic, Kohut (1960) noted that critiques of the value of applied psychoanalysis are largely academic, if not spurious, because the field has always sought to apply its insights outside of the consulting room and to learn from them to extend its reach. Kohut (1960, 1985) demonstrated how psychological biographies may enhance the understanding of the significant individuals, elaborate psychoanalytic knowledge and elucidate “specific … constellations … to the development, maintenance, and disturbance of normal or especially desirable ego functions” (Kohut, 1960, p. 583). Following the perspective that applied methods have much to offer both the clinician and non-clinician, I believe that psychobiographical studies may also demonstrate may significant but unheralded dyadic relationships in the lives of artists that further productivity (Gedo, 1983; Zerbe, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1995) and serve as a springboard for debate about curative or ameliorative factors imbedded within therapeutic work. Negative and positive potentials of essential others can be examined by this methodology but it also has significant limitations. Understanding of the unconscious forces and the meaning and value of the creative product to the artist in fostering development cannot be assessed as in a clinical case report. The conclusions drawn from psychobiography are of an analogical and deductive nature.

In attempting to more fully grasp what factors are pivotal to literally restart a life that is stymied, psychobiography is an important instrument and source of data for ongoing speculative reasoning and theorizing in our field. Many individuals, like Carr, have so-called spontaneous remissions from illness, and as analysts we assume something has transpired to shape this transformation, yet we know so little about what happened because these individuals are typically not our patients. Might it be an experience with an essential other that sowed some of the potential seeds for recovery and resilience? Conversely, a negative bond with an essential other may have a profoundly adverse effect on a human being. The personal relationship cultivated with one’s essential others that is underscored by studies of the “muse” (Tutter, in press) or “creative partnerships” factor prominently into cultivating resilience as is demonstrated by Emily Carr’s life as a case in point.

Early Life and Professional Development

Emily Carr was born in 1871 in Victoria, British Columbia, the youngest of five daughters. Before her parents moved from England to Canada, they had three sons who died in infancy, a common tragedy for the era. A baby brother arrived in 1875 but according to biographers, Emily, named after her mother, was considered her parents’ favorite. Carr’s father decided to settle in the Western part of Canada to build his dry goods business that was initially successful; financial reversals and death of friends later led him to become increasingly religious (Tippett, 1994).

Emily was precocious, displayed little interest in fashion, enjoyed animals and the out-of-doors, and tended to be shy but engaging, especially with elderly people. She and her siblings were deeply affected by their mother’s chronic illnesses, misanthropic temperament, and reclusiveness. Mrs. Carr died from tuberculosis when Emily was in her mid-teens. In her late writings, Emily Carr confides that she was always a “contrary” child, whose guilt and pride in her differentness are thinly veiled by her statement, “My dear little Mother wrestled bravely and I was born and the storm has never quite lulled in my life. I’ve always been tossing and wrestling and buffeting it” (Newlands, 1996, p. 6).

Carr’s father died in 1888, just 2 years after her mother. He left the family significant financial resources, but also sapped Emily with an indelible emotional scar. Although most scholars conclude that there is no evidence to support actual incest, something seems to have ruptured a heretofore-close father–daughter relationship. This injury contributed to Emily’s thwarting sexually intimacy in adulthood. In her autobiographical writing, she recounts that she perceived how her father grew “bitter” and “cruel” toward her in late adolescence; in a letter to her friend and editor Ira Dilworth (one of the essential others I discuss later), she speaks of “the brutal telling,” an allusion to her father’s discussion with her of human reproduction (Blanchard, 1987; Braid, 2000; Morra, 2006).

Whatever factors may have undergirded her later breakdowns, depression, and irascible temperament even in good times, surely Carr’s despair and emotional disturbance was exacerbated, if not caused, by the lack of consistent maternal care due to illness (disrupted attachment), the death of her mother around age 15, and then her father only 2 years later (bereavements at a pivotal time of individuation), and the traumatic father–daughter rupture in adolescence (failure of attunement; maltreatment; possible sexual violation).

Notwithstanding these traumas, both real and psychic, Carr’s resilience is remarkable. In an age when it was still uncommon for young women to become educated, let alone demand opportunities for their aspirations, Carr first requested from her oldest sister and guardian tuition and living expenses so she could leave Canada and attend art school, and, when she was refused, petitioned the trustee of her father’s estate. She prevailed. After a period of study at the California School of Design in San Francisco, she returned to Victoria, British Columbia and taught art in order to be able to continue her studies in Europe. Her first paintings of the forests on Vancouver Island and solitary forays to the coastal regions in British Columbia to paint the First Nations People (Canada’s indigenous inhabitants) began in the late 1890s. She displayed remarkable independence by traveling abroad on her own, enrolling in the Westminster School of Art in London and remaining in England for over 4 years. Carr’s personality quirks (including irritability, moodiness, loneliness, self-criticism, and dysphoria) are abundantly apparent in her letters from this period and in her later writings: she found fault with London’s people, climate, noise, and educational possibilities, but she garnered what she could from the lessons she took in the predominantly male-dominated art classes.

What is most remarkable about this time for purposes of psychoanalytic investigation; however, is that she suffered a psychiatric breakdown that eventually ended in her entering a sanatorium for intensive treatment for 18 months. She received the standard therapies of the day including rest, massage, and an early form of painful transdermal electrical stimulation, but remained apathetic with little interest in her work or other people (Blanchard, 1987; Tippett, 1994) for months. She stayed emotionally engaged at points by drawing birds and caricatures of staff members. Although the precise nature of her illness can never be known, some contemporary biographers diagnose the problem as one of conversion disorder or neurasthenia brought on by her father’s “brutal telling,” whatever sexual liberties that may have accompanied it, and the aftermath. Her symptoms also are also highly suggestive of an anaclitic depression (Spitz, 1946; Blatt, 1974, 1998) or mixed anaclitic/introjective depression (Shahar, Blatt, and Ford, 2003), manifested by self-recrimination, withdrawal, periods of clinging, anergia, apathy, and “giving up.” Her identification with her father (e.g., living in England; her determination to become financially responsible for herself), conflict-ridden intrapsychic relationship with him, and physical separation from her home augur that this was a depressive crisis rather than one of conversion disorder or sexual anxiety.

Carr was able to recover sufficiently, however, to return to Canada later in the year, intent to continue her studies and profession as an artist (Blanchard, 1987; Walker, 1990; Braid, 2000). For over a decade Carr made significant progress in her career. Although there were always financial challenges for her, she instructed students to earn a living and acquired the means to travel to Alaska and the coastal range of British Columbia to paint the land with watercolors. A body of work depicting villages, totem poles, and forest interiors expanded, and she made a personal commitment to recording the lives and art of the First Nations People.

Because she found her watercolor technique unsatisfactory to the task of bringing to fruition the passion she felt for her subject, she traveled to Paris to imbibe the “New Art” of the Fauves. Study in Paris came at a price. Again separated from Canada, the land she loved, and the familiar, Carr complained about the congestion of the big city. She suffered two more depressive breakdowns and was hospitalized each time for 6 weeks. Her work benefitted by recuperation periods in Sweden and the French countryside where she practiced working with stronger color. She later had the affirming experience of seeing two works displayed in the annual Salon d’Automne in 1911. Upon return to Canada, her oil paintings of British Columbia tribes became much more colorful, warm, and intense and reviewers readily saw the influence of her French contemporaries and commented on it.

By age 41, Carr was a well-known figure in Vancouver who exhibited her work and taught a cadre of students. She also routinely made sketching trips throughout the wilds of British Columbia by herself, a most unusual practice in her age. An intrepid spirit, she aimed to capture the spiritual essence of the land and depict Kwakiutl villages on Vancouver Island and the Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands; Braid, 2000; Lamoureux, 2006; Stewart and Macnair, 2006). Physical hardship and dangers abounded but did not daunt her as she traveled by steamboat, canoe, motorboat, and foot with her sheepdog through the Canadian wilderness.

Her goal of selling and exhibiting more of her art was dashed when she was not selected to decorate a wing of the Parliament Buildings in Victoria. Carr had hoped her paintings of native villages, totem poles, and the land would serve as a record of a time period and people whose ways were quickly becoming lost to modernity. Even though her work of the period was more realistic than her later paintings, it was deemed too abstract by the government officials, who wanted more photographic-like representations for a historical record. Although Carr held several exhibitions in Vancouver, reviews were mixed and by 1913 she decided that she could not make a living as an artist. Until 1927, she lived a marginal existence in Victoria as a landlady and potter, a sorry period commemorated in her later collection of autobiographical stories A House of All Sorts (1942).

Given the considerable productivity of the decade prior to this, it is notable that she rendered a mere 20 paintings between 1913 and 1927. Although she did make acquaintance with artists from Seattle and was commissioned to paint decorative panels for the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, her discouragement grew. Although some biographers and authorities of her work view this decade and a half as a fallow period in which Carr’s oeuvre was taking new form despite less output, her autobiography paints a different picture (Dawn, 2006/2007). By age 55, she had failed to establish herself as the successful artist that she aspired to be and was unenthusiastic about selling her pottery because it “was stupid,” “cheapened,” and “distorted” (Carr, 1946/2005, pp. 280–281).

Professionally hampered and craving recognition that she did not receive likely contributed to the symptoms of depression recorded by her biographers. The artist struggled with feelings of loneliness, outbursts of anger and frustration, discouragement, withdrawal, apathy, and diminished production of painting. One bright spot was her love of animals, a menagerie that grew over the final decades of her life and included dogs, cats, birds, chipmunks, a rat, and a monkey. In her posthumously published autobiography Growing Pains (1946/2005), Carr insightfully reflected on this period where she was “rejected” because “people did not want to see beneath the surfaces” (p. 277) and, thus defeated, she “never painted now—had neither the time nor wanting. For 15 years I did not paint” (p. 281).

Enter Eric Brown: The First Essential Other

Eric Brown, then the director of the National Gallery of Canada, traveled to British Columbia in 1927 to further study the art of the Indigenous People and to make selections for a major exhibit of historical and contemporary Western Canadian Art that he was spearheading at the National Museum in Ottawa. Ethnologist Marius Barbeau, passionate to preserve what was thought to be rapidly disappearing native art in Western Canada, urged Brown to make Carr’s acquaintance after seeing many examples of her early depictions of totem poles, Indian villages, and native portraits.

Barbeau was moved by the vision of the adventurous woman artist whom the native people had so obviously loved as to allow her to encamp among them and to study their way of life for stretches of time. Barbeau made frequent trips to Carr’s studio, bought her work, and prevailed upon Brown to visit her (Hirsch, 1978; Shadbolt, 1979). In Carr’s diaries and later publications, no individual supporter figured as fully in propelling her career forward as did Eric Brown, whom, she later wrote “was fond of me and good to my work” (Morra, 2006, p. 225).

Brown’s initial attempt to make contact with Emily Carr was rebuffed. Despite her initial irascibility and refusal to speak, Brown persisted. Accompanied by his wife, the curator finally went to Carr’s home and was “overwhelmed” by the “vast collection” of works that he immediately regarded as “‘powerful and original’” (Tippett, 1994, p. 140). He assured her that her work was in keeping with other artists’ painting in the East and immediately began to make arrangements for her to exhibit in Ottawa at the December 1927 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art: Native and Modern.

Brown requested a brief autobiography for publication in the exhibit catalogue. Most importantly for Carr’s personal development, he insisted upon introducing her to the artist members of the “Group of Seven” when she traveled East on the Canadian Pacific Railway to visit Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. Brown’s own sense of exhilaration in discovering Carr was only exceeded by the artist who saw this as a potential turning point in her life. Carr quickly had a large selection of paintings crated for exhibition and sale and her sisters, who had been heretofore largely disdainful of her ambition, now pulled together to provide some additional financial and emotional support.

Carr’s experience of herself and her work appears to have transformed quickly as a result of her encounter with Brown. Just as psychoanalysis has championed individual autonomy as the pinnacle of psychological health until late into the 20th century, so has artistic accomplishment been inaccurately viewed as an act of self, largely neglecting the role of selfobjects or essential others in the development and sustenance of the productive person. Defining the “essential other” as “our experience of other people, and entities in the environment, that supports the sense of a coherent and vigorous self and its development” (p. 3), Galatzer-Levy and Cohler extend Kohut’s definition of selfobject experience to include an ongoing, lifelong experience of self and one’s objects that continues over the lifespan to nurture the self. They see developmental progression through adulthood as proceeding only when one has those necessary, mature figures, whose “support of the self” are “always part of a total experience of other people and entities” (1993, p. 347).

By his timely entry into Carr’s life in middle age when her painting was at a nadir and her prospects for connection with other artists who could also serve as mentors, supports, and essential others was unlikely given her geographical isolation and financial circumstances, Brown clearly provided the necessary support for a flagging sense of selfhood. He also ensured that her painting would be taken to the wider world and recognized the value and need for Carr to have a cadre of peers who were artists like herself, from whom she could learn and who would also encourage her productivity. The artists who came to know Carr through Brown were moved by her artistic ability and found her interesting company.

As Galatzer-Levy and Cohler further opine,

To be a satisfactory essential other to the mentor, the protégé must have reasonable levels of talent and come close to fulfilling some of the mentor’s fantasies—which may range from a sense of personal continuity into the next generation, to being admired, to allowing vicarious participation in the younger person’s accomplishments. (1993, p. 296)

In 1934, at the age of 63, and having attained a degree of national renown and knowing that her work had gained acceptance by peers and collectors, Carr credited Brown with being her first champion who encouraged her return to painting. She told Brown, “I always have and always will feel grateful towards you personally, for hauling me out of the slough of despair and setting me to work again” (Udall, 2000, p. 295).

There were occasional strains and interludes of limited communication between the pair; the artist was known to sometimes drop even close friends and supporters on a whim, indicative of the impact of her childhood losses and residual dysphoria. Despite hiatuses, Brown and Carr repaired their connection. Until his death in 1939, although she had other muses available to her, Brown still continued to encourage Carr in letters, visited when he could, and made her contributions known in lectures to the public. Brown also arranged numerous exhibits and brokered private sales of Carr’s paintings as well, helping to keep the artist financially afloat and working as an artist during the Depression. The mature professional interdependency and personal relationship that Brown and Carr sustained for over a decade led to the artist’s sustained flourishing.

Meeting Lawren Harris: A Second Essential Other

As Carr traveled to the installation of the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art—Native and Modern, she had opportunity to meet with some of the Group of Seven. Carr’s journal, Hundreds and Thousands (1966) extols how thrilled she was to examine the range of color and depth of expression in the nature paintings of A. Y. Jackson and Arthur Lismer, which captivated her by their strong, expansive colors, dramatic lines, and simpler, bold forms. With the tone of near religious experience, Carr (1966) exclaims that these works had “spoken to the very soul of me, wonderful mighty, not of this world. Chords way down in my being have been touched. … Something has called out of somewhere. Something in me is trying to answer” (p. 657).

While the kindness and respect the group members showed moved her deeply, Carr’s meeting with Lawren Harris in 1927 was to prove most instrumental in redirecting the subject matter of her work and emotionally fortifying her with a confidence she had never before experienced. Harris, a man of inherited wealth who was patron and leader of the other members of the Group of Seven, became an enthusiastic supporter, whose correspondence with his new female colleague began after a series of meetings in his home in Toronto. Detailed in her book, Growing Pains (1946), Carr explains how Harris saw the deeply spiritual in nature. She could speak with him about what to others might appear “trivialities” (p. 307) because Harris had a spiritual yearning to see deeply into humanity and nature, a vision that was similar to Carr’s in her early period. In conversation he explained to Carr that for him, “race, colour, class and caste mean nothing in reality; quality of soul alone counts. Deep love transcends even quality of soul” (p. 308); he was moved and grew from her love of Indians.

In letters the mentor/mentee relationship between Harris and Carr quickly grew. She still tended to devalue her work despite the approbation of the Group of Seven. Harris repeatedly told Carr to cease putting herself down, reminding her in one important letter that,

in Art … there is not evolution; there is change of idiom, approach and expression. … The old Masters have not been surpassed. Modern artists do things in terms of their day, place, and attitude. Great works of art are the same yesterday, today, and forever. We but endeavour to be ourselves, deeply ourselves; then we approach the precincts of Great Art (p. 307).

She was as touched by the stark beauty and simplicity of his paintings as she was by his psychological insights and generosity of spirit. When she returned to the West, she began to paint again, taking as her raison d’être initially the traditions, villages, territories, and spiritual practices of the First Nations People (Moray, 2006). Knowing that her trips to the regions would be physically arduous, solitary, and dangerous did not dampen her spirits. She loved the challenge, and sought to cultivate her own idiom from what she had imbibed from Harris’ work. She took full measure of his simplified trees as “bleached, wonderful, in purified abandon, they are marvelous,” and conjured up notions of comfort and soothing long suppressed. “I think perhaps I shall find God here, the God I’ve longed for and failed to find” (Newlands, 1996, p. 32), she wrote as she planned her journeys into the forests of British Columbia to paint.

In Growing Pains, Carr credits Harris to her turning away from painting First Nations themes almost exclusively, and moving more directly toward the vibrancy and awe that she found in the Canadian woods. In their detailed correspondence Harris remained the voice of constant encourager and seer, including in his observations and critiques of her works strains of adulation. There was also a therapeutic streak in Harris’s letters that had at least as great a value as the aesthetic impact of his work; he reminded Carr that to “enter the creative life” one must find and maintain “self reliance, active conviction, learn to see the logic behind the inner struggle … (to) keep on” (p. 310).

Harris also countered Carr’s natural tendency toward despair, apathy, and the abject self-criticism she turned against herself, by writing, “For goodness sake, don’t let temporary depression, isolation, or any other feeling interfere with your work. … Remember when discouraged, that there is a rhythm of elation and dejection; and that we stimulate it by creative endeavour” (p. 310). When she contemplated a fresh start or a new project, instead of advising caution or taking credit for it as others might have, he wrote, “Sounds good to me. Occasional uprooting is good for work, stirs up a new outlook, or refreshes the old one” (p. 311). Carr intuitively grasped her need for a champion of this ilk if she were to override her dysphoria, and shares with her readers, “Thus he cheered, gave me heart,” a function without which she was a “bubble” filled with “despairs and perplexities” (p. 309). So it appears that Harris afforded a combination of factors—generosity, personal interest, and a unique ability to make and sustain the meaningful contact that Carr needed in order to “try to set my crookedness straight” (p. 308).

Thus ushered in a period of time when Emily Carr was not only substantially freed from her depression, but became highly productive and original in her corpus. Following in his footsteps to some degree, and incorporating insights she was learning from the study of other modern artists, she simplified her forms and changed her perspective; to capture the movement of the trees, for example, she reclined on her back, shifted posture and position in order to glimpse a close up, distorted but emotionally resonant and accurate images of her solitary, powerful, haunting, abandoned subjects. Despite her antipathy for public speaking, from time to time she also gave lectures in order to support her sales and to spread word of the new Canadian art, in which Harris himself included her as an equal when, in 1927, he wrote her, “You are one of us” (Newlands, 1996, p. 30).

This dramatic “change in the experience of self” under the aegis of Harris highlights several of the functions that Galatzer-Levy and Cohler (1993, p. 294) find important in assessing personality growth in middle age. In some ways, Harris fulfilled the role of mentor who non-competitively and generously encouraged Carr as a full peer, even though when they met she was clearly an unknown artist. Interdependence, achieved through their correspondence and infrequent meetings in the 1930s, is another hallmark of the function of the essential other and kept Carr working even when, by her own admission in her writing, she “was often grumbly (sic) and not nice” (p. 311). Despite the alleviation of her acute suffering, Carr could be rude and hurtful to others and Harris did not shy away from confronting her when this happened. In a psychotherapeutic way, he told her to not only write to him about what she was doing but admonished her to turn to him for catharsis. He explained, “get it off your chest by writing to me. … Write me when you are rebellious, angry—” (p. 311).

Although her petulance is likely one residua of her depression, the fact that she began to function at such a high level indicates that the anergia, hopelessness, withdrawal, and apathy that were her hallmark symptoms dissipated as she began to receive the soothing and support from the environment that Harris provided. A more effective and integrated self-flourished as her emotional and social isolation dissipated; slowly, she began to trust others and feel a sense of emotional attachment and social belonging, although her erratic moods and loneliness continued to return from time to time.

Psychoanalyst Emmy Gut (1989) recognizes the kind of help that individuals like Harris supply depressed individuals like Carr and named it “informal first aid.” Gut sees many parallels between formal psychotherapy of depression and “informal first aid” that shift the individual from an “unproductive” to a “productive” depression. New learning, improved communication, “perceptive listening and pertinent questions” (p. 210), being taken seriously, and permission to withdraw when necessary are prerequisites of helpers for the depressed. Bearing sorrow and anxiety and finding a place of solace are also important for moving the depressed person from an “unproductive” to “productive” phase of recovery. Lawren Harris, who also appears to have intuitively understood Carr’s need to retreat into the woods and forests of Canada for sustained periods of work, assisted her recovery from depression by telling her that her decisions and choices were good for her. With her sizeable animal menagerie, she set out to explore the British Columbia forest reserves and experiment with new forms. Reflecting on her eccentric lifestyle, the admiring Harris simply wrote back a resounding, “Swell!” (p. 312).

The works on the article for which Carr is now best noted derive from this period. An exquisite, unique colorist, Carr concocted a way to thin house paint with gasoline (because it was cheaper for her), and use it to render remarkable, exuberant, bold depictions of trees, forests scenes, sea, and sky. As much as Harris as muse urged Carr to take new steps and innovate, thereby adding the non-interpretive, but highly specific interventions thought essential in psychological improvement in contemporary psychoanalysis (see Bacal, 1998; Bacal and Carlton, 2011), so at times did he provide interpretation of her experience, as related in her published works. For example, a 1933 entry in Hundreds and Thousands, her posthumous journal, reveals a perception of Harris akin to what some analysts believe is the most important factor gain in psychodynamic work—the capacity to think one’s own thoughts (Stein et al., 2000; Ferro, 2002). Carr explains,

You need not expect Lawren Harris to do your thinking for you. He suggests—leaves you to ask questions if you are interested—answers them patiently and fully—then gives you, as it were, a gentle push-off and leaves you to think things for yourself. (Carr, 1966, p. 716)

Interpretation of her experience-near affect, leavened with gentle confrontation of her tendency toward self-deprecation, offered another aspect of quasi-psychotherapeutic presence thought by some analysts to be a universal experience of the wish to help another human being through depth of understanding (Searles, 1975). Thus, in his role as essential other, Harris enabled Carr to take the next essential steps in her productivity through attunement, insight, validation, encouragement, and confrontation, a process that Bacal (2011) has conceptualized as “optimal responsiveness.” By creating the space for, and even encouraging the expression of, speaking her own thoughts, Harris conveyed a real belief in Carr’s separateness and autonomy that she transmuted into her works on paper.

Writing With Ira Dilworth: The Third Essential Other

The editor of Emily Carr’s books was Ira Dilworth, an English professor at the University of British Columbia and the regional director for CBC Radio in British Columbia. The pair formed a devoted friendship, chronicled in letters that are the subject of recent scholarship (Morra, 2006). Dilworth’s role was not only one of a “complex mentoring process” but deeply personal, “substantial, virtually immeasurable, influence upon her writing career” (Morra, p. 3); since their correspondence encompasses the last 5 years of Carr’s life (1940–1945), the role of the essential other in late life becomes available for study.

Although Carr continued to paint in the final years, her trips away from home became shorter in distance and in time because of severe heart disease and strokes. Confined to bed by illness and long recovery periods, she found a new creative outlet in writing. She had taken some early courses in writing and kept a personal journal for years.

Carr’s natural narrative proclivities were marred by poor spelling and grammar; she was in need of an accomplished editor, were she to publish. Dilworth initially took over this responsibility because he believed in her importance to Canadian culture and found affirmation in their friendship. Due to his sponsorship, her autobiographical writings became immensely popular in Canada, and brought her a degree of fame that had not been achieved through her art (Shadbolt, 1979; Thom, 2006). In fact, most Canadians got to know Carr’s life work for the first time by the radio readings that Dilworth successfully arbitrated.

She had, by her 70s, attained a new level of self-coherence and capacity to love. She confided to him that “to love my best friends … just as hard as I like” was a new and mutative experience for her, and she concluded that her love for Dilworth was particularly special, “something like a mother’s,” while she experienced his affection for her “like a father’s” for a daughter (quoted in Morra, 2006, p. 160). While defensively pushing the negative and erotic transferences toward him out of her awareness, Carr did not deny Dilworth’s importance to her growth.

Dilworth was gay, childless, devoted to his mother, and there was a 20-year difference between their ages, so it is highly unlikely the pair were ever lovers. The intimacy they shared was nevertheless complex, mutual and, as reflected in the letters, had “intellectual, emotional, spiritual—and even somewhat erotic—overtones” (Morra, 2006, p. 15). By inference, the publications that spawned from their collaboration were “children” for whom they devotedly and unabashedly cared; in Dilworth’s case, the loyal parental care for his protégé’s written works continued for over two decades after Carr’s death.

The first book that Dilworth edited was Klee Wyck (1941), today considered by Carr’s biographers as a somewhat fictionalized account of her earliest relationships with the Indigenous People. Carr found the editing process with Dilworth exhilarating and personally liberating. After the publication of Klee Wyck, which won a prestigious national award and achieved acclaim in Canada, Dilworth helped her bring to press before her death The Book of Small (1942/1993) and The House of all Sorts (1944). With more material to release but in increasingly failing health, Carr appointed Dilworth to be her literary executor. The Autobiography of Emily Carr (1946) and Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (1966) were published posthumously under Dilworth’s editorial authority. In all of these works, Carr is now believed by scholars to paint portraits of herself, her family, her travels, her emotional struggles, and her adult relationships that are emotionally accurate, and hence revelatory, while not always completely factual. However, they provide readers with a sense of the author’s conscious recollections and unconscious motivations, conflicts, and sensitivity—an unusual and valuable source of specific data from an artist that augments biographical facts and speculation on her life choices, both personal and professional.

Revising her narrative and personal stories with Dilworth’s help, the process of writing was therapeutic for Carr at a time when her artistic energies were waning and death was close at hand. Perhaps severe depression did not reoccur at this time and writing went on productively and unabated because Dilworth provided the nurturance, protection, and a sense of being loved for oneself to which most persons, but particularly those that have struggled with loss, trauma, and severe depression, respond to therapeutically (Blatt and Behrends, 1987; Shahar, Blatt, and Ford, 2003). Like the more “quiet” factors that facilitate analysis, Dilworth’s presence facilitated the normal growth process to proceed and longstanding psychopathology to be further transformed. This occurred as death was rapidly approaching, when the most stalwart human being can falter because the loss of one’s own self must be faced. The security of Dilworth’s affection and of Carr’s dependence on him anchored her as she made her late life passage, and assisted her in investing in her new creative works, in essence, countering the closed system that is one hallmark of psychopathology and providing scaffolding for a more open one to take shape (Settlage, 1997).

The books that Dilworth edited are less revealing than the recently released correspondence, as one would also expect in any close friendship or creative partnership that develops over time. However, The Book of Small (1942) remains particularly important for psychological understanding of the growth and resilience of the artist because in it, Carr names and becomes the persona “Small,” her childhood self. She meanders back and forth from being “Small” as a little girl to observing and commenting on her juvenile antics as a mature woman. In her letters to Dilworth, the lively child “Small” described in her book morphs into Dilworth’s “ward,” who is needy, less carefree, dependent, vulnerable, and real, but still carries the sobriquet “Small.” Carr confides in a letter that she allows Dilworth to enter her psyche at this depth because “our love for each other is friendship as deep as an ocean.”

The extensive correspondence of hundreds of letters between Carr and Dilworth conveys her profound trust in him as friend, editor, and confidant (Morra, 2006). She also writes candidly about her disappointments with other people over the years. When Carr assumes the persona of “Small,” however, Dilworth takes on more than a presence as confidant and consoler and becomes more of an active interpreter of experience. For example, Dilworth champions the development of “Small” as both a literary and personal creation, helping Carr to mold her meaningful personal narrative and newfound sense of self (Gilhooley, 2008). From the perspective of contemporary psychoanalytic writings, the personal aspect of the Carr-Dilworth relationship had many features of the psychotherapeutic relationship, wherein new openness and trust allowed a fuller reality and resilience to emerge, “rich in its qualities of immediacy, authenticity, affectivity, mutual recognition, and intimacy” (Frank, 2005, p. 49). Moreover, by fostering Carr’s writing about her self-states, Dilworth helped to heal the vertical split of disavowal formerly maintained between them (Goldberg, 1999).

As Dilworth held and heard both the “Small” and the adult woman in Carr in her letters, he assumes a sophisticated psychotherapeutic function, one familiar to psychoanalysis when we conceptualize our role in promoting more easy and open communication between split-off sectors of personality. Individuals have an “absolute need … for the disavowed material to be retained until a relationship becomes available which can, at least temporarily, absorb, connect to, or satisfy this separate sector” (Goldberg, 1999, p. 111). In his responses back to her, Dilworth filled this “absolute need” and demonstrated empathic resonance that moved Carr to continue writing. No doubt this was a pivotal aspect of the Carr’s connection to Dilworth, because he could hear the “child in the adult” and enabled that aspect of her subjectivity to flourish maturely. In particular, she was fond of telling Dilworth about feelings and attitudes not in keeping with contemporary social norms, which she nonetheless knew were true for her but alienating to others.

By giving Carr concrete help in her professional life and serving, by her own acknowledgement, the closest friend she had ever had, Dilworth offered a greater degree of personal relatedness and authenticity than Brown and Harris. Dilworth served as an essential other of a different order, more closely aligned to the psychotherapist, because he was privy to Carr’s personal history as she recollected and recreated it in her writings. By non-judgmentally listening to her narrative, Dilworth was a “witness” to her internal experience, in the manner Poland (2000) describes as paramount to therapeutic action because he was “present” with her during her recounting and could bear her intense affect states as none had heretofore been privy to.

Progression in depth of intimacy and trust is evident with each succeeding essential other relationship in Carr’s life. This parallels what sometimes occurs in successive psychotherapeutic experiences, in which significant benefit is derived but developmental need persists, the individual gradually able to expose more of the self and to grapple with more difficult and dangerous material, as Carr and Dilworth did with “Small.” Allusions to the explicit transferential roles that each participant provided the other are apparent as Dilworth takes delight in his protection of “Small,” and Carr confides that she not only cherishes his protective, paternal presence but sometimes feels quite maternal toward her protector. What I wish to emphasize is the spontaneous emergence of a depth of affective expression and complex transferential experience that permitted psychological resiliency and creative growth to proceed that held regression and depression in check at the end of life (Settlage, 1997).

Discussion: The Essential Other in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

The diverse roles that the three primary essential others played in the return to creativity and the relief of depression in the life of Emily Carr is suggestive of one particular ameliorative factor in psychotherapeutic processes that analysts and psychodynamic researchers continue to grapple with in our understanding of resiliency and therapeutic recovery. By implicitly conveying to the artist that she had talent and explicitly assisting her with tasks that furthered her emergence and visibility in the world, Carr’s creative partners supplied a selfobject and real object relationship that attenuated her psychopathology. Biographical evidence also indicates that Harris and Dilworth understood Carr’s psychological needs and were active interpreters of her experience of herself, extending the usually conceived role of the essential other to one more akin to the “gold standard” of analysis wherein insight and establishment of personal narrative are paramount in fostering developmental progression (Poland, 2000; Stein et al., 2000; Abend, 2001). These particular psychotherapeutic functions may serve a universal need in individuals that lead to reintegration of thought and feeling, as aspect of the experience with one’s essential others of which one may not be consciously attuned but are decisive in its function.

Evidence as provided by the study of a life such as Emily Carr’s suggests that a helpful relationship, more than any other factor except fortuitous radical change in social circumstance, is necessary for non-pareil personal and professional growth. Brown, Harris, and Dilworth gave Carr practical assistance in her work that was affirming in its own right and led to other positive experiences in real time that allowed productivity to flourish. At the right moments, as vividly encountered in her journals, stories, and by those who knew her, these three individuals provided the corrective confrontation and redirection that spurred her on. Paralleling the somewhat hackneyed clinical wisdom that “after each analysis a patient gets easier to treat” because a foothold has already been established, Carr’s relationship with Dilworth yielded a new level of personal emancipation and self-revelation because it built upon the gains of two prior relationships. Deep psychological growth occurred over time in Emily Carr’s life, even though her “help” primarily consisted of only one of the core elements of the analytic setting, as usually conceived: The mutative effects of the relationship that Carr had with each of her essential others. And, by facilitating her art, her muses facilitated whatever therapeutic gains Carr may have additionally derived from bringing to life her creative products—the process of creation itself an active agent in the healing process.

Contemporary perspectives in neuropsychoanalysis also point toward a deeper appreciation of the implicit levels of experience that were likely imbedded in Carr’s relationship with each of the three pivotal men. Much of any healing process occurs at unconscious levels of brain functioning; interpretation, creation of personal narrative, and cognitive mastery are often not noted by our patients for long stretches of time when the spur is so close to the bone of their experience. Significant therapeutic actions occur at implicit levels, when “the opportunity to construct meaningful narrative explanations of their symptoms … may be the essence of the therapeutic cure” (Gilhooley, 2008, p. 210). The rehabilitation of Emily Carr as artist, and then writer, occurred for just these reasons. By valuing her work, providing empathy and hope at crucial moments, and implicitly understanding her needs and filling the gaps, Brown, Harris, and Dilworth can be said to have had provided for Carr those relationship-specific moments of optimal responsiveness (Bacal, 1998; Bacal and Carlton, 2011) that enabled change to occur. It is impossible to know what elements instigate significant change in any non-linear system, but in the life of Emily Carr, artistic and personal transformation were most certainly heralded by what she gleaned from three distinctly different essential others, muses who championed and inspired her in highly personal and concrete ways.

The Impact of Essential Others on Spontaneous Remission

Until Boesky (2014a, 2014b) brought to light a key paper by Norman Reider (1955) on the topic, a Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing Web Search revealed only one article (written in 1950) on the subject of spontaneous remission from serious mental illness, and five written before 1977 on the topic of spontaneous recovery from psychosis, cancer, or amnesia (Robbins, 1937; Cohen and Lipton, 1950; Berliner, 1951; Boverman, 1955; Booth, 1977). In five of the six reports, death of a person who stood in the way of growth, or the arrival of a new object who appeared to support it (for example, a caring nurse or activity therapist) figure prominently in the tentative understanding of improvement in the patient. For example, Cohen and Lipton (1950) report the spontaneous recovery of three schizophrenic patients after their mother died. The patients’ mothers were all actively involved in their hallucinatory and delusional systems and symbiotically attached to their children, the patients. By inviting a reappraisal of Reider’s observation of spontaneous cures by ego strengthening mechanisms and changes of objects within the milieu, Boesky concludes that “available explanations are insufficient” (p. 417) to “clarify, refine, and differentiate the daunting diversity and complexity of numerous antecedent subchanges … that precede visible and more enduring changes” (p. 439) in our patients. I suspect that essential others in our patients’ lives, sometimes but not exclusively ourselves as analysts, may be the key to significant change because provided are ego supports and attenuation of pathological attachments and identifications that have been heretofore traumatic.

Given the significant “spontaneous” remission rate of medical illness, one is left to wonder why this topic has received little study by psychoanalysts. In the case of these three schizophrenic patients cited above, a destructive relationship had a decidedly negative valence, and the patient became liberated only after that person’s death. Based on the thesis of my article, one might reasonably conclude that in such patients, the elimination of a catastrophic personality through death enabled the patients to individuate and to find “an adaptation to a less irritating and provocative reality” (Berliner, 1951, p. 649).

Like most depressive personalities, Carr’s remission was a partial one. Her proclivities to irritability, discouragement, paranoia, and demandingness were with her always (Blanchard, 1987; Tippett, 1994; Braid, 2000; Dawn, 2006). Although the psychological assistance of Brown, Harris, and Dilworth helped her to have a career and to be gratified by its reception in Canada, even they could not still the lifelong depressive facets of her demeanor that could alienate others. Nonetheless, their presence helped overcome “the impairment in object representation (that) creates a particular vulnerability to depression” (Blatt, 1974, p. 148; see also Arieti and Bemporad, 1978), and in a quasi-therapeutic manner enabled the artist to “resolve the contradictions and ambivalence” (p. 151) brought about by early loss, maltreatment, and professional rejection, freeing her to function autonomously, work symbolically, and interact consistently enough with others so as not to continually alienate friends or family—all hallmarks of a more integrated personality, increased object constancy, and the resolution of a significant degree of affective disturbance.

Therapeutic Action

As originally conceived, the essential other functions to shore up the self—albeit, according to Galatzer-Levy and Cohler (1993), this process changes over time as the individual takes over the function for his or her self. In this respect, the essential other may be said to be analogous to Kohut’s mature selfobject experience, crucial through all stages of development but harkening back to one’s earliest infancy. I propose that when one examines an individual life, such as Emily Carr, and sees remarkable change as a result of engagement with essential, helpful others, the definition or understanding of the role of essential other must be expanded to include the practical, concrete, personal role that the other plays in the life of the subject. In other words, post-oedipal development flourishes under the aegis of personal objects who are actual presences in the person’s life. The object is not only “an experience of other people, and entities in the environment” (Galatzer-Levy and Cohler, 1993, p. 3), but a real person whose influence, power, talents, love, and understanding are positively, non-enviously, invested in the subject. Both participants in the dyad must weather the normative dysregulation that occurs with success, and experience their relationship as a platform for continued mutual productivity and growth rather than retreat from this potentiality out of envy, greed, or competiveness.

Psychoanalysts have clarified that it is misleading to simply label these analytic attributes—whether formulated within the rubric of the essential other or selfobject—by the earlier name, “the real relationship” or “corrective emotional experience.” What is therapeutic in the action of psychoanalysis, and likely in demonstrations of personal evolution such as the life of Emily Carr, is the “ongoing personal (or person-to-person) relationship and the emergent new relationship” (Frank, 2005, p. 49) that sparks new growth. A psychobiographical portrait such as this removes some therapeutic variables that we clinicians often debate when we discuss what works or fails with a particular person in our consulting room. Essentially, the person who serves a transformational function for another must have all those “immediate and emergent qualities of affective authenticity, mutual recognition, and intimacy” (p. 50) that are currently almost taken for granted in a therapeutic setting.

As demonstrated in this psychobiography, the essential other must, in addition, have a degree of generativity and personhood so that they can be of actual help to and show concern for the other when called upon. They are not only stand-ins, in the way we used to consider the transferential relationship in analysis. Also suggestive is the implicit and explicit messages conveyed by the analyst that conveys to the patient,

You have the capacity to transform your life. By my presence you are not alone in the doing. I see what you are experiencing and I can share this with you. I can do more than act it out (such an in enactments) with you or supply something that you do not have. Your creativity and progress do not create envy or destructiveness in me because I have my own life. My creativity has nothing to do with yours. Rather, I am interested in furthering your work at this time. We share a common humanity. (M. Bornstein, personal communication, 2015)

Emotional availability, supplying “affirmative interventions” (Killingmo, 1989) that assist in the correction of deficit, and, as a matter of principle, recognizing that the patient’s needs are not always infantile in nature, but may herald a new and sustainable process of growth responsible for a return to life as it is lived, may be more important attributes, whose ability to rapidly and incontrovertibly change the dynamic internal landscape of a human being we have yet to fully plumb.

Conclusion

Emily Carr has attained iconic status in Canada and increasingly throughout the world for her prodigious output as painter and writer of the Pacific Northwest. This article describes how the arrival of three muses—“essential others” (Galatzer-Levy and Cohler, 1993) at pivotal moments in middle life helped lift Carr out of a serious, lifelong depression and nurtured and inspired her creative output. Without the concrete support, encouragement, and practical assistance of each of her three muses, the oeuvre that is lauded today as much for its unique depiction of a solitary woman’s life as its renderings of the wilds of the coastal landscape, would never have flourished.

I have argued that Carr’s productivity and “spontaneous” psychological recovery from severe depressions would likely not have occurred without the responsive human contact of her essential others. Creative partnerships function analogously to psychotherapeutic relationships. Emily Carr’s definitive paintings and autobiographies, her burst of technical innovations, and increased personal resiliency would not have been achieved without the cumulative impact of each mentor at specific, fortuitous points in middle age

Psychobiographical observations have implication for psychodynamic clinical work. As in the life of Emily Carr and her “essential others,” these studies can throw light on the often unheralded, behind-the-scenes role of a pivotal figure that may help the individual overcome serious psychological disturbance while honing significant talent (Zerbe, 1987, 1992). So-called “spontaneous remissions” of serious illness need more study by psychodynamically oriented clinicians who are invested in understanding the curative factors of the therapeutic relationship. Essential ingredients that the muse or mentor provide range from what clinicians would classically describe as non-interpretive interventions, but can evolve as intimacy in the pair deepens to include a depth of understanding, analogous to interpretation in the clinical setting. A case is made that creativity and healing occur when a significant change in the external world of the individual is initiated by the arrival and care of the essential other. This person is by necessity generous and non-envious of the talent of the protégé. The collaboration that ensues leads to new and healthier adaptations and enhanced resiliency and productivity in the artist’s life.

Emily Carr’s biography further demonstrates that when one is fortunate to have more than one muse in sequential periods of one’s life, their influence may combine, build, and deepen so that a remarkable and unexpected gestation leading to additional psychological maturation is witnessed, much as may be seen in different chapters of psychotherapy. The role of the muse or essential other also warrants study by psychoanalysts because their input, as demonstrated by the case study of Emily Carr, can lead to a seemingly “spontaneous” remission of illness and a creative, productive burst in middle life. Psychobiography is a mode of research that enables psychoanalysts to grapple with what is most essential in the dyad for personal transformation and encourages clinicians to be both humble and hopeful about the magnitude of positive change that can potentially occur at any point in the life cycle.