I knead hardened mud with knuckles, working water into it with my fingers, in attempt to make it more pliable. On the eve of a Hindu celebration, I sit down to quite literally shape the deity who will be worshipped, only to later be immersed in a water body.
Drawing from mythology, it is a Goddess who creates her son from her turmeric layered skin. This son who is to guard her as she bathes. The son, one could say is born of only the mother, now encounters the husband, who is not yet his father.
The husband on encountering this child who interrupts his reunion with his wife, in a violent rage, beheads the child, who is not yet his son. The wife, and now mother, wails on seeing her headless creation. The husband replaces the head of their child with an elephant’s head, whom he designates now as the leader or pati, of the ganas. Ganapati, the child of both mother and father and now prince, comes to be known.
When reading mythology, one should be sensitive of the many existing associations around the material. I claim to be no expert in either Hindu mythology, worship rituals and neither can I claim to fully understand its psychoanalytic reading.
This essay is an attempt in engaging my own curiosities with different facets of this story, as I create, with my hands, God. I intend no disrespect to any culture, religion or tradition in this attempt, but to merely notice the ways in which mythology describes and elaborates on human tendencies and ways of relating. We tread with the knowledge that perhaps no new discoveries will be made here, but to consolidate what we may already know through different means.
I will work with what I can hold, and at the moment, it is mud. It is out of this mud, I shape this God. As I work my way through sculpting the body, arms and instruments, I think about this powerful act of shaping and creating the Other into being.
What courses through my mind and my hands as I work with mud? How do I want to shape this God, will I be able to create the structure I imagine? Into this sculpting and shaping, I pour my projections.
How does a mother begin to relate to the reality of shaping life within her, outside of her? What fantasies of the mother does this child come to carry – legacy, rescue, continuity of selfhood, an allowance, a possibility? Just as the mother, I wonder then, momentarily, about the projections that find their way into the mud.
Extending this thinking to the clinic, what runs through the mind of the patient as they begin to shape the life in the presence of the therapist? I am of firm belief that all the patient brings to the therapist is to be revered, and to be treated with devoted attention.
As I listen, I too shape something of my own, quietly in my mind and body, something is forming alongside the patient’s. I am aware that all that I am to verbalise or express, will affect the patient’s shaping. Yet such is our work, we interrupt our sculpting. We interrupt each other with our questions, anxieties, desires, hopes, possibilities, challenges, dilemmas. And we can never quite fully know what will come of this interaction.
It is a risk to sculpt God with another being. We would hope, quite naturally, that both them and I hold the same ideas. And quite naturally, we rarely ever do. We tread across and into each other’s worlds, pausing, continuing, preserving, destroying. With each hour, we are left with a growing sense of our differences. The painful reality that our minds are not one, that we experience different realities, and that we will can never fully know each other.
Having been both patient and therapist, and continuing to be, I have come to regard as sacred this very unknown. I believe both therapist and patient grapple with many projections and fantasies of who the other person is. Yet somehow we meet hour after hour, continuing this work of shaping God, moreso each other. Why do I regard this unknown to be sacred? This is perhaps I have come to experience a strange intimacy that can be born even in knowing so few details of the other. There is something to be said about this experience of devotedly being present to each other that no detail could offer.
The both of us can be tempted to think that we know what it is come of our interaction and our relationship, yet we do not know. We enter the hour, quite simply unaware of our sculpting will take us today.
We do not know who we will become to each other. And yet we may wish to cling to the illusion that we know the other. On some level, we deeply do. And on another, we are still shaping each other.
In the lore, there is a certainty that betrays the clinic. The Goddess Mother has literally projecting into her child, all of her skin. The child then identifying with all of her inside him, and becoming her son.
The child stands guard as the mother returns to herself. Although it seems much like a separation, perhaps it is not. Both mother and child are made of each other. It is the husband, who enters this intimate mother-child couple. The head of this child is beheaded, headless, thoughtless in the absence of the head the mother has shaped for him. The mother’s wails are agonising, it is her child’s head, but also her own that is violently beheaded.
Her creation, the son she creates as a dream, has now come undone. As all our carefully held projections do, the child learns that the mother is not the imagined mother, the mother learns that the child is not the imagined child.
The therapist learns that the patient is not theirs to create, the patient learns that the therapist is not theirs to shape. And it is terribly painful to have one’s head, this very head that shapes these intimate imaginations now severed from the body. One can imagine then how disorienting it must feel to have all of one’s imaginations decapitated.
How do we begin to cope with the reality that the people we create in our minds are our own creations? The moment these precious creations leave our minds and enter a field shared between therapist and patient, it is indeed, terrifying. These creations have now left us, and are at the mercy of the sensitivity, creativity and imagination of the therapist-patient couple.
The therapist is no sculptor of reality, it is the therapist who witnesses the patient sculpt theirs. However in this witnessing, the therapist too must share their desire, fantasy, hope, possibilities that they can dream of, with the patient. The patient too, will hopefully begin to find in themselves space to allow this interruption.
It is an interruption indeed, but perhaps one that is shared with care, intent, curiosity and appropriate clinical grounds. We would much rather continue to sculpt away and shape our Gods as we would like. However, our Gods become carriers of many projections and hands.
And what it is to be sculpted becomes a joint creation, and perhaps a joint intimacy that is revered and worshipped in the clinic. We can only hope that we hold sacred what is shaped, for it is this child that guards our vulnerabilities. We must find a way to bear the agony of what is severed in a loving interruption, and work together to find what can hold our mind and bodies together with and come to celebrate this birth of jointness.
For when the hour ends, in it lies the greatest interruption. Our sculpting together pauses and yet the work of sculpting continues as we part ways. As we leave the clinic, we hold in our minds a creation, carrying it out into our lives. We will never fully know what we carry away in our minds, we can only hope to attempt to communicating this in our work of sculpting.
With the hours, the projections too find their end, hopefully in another reality that acknowledges how we have both come together to understand how we relate to each other and the world outside of us.
The idol that is worshipped is later to be immersed in water. All the hours of painstakingly lovingly shaping each other’s life are now immersed in the waters of time, time which goes on, much past the hour. The God leaves our house, the therapist and patient leave the clinic, yet I would like to believe we are changed in the divine spirit of our interaction. In this shared madness of creating, shaping, resisting, defying, we never do leave the hour quite the same as we began. And what becomes of our discoveries in the clinic, I would like to believe that we find ourselves immersed in our work of living, loving and creating.
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