Jackson Pollock

by Steven Naifeh

  In fifty years on the barricades of social reform, Marot became a divining rod for ideas, people, and movements. Along the way, she won the friendship and respect—sometimes grudging—of fellow reformers like Samuel Gompers, Louis Brandeis, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, and Mumford. Then, in 1919, she gave it all up. “[She] dropped the preoccupations of a whole lifetime,” Mumford wrote, “as if they were so many soiled garments.” Moving with her old friend Caroline Pratt to the house on Twelfth Street, she retreated into a private study of psychology and anthropology. “She had seen all the movements she had worked in and for, with an almost religious dedication, go wrong,” Mumford wrote, “and she was determined to get to the bottom of this miscarriage by working back to the earliest [childhood] patterns of human behavior.”

  Fifteen years later, at the age of seventy, she met Jackson Pollock.

  Far from embittering her, the years of frustrated idealism had left Marot with a relaxed appreciation of human frailties—a “vein of unabashed romanticism,” Mumford called it—that invited openness and intimacy even from someone as reticent as Jackson. Although never trained as a psychologist or psychoanalyst, she fell into the role naturally. Her conversations were filled with “swift insights into the human situation [and] warm response to the sufferings of others.” “Jackson always seemed to be more relaxed if there wasn’t a sexual element in a relationship,” says Peter Busa, “and I think it helped him explain his problems to older women like Marot.” Jackson may also have been relieved that Marot was more interested in him as a person than as an artist. Although as a child she had played with Maxfield Parrish, and later served on the editorial board of the Dial—the magazine that Charles Pollock sent home to his brothers in Orland—Marot always cared more about the human “creative impulse” that produced art than about the art itself.

  Basing her theories on the work of behavioral scientists like Sir Charles Scott Sherrington and James Bryan Herrick rather than the more popular Freud and Jung, Marot argued that impulses were the physiological building blocks of all human behavior and that the true purpose of education was to isolate and restructure those blocks in a way that ensured continued “growth and development.” Because impulses could be directed, no action was truly spontaneous. Actions that appeared spontaneous were, in fact, “reflexes” of the unconscious. If the summer at Bloomingdale’s had shown Jackson what to paint, Marot’s ideas may have given him a first hint of how to paint. Instead of adopting conscious symbols—crosses, pregnant women, horses, or bulls (as Orozco had done)—Jackson could paint by impulse, bypassing the conscious mind altogether. The more spontaneous a painting, or a brush stroke, the more accurately it reflected the unconscious.

  Despite their frequent conversations and Jackson’s apparent candor with her, Marot never considered herself anything more than a friend and confidante. When he suffered a second breakdown in January, she didn’t hesitate to recommend that he resume professional therapy. But not at Bloomingdale’s. For some unknown reason, neither Marot nor Sande pressed Jackson to return to the hospital. Apparently, no one even bothered to inform Dr. Wall of the relapse. Perhaps Jackson was discomfited by Wall’s incisive analysis. Perhaps Sande, obsessed with family pride and privacy, wasn’t prepared to concede failure. Whatever the cause, the decision set another dangerous precedent. For the rest of his life, Jackson would move from doctor to doctor as restlessly as Stella moved from house to house, staying with each just long enough to relieve the immediate anguish, exercise his charm, and absorb the vocabulary, but never long enough to be helped. What seemed to many a frustrated search for emotional resolution was, in fact, a flight from exposure. Years later, when his agony, like his art, became a public concern, Jackson’s wife and friends would complain bitterly about the incompetent therapy he had received in early adulthood. In fact, with rare exceptions, Jackson got exactly the therapy he wanted—seldom less, never more. “[Therapy] never grew him up in any way,” observed Fritz Bultman, an artist who met Jackson in 1940. “He used it as a crutch.”

  Frequent changes in therapists also meant frequent changes in therapeutic strategies. The first and most critical of these came in early 1939 when Helen Marot, searching for a therapist to replace the Freudian Wall, turned to her friend Cary Baynes, a leader of the small Jungian community in New York. Baynes, in turn, recommended the newest member of that community, a young analyst named Joseph Henderson.

  Once a week, more or less, for the next year and a half, Jackson visited Henderson’s small office-apartment on East Seventy-third Street. Like so many of Jackson’s ambivalent attempts at therapy, however, the sessions with Henderson would prove of far greater benefit to his art than to his psyche.

  22

  ARCHETYPES AND ALCHEMY

  Joseph Henderson had just returned from nine years of study in Europe, including an apprenticeship with Jung, when Cary Baynes recommended him to Helen Marot. At the relatively advanced age of thirty-five, he was still an inexperienced analyst struggling to make a name for himself in a city overrun with German analysts, mostly Freudian, fleeing the incipient war in Europe. Grateful for Baynes’s patronage, and intrigued by the opportunity to work with an artist, he agreed to see Jackson gratis.

  Henderson was a short, slight man with an aquiline nose and pointed jaw that gave his face the sleek aerodynamism of an Art Deco sculpture. Behind the meticulously cultivated facade of Continental elegance, however, lurked a boy, like Jackson, bred in the American backwoods. Born in 1903 in Elko, Nevada, Joseph Lewis Henderson was the ambitious scion of an ambitious frontier family. His great grandfather had been the second governor of Nevada, his father a prominent cattleman, his uncle a United States senator. Although serenely uninterested in his family’s empire, Henderson brought the family ambitions with him to a gilt-edged eastern education. At Lawrenceville Academy, he attached himself to a promising young teacher named Thornton Wilder who introduced him to both psychology and art. When Wilder went on to graduate work at Princeton, Henderson followed as an undergraduate. Afterward, “at sea over his future,” he drifted through the “salons” of Berkeley, California, until he met the Bayneses. They gave him a reproduction of Jung’s painting Mandala of a Modern Man and a copy of Jung’s book The Seven Sermons to the Dead, and instantly he knew what direction his life would take. “I decided right there and then,” he said, “that, if I possibly could, I would have to go and meet the man who had written this.”

  From the start, Henderson was determined to distinguish himself among the army of adoring analysts-in-training who gathered at the Hotel Sonne in Küsnacht, near Jung’s beautiful lakeside Zurich home. In a bid for the master’s attention, he announced that his destiny as an analyst had been revealed to him in a dream. (For the rest of his life, he would make career decisions by “asking his dreams for guidance.”) But Jung was unimpressed. He told Henderson curtly, “If you’re really interested in analysis, go to medical school first.” Henderson did just that, enrolling in premedical studies at the University of London. The night before his final graduation exam, however, he dreamed about a “white horse running over a dark sea” and being killed by an eagle, and took that as a sign that medical school was not his destiny—an insight that was confirmed the next day when he failed the exam. Eventually (after yet another dream about a “ray-like, black fish”) he did pass and, in 1934, consummated his assimilation into the European intelligentsia by marrying Helena Darwin Cornford, great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. While in medical school, he returned often to Zurich where he “swallowed Jung whole,” according to one colleague, and joined the inner circle of apostles whose training consisted of being analyzed by the fifty-five-year-old master.

  Dr. Joseph Henderson

  In the fall of 1938, Henderson brought his wife and daughter to America. From the start, he had difficulty adjusting to the relative isolation and anonymity of New York. Despite his social connections through Cary Baynes and old Princeton friends like Wilder, professional recognition eluded him. Th
e earlier arrival of Freudian emissaries like Otto Rank and Sandor Ferenczi, as well as Freud’s lecture tour in 1909, had staked a prior claim on public attention. Even Jung’s belated lectures at Yale in 1937 did little to loosen Freud’s grip on New York. Only outside the city, especially farther west, where there was “a puritanical reluctance to grant the libido total creative monopoly,” were Jungian ideas finding a truly favorable climate. Late in 1938, not yet licensed and still unknown, Henderson watched as his old schoolmate, Wilder, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed Broadway play Our Town. Soon afterward, a “large, self-contained man” named Jackson Pollock walked into his office.

  Still fresh from his sessions with Jung, armed with theories and eager to build a reputation, Henderson decided to make Jackson a model case. An artist himself, Jung had developed elaborate theories on symbology and the “imaginal mind.” If he could prove these theories using Jackson, Henderson might attract the master’s attention and jump-start his stalled career. “For him, Pollock was just an example for a Jungian study of an artist,” says a friend to whom Henderson recounted his early experience with Pollock. “What interested him was how artists ‘fit the Jungian package.’” Because Jungian theory dictated that analysis focus not on the past but on the future—the search for the “innermost self”—Henderson disdained questions about Jackson’s history: his mother, father, family situation, childhood, or sexual experiences. To avoid polluting his analysis with the errors of others, he refused to look at Jackson’s hospitalization or previous treatment records. He also refused to speak with the previous therapist, Dr. Wall, Marot, or Sande. “[Jackson] was taken simply as he presented himself,” Henderson said later. As a result, he knew only what Jackson chose to tell him. “[Jackson] explained that he did not feel the way he looked,” Henderson recalled, “that he was in a diminished state of being as a result of his problems with alcohol, [and that] he thought of himself as less of a person than [his] brother.” All Henderson knew of Sande was that he “saw to it that Pollock got to his appointments and home again without losing his way or going into a bar.” Although aware of Jackson’s drinking, he chose to ignore it. Jung had taught that as long as such behavior was “managed” in a way that allowed “the emergence of the true self,” the analyst didn’t need to be concerned with it. The “managing” job, of course, was Sande’s. Later, Henderson would joke, “it may be that his drinking was necessary to keep him afloat, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  Without family, past, friends, or previous therapy to talk about, Jackson had little to say. Watching him sit edgily in an office chair, Henderson thought “he seemed preoccupied with his inner thoughts and feelings.” Occasionally he would make a halfhearted effort to “talk about himself,” Henderson later wrote, but “would do so in an impersonal manner, and then only refer to the most superficial aspects of his life.” For weeks, Henderson endured these long, unproductive sessions—“This was not even counseling,” he admitted—and with each frustrating hour, no doubt, felt his career breakthrough slipping away.

  Until Jackson brought in a drawing.

  It is impossible to understand the impact of Jackson’s art on Henderson and on the course of his therapy without understanding the world of ideas in which Henderson lived—the world of Carl Gustav Jung.

  Every person, Jung believed, has the potential to become a healthy, well-adjusted human being: one in whom the four personality coordinates or “functions” (intuition, feeling, sensation, and thinking) are “integrated” into a balanced whole. Under normal conditions, a person’s inner potential or “embryonic germ-plasm” emerges into consciousness only after a long and arduous journey of self-discovery that Jung called “individuation”—the process of becoming an individual. According to another key Jungian theory, every individual is also born with a “collective unconscious,” a set of instinctive patterns, both images and behaviors, that represent the accumulated psychic experience of the race. Jung called these instinctive patterns “archetypes” and theorized that they play an important role in the individuation process. The journey from germ-plasm to “integration” is an interior one, Jung said, but it is marked by the emergence of archetypes along the way, indicating that a person has “discovered” a certain pattern in the collective unconscious and raised it into the light of conscious recognition. Thus, by following the archetypes that emerge in a person’s consciousness—through dreams, for instance—a therapist can track a patient’s progress on the path to integration.

  But archetypes are more than just the by-products of the individuation process. According to Jung, they are preexisting psychic phenomena stored in the unconscious whether or not they’re ever discovered. Therefore, a person who has lost his way (whose personality is out of balance) can be “reintegrated” if only he can recognize the appropriate archetypes. Jung saw this as the therapist’s job: not to review the past to determine where and why a patient went off the path, but instead to help the patient see the way back to the path by directing him to the archetypes that mark the way. For Jung, unlike Freud, the value of a symbol was primarily therapeutic, not diagnostic. Each time a patient, with an analyst’s help, “recognizes” an archetype in his own unconscious, he makes another step toward integration, toward health.

  In this world of curative symbols, Jung considered artists “the symbolmakers.” “The creative process, insofar as we are able to follow it at all,” he wrote, “consists in an unconscious animation of the archetype.” Artists are favored with a special sight—the “visionary mode”—that gives them extraordinary access to the unconscious world of symbols and archetypes. “The artist reaches out to that primordial image in the unconscious,” Jung wrote, “and in the work of raising it from the deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming its shape, until it can be accepted by his contemporaries according to their powers.” When confronted with true art, Jung claimed, “we are astonished, taken aback, confused, put on our guard or even disgusted. … We are reminded of nothing in everyday, human life, but rather of dreams, nighttime fears and the dark recesses of the mind that we sometimes sense with misgiving.” Just as Aristotle’s tragedian traps his audience into “recognizing” half-known truths, Jung’s visionary artist relates “genuine primordial experiences” to his audience, leading to a “synthesis of the individual and the collective psyche” that brings each member of the audience one step closer to integration. As a group, artists constitute a priesthood that can provide therapy for the entire society, bringing it into “balance” just as symbols bring the individual psyche into balance.

  Jung formulated his theories about art and artists partly in reaction to what he saw as Freud’s denigration of art as “substitute gratification” for neurotics seeking escape from reality—what Jung called the “genetic fallacy.” Where Freud explored the personal conditions in which a work of art was created, Jung focused on the work’s psychic significance. “It is art that explains the artist,” Jung wrote, “and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life.” Freud argued that the unconscious symbols in a work of art reveal repressed events from the artist’s life and the analyst’s job is to work with the patient to bring those events into consciousness and “work through them.” Jung believed instead that symbols represent current events that can lead to health. By identifying those symbols and encouraging the patient to provide analogies, an analyst can help a patient “dream the myth onwards” toward the ultimate goal of individuation. Where Freud seemed to reduce art to little more than a diagnostic tool or biographical study, Jung celebrated art’s healing powers and the role of the artist as visionary. “What is essential in a work of art,” Jung wrote, “is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind. The personal aspect is a limitation—and even a sin—in the realm of art.”

  As soon as he saw Jackson’s drawing, Henderson grasped its
value as a therapeutic tool—and as a career opportunity. Why he didn’t inquire about Jackson’s work earlier, given Jung’s emphasis on symbolmaking, isn’t clear. Dream interpretation was Henderson’s preferred method of therapy, and he may have tried others only after Jackson refused to talk about his dreams.

  Thereafter, each session focused on one or two works. The early offerings, done before the therapy began, were Orozcoesque in style, filled with “human figures and animals in an anguished, dismembered or lamed condition,” Henderson recalled—a vein of vivid, disturbing images that Henderson mined enthusiastically, identifying the symbols and trying to engage Jackson in a dialogue about their significance. To one of these early sessions, Jackson brought a turbulent gouache done in primary colors and heavy black outline, depicting a crucifixion reminiscent of Orozco’s Migration of the Spirit at Dartmouth. With Jackson apparently taking notes, Henderson explained the four personality functions and assigned a color in the gouache to each: intuition, yellow; thinking, blue; feeling, red; and sensation, green. (With only three primary colors to work with, he was forced to assign “sensation” to a small patch of smeared black with a slightly greenish hue.) According to Henderson, the violent movement and distortion of the four figures in the work confirmed that Jackson’s four personality functions were dangerously out of balance. The “intuitive” yellow of the crucified figure indicated that “[Pollock’s] own highly developed function of intuition needed no help from anyone, but did need to be rescued from time to time from a crucifying sense of isolation.” Among the few encouraging signs, said Henderson, were the cross (as distinguished from the crucifixion), which represented the axial archetype, and a red circular dot in the upper right corner representing the sun. Both of these appeared to be new “ordering symbols”—or signposts on the road back to integration.