Playing Scared

by Sara Solovitch

  “People who use the first-person pronoun are really just rehashing what happened,” Ayduk explains. “They tell a story by saying, ‘First this happened, then I said this, my boyfriend said that, and then I said …’ That’s the way autobiographic memories are encoded. It’s about the sequence of events: where it happened, who was involved, what was said and done, what emotions were felt. People taking the third-person perspective also do that. We all do that.” Yet the students who told their stories in the third person were able to make peace with an experience and walk away from it. The meaning of the story had changed. It was reinterpreted and released as a source of stress. One of Ayduk’s colleagues, Jason Moser, a psychologist at Michigan State University, conducted EEG studies that found a dramatic change in brain waves between first- and third-pronoun usages. Students were wired up and exposed to a series of images, some neutral, some gruesome. The neutral images included a coffee mug, a tissue box, and a light bulb. The gruesome images were truly gruesome: a mutilated body, a woman held at knifepoint, a shark attack. The students were asked first to reflect on their responses to the images in the first-person voice. During the second round, they were asked to reflect while using their first names.

  “In the first person, when they used the word I, we got the normal brain response,” reports Moser. “It lit up for the emotional scenes. But when they used their own names, moving into the third person, the emotional response pretty much went away. And it happened within seconds.”

  The approach bears comparison with mindfulness practice in that it teaches people to stand back and observe their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in a healthy way. As Fritz Perls once said, attention “in and of itself is curative.” The practice of meditation demands that one observe every thought, every sensation, every feeling, without judgment. My concert is only six months away and I already feel scared. I just don’t know if I can do it. Hmm, interesting that this thought has entered my brain. Or we can try to lessen the amygdala response by talking to ourselves in the third person. Sara has had some difficult performances in the past and now she’s scared that she may never get her act together. She forgets that she is very prepared and doesn’t have anything to worry about.

  I have been multitasking ever since I was a little girl, propping the latest Nancy Drew mystery on the music stand while executing Hanon exercises in every key. Now, occasionally, at the end of a long and demanding yoga class, I find myself in Shavasana, in a state of unfettered thought and judgment. The space around my body feels extended. I float untethered. It is a moment of sublime concentration. The instant I grasp for it, it eludes. More often, I am thinking about what I plan to make for dinner, which of my kids I’ll call on the way home, and how much more piano practice I want to get in before I climb into bed. The lights are off, thirty bodies lie prostate all around me, and I’m still multitasking. How do you change a habit to which every part of your body reverberates? One way is to just keep coming back to the breath.

  Chapter 8

  ME AND MY SHADOW

  Denny Zeitlin’s earliest memories are of climbing onto his parents’ laps and placing his little hands over their big ones as they played the piano. The family’s Steinway grand dominated the living room, and when Zeitlin was two or three he was given free rein to explore it, to clamber around inside, crawl over the soundboard and across its steel wire strings, to pluck them and lose himself in an ecstasy of sound and touch. Hours went by like this, he remembers, during which he struck and clanged the strings with spoons and blocks and other household objects, before moving on to the black and white keys. It was permission, he says, with a capital P.

  Zeitlin is proof that an unhappy childhood is not a prerequisite for becoming an artist. The San Francisco–based jazz pianist and psychiatrist grew up in a Chicago suburb, with an older sister and two doting parents. His father was a doctor, his mother a speech pathologist, and both were amateur musicians. At seventy-five, Zeitlin is still drawn to those “intergalactic sounds” from childhood, still exploring and creating sound worlds that challenge orthodox assumptions of what constitutes music.

  With more than thirty-five albums under his belt, Zeitlin is a musician’s musician who twice placed first in the DownBeat International Jazz Critics Poll. He has composed music for Sesame Street, and he scored the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also is a clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco, where he teaches psychiatric residents, and has a full-time private practice in San Francisco and Marin County. A lanky, bearded man, he runs up and down Mount Tamalpais, not far from his home in Marin, at least four days a week and is an expert fly fisherman who travels to Christmas Island in the central Pacific for bonefish. Though he has never experienced serious stage fright (“The first time I played Newport Jazz in ‘64, I looked out and there were ten or fifteen thousand people; I was a little nervous”), he has come to understand it.

  Music has always been his main portal to a state that he calls “merging.” His first such association—the toddler almost becoming one with his parents—was soon followed by others. He remembers as a child waking up early and going downstairs to play the piano, eventually noticing, out of the corner of his eye, that his mother had followed him down and was sitting and watching, quietly listening, refraining from comment. Her presence floated across the room to join his, generating a force that spurred him on in some unidentifiable but pleasurable way.

  When Zeitlin speaks about the merger state, he means the dissolution of individual boundaries, a spontaneous transformation of becoming part and parcel of everything and everyone around him. Merging is a way of taking on different aspects of the world and becoming whole with it. On the bandstand, it is triggered when he loses himself in the music and experiences a synesthesia of sounds, where the notes have tastes, textures, and colors, and B, for example, is purple, A is red, D is yellow, and F is green blue. “When I begin to get those experiences, it’s a signal for me that I’m on the verge of entering that merger state.” Musicians and athletes call it “the zone”—a place where the music seems to happen independently of the player.

  Denny Zeitlin (Courtesy of Josephine Zeitlin)

  Music is still the primary portal. (“When I play my best, I often have no idea who’s creating music. I’m aware there’s music happening, but I am not aware I’m playing the keyboard. I could just as easily be playing the drums.”) But it’s not the only one. There are many kinds of mergings: physical, emotional, spiritual, and sexual. When running in the mountains near his home in Marin County, he finds himself flooded with sensation, merged with the wind, light, and landscape. A related feeling comes upon him at the office when, as a psychiatrist, he enters into a profound sense of understanding with the person sitting in the chair across from him. “There is a tremendous commonality between improvising music and working with patients on a deep level,” he says. “It’s entering into a merger experience at its most intense, where the boundaries dissolve out of choice, and yet a part of oneself remains available to observe and comment on the process. In the office, the patient is the protagonist and I’m the accompanist. It’s analogous to what I do as a pianist when a trumpet player takes a solo. How can I support the story this person is trying to tell? How can I try to enhance it or give it some meaning?”

  At the age of six, Zeitlin requested classical piano lessons. He progressed quickly, showing such talent that by the time he turned ten, his piano teacher told his parents it was time to start grooming him for a concert career. He needed to devote himself to a lot less socializing, a lot more practice. “My parents said no, our son is the one who’s going to decide where music is going to take him, and I am so grateful to them for that. I never would have been happy as a classical pianist, playing the same notes over and over, interpreting what someone else wrote on a page. I was always impatient. I would learn a piece of music, and once I understood how it was put together, my interest in performing it was nil. What I was interested in was how
that material might infuse my improvisations and compositions.”

  When he was fourteen, he was introduced to the piano music of George Shearing. Zeitlin had never heard jazz before, but as he listened to the ten-inch LP with a photograph of the blind pianist on the cover, it hit him “like a blitzkrieg. The first piece I heard was his version of ‘Summertime,’ and I was knocked out by that. The way he used classical technique to make new music. It had drive, it had propulsion, and they were making up some of it as they went along!”

  By age fifteen, he was driving—with his parents’ blessings and the key to the family car—to the South Side of Chicago, where he hung out (“the only white kid in a black club”) with some of the era’s leading jazz musicians. It was education by osmosis, absorbing the work of pianists such as Chris Anderson (who would also become a mentor to Herbie Hancock) and Ahmad Jamal (an inspiration to Miles Davis), eventually sitting in with major players such as saxophonist Johnny Griffin and trumpeter Ira Sullivan. There were nights that Zeitlin didn’t get home until four.

  His love of music was rivaled only by a fascination with psychiatry. He first learned about it from his Uncle Howard, a psychoanalyst who regaled the boy with stories about his work and the people he met. The idea that other people had inner lives enthralled Zeitlin and gave him a whole other window on life. When he was seven, he emulated his uncle in the schoolyard, setting up a table at recess where classmates could come and discuss their problems. From an early age, he was convinced he would be involved in both fields. Years later, the pianist Billy Taylor, another important mentor, urged him on toward medical studies, telling him that a musician’s life on the road was not an easy one; better to keep it as an art form, not a means of making a living.

  His psychiatric approach was shaped by his long association with the psychoanalyst Joseph Weiss, a leading theorist of modern psychiatry. Once a week for thirty years, until Weiss’s death in 2004, Zeitlin “bought consultation,” meeting him at his San Francisco office to discuss theory and research and to brainstorm how to help his patients. “It was the outstanding educational experience of my life,” Zeitlin says. “He turned my work around. I never before had such a clear idea of how psychotherapy worked, and soon I found that I was making enormous progress with my patients.” Weiss formulated an influential theory that negative “pathogenic beliefs” about oneself and relationships with others arise from childhood—sometimes from traumatic events, but most often from long-simmering dysfunctional family dynamics. These beliefs lead to psychiatric symptoms and maladaptive behaviors that are doomed to be repeated in future relationships unless the patient can find the key to change. Unlike Freud, who in his early writings promulgated the idea that people exert no control over their unconscious mental life and actually obtain gratification from their neuroses, Weiss argued that patients exercise considerable control over their unconscious processes and have a wish to overcome their problems. He called his approach “control-mastery theory.” According to the model, the therapist’s role is to serve as an ally and help the patient follow her unconscious “plan,” to disprove her pathogenic beliefs by acquiring insight and “testing” the therapist. Zeitlin calls it “a cognitive, relational, humanistic theory,” because, he says, everyone has an unconscious plan for how to rid themselves of their pathogenic beliefs.

  A case early in his psychiatric career gave him an opportunity to test that theory. “A jazz saxophone player—I’m thoroughly disguising this example—came to me because he felt he played wonderfully in rehearsal, but as soon as he stood in front of an audience his performance would fall apart. He was a superior player. He brought in tapes of his music so I could hear it. It seemed like a clear case of fear of failure. He had always gotten top grades in school, been popular—a real golden boy. The possibility that he could not get up in front of an audience was devastating to him.

  “As I understood his family dynamics, his younger brother was not so nearly blessed. He didn’t get the good grades, he didn’t have the musical talent, he didn’t have many friends. As we explored that, he remembered incidents of his brother’s unhappiness. He felt guilty that his life had gone better, that at times he enjoyed feeling superior to his brother. Yet he also worried about him. He had a pathogenic belief that the assets in a family must be parceled out equally. He dealt with his ‘survivor guilt’ by holding himself back in his music to somehow level himself with his brother.” The more Zeitlin explored the family history, the clearer it became that his patient was experiencing the same survivor guilt toward his band mates. “As we worked through it, he began to play more and more in public and began feeling joy in kicking ass and even allowing himself to feel superior to his fellow musicians. They ‘passed the test’ by responding very positively, helping him to disconfirm his pathogenic belief that everyone had to be equal in ability. It was an extremely therapeutic experience. He’d been the lame one in the band, and now he was the star.”

  Zeitlin became known as an expert in the creative process. As his psychiatric practice grew, it attracted a large number of artists, particularly performing artists. Many came because they were experiencing creative blocks. “Most of these people had heard I was a performer and hoped I would understand their experience. And certainly performance anxiety has come up a lot. I try to discover what pathogenic beliefs are producing this symptom, and there are numerous possibilities. Often, guilt over success can masquerade as a fear of failure, as in the example of my ‘saxophonist’ patient. It’s an underappreciated theme in psychotherapy, and I’ve found it very valuable to tune in to that. It happens when someone doesn’t feel they deserve to be successful. They snatch defeat from the jaws of success. They’ll convince themselves they’re really impostors.”

  Most performers who admit to stage fright trace it to childhood. It’s always easy to blame one’s parents. But when it comes to classical music, ballet, equestrianism—anything that demands early exposure, dedicated practice, and excellence—the parental voice lodges itself deep and early, as intertwined in the child’s psyche as the strands of the double helix. I once met a middle-aged violinist who told me that the instant she pulled the bow across the strings, she didn’t hear music; she heard her father’s censorial voice. I had gone looking for the psychological underpinnings of my own stage fright, reaching out not only to Zeitlin, but to Freudians, Adlerians, Jungians, and integrative psychologists and psychiatrists. Their insights were provocative and sometimes helpful, but they didn’t necessarily guarantee my own progress. When it came down to it, this was my fight.

  Unlike the Zeitlin living room in suburban Chicago, where a Steinway grand doubled as an indoor playground, the modest Heintzman upright in the Solovitch house in Port Colborne, Ontario, was downright fetishized. When I was a little girl, my mother looked on as I washed my hands, then inspected them on both sides before I was allowed to sit down and play. If I didn’t get down to business right away, I was accused of banging, or “boompking.” Even today, the idea that a child would be allowed to clamber over and around a soundboard strikes me as crazy.

  I was encouraged to merge with the piano in other ways. One of my earliest memories is of lying under my aunt’s grand piano, feeling my body reverberate to the sounds and vibrations of that enormous beast. When I came up for air, it was to watch my aunty Maddy’s hands fly across the keys. I can still remember thinking how odd it was that the notes rang clear even as her fingers fogged up in a blur of motion. Aunty Maddy had begun studying the piano when she was three years old, taking lessons from a pianist her mother had known in Russia. Madam B. came to my grandparents’ walk-up in Syracuse and introduced Maddy to the piano with the C scale: “One, two, three, pass the tomba,” she dictated in a thick accent. When the little girl, with her chubby fingers, failed to execute the scale and turn her thumb properly, Madame B. became infuriated, threw her into a closet, and locked the door—fighting off my grandmother’s pleas to let her baby out. Abusive as that was, it had no lasting impact on my aunt’s
love of music. She played Chopin especially beautifully, attacking the études and mazurkas and ballades with passion. Her hands probably weren’t much larger than mine, but in my memory they spanned the keyboard. Her playing conveyed uncomplicated joy; even when the music was sad or pensive, she played as though she were thrilled to be alive.

  As a pianist, I was her opposite, controlled by the shadow, what Carl Jung called “the inferior part of the personality.” He meant, of course, the unconscious, which has to be recognized and assimilated for a whole, integrated self to emerge. Jung knew all about the fear of public speaking, defining it as an illness of the consciousness of the self. “What can one say to a person who is self-conscious?” he said in a series of seminars called Visions. “You cannot be better than you are, why should you be self-conscious? You are just foolish. I have to say the same thing to myself, too, of course, and I know very well why I need it. Everybody is sick for a time with that self-conscious business.”1 It is in that collection of seminars that Jung tells the apocryphal story of a tongue-tied Alcibiades, fearful of speaking before the people of Athens. Classicists and scholars of ancient Greece say they can find no evidence of the tale in the historical record and question whether, Jung created it as a way of explaining, perhaps even taming, his own fear.

  In classic Jungian thought, stage fright is a primal fear, awakening archetypal memories of ourselves as herd animals thrust outside the safety of the pack. Our predators—the lions, the sharks, the audience—smell our vulnerability and hover nearby, waiting for that one mistake.