Why Are So Many Artists Becoming Therapists?

Why did you decide to become a therapist?
From my early 30s, I thought I might become a therapist if being in the art world became too much to bear. Surely enough, in my mid-40s, I decided I had had enough of its fashion cycles, its vicissitudes, and its fickleness. Soon, I was applying to graduate school again, this time for counseling. I told a friend, “I give up being an artist in the art world,” which felt good, if a bit shocking. I had wanted to be an artist—and I didn’t give up being an artist, really. I just gave up, at least temporarily, tying part of my identity to being someone who reveled in his work being seen, valued, and acquired by collectors and institutions.

I knew I needed a passion other than making art that would be financially stable and emotionally satisfying. Being an artist tends to be a very selfish business that involves spending many hours alone. The world needs art, but the cost of making it feels indulgent, whereas being a therapist has more of a direct contribution to the betterment of something or someone.

Now that I’m in my second year of training as a therapist, I feel ready to make art again, with the same ambition I’ve always known, though I am tentative about wanting to be part of the art world as I knew it. More than anything, I’ve realized making art is about self-care. That is what is most important now.

What kind of therapy do you practice,
and why?
I practice psychoanalytic therapy, the branch originally founded by Freud and since elaborated and refined by so many others. I chose that modality because I fell in love with its language and stories, its focus on the earliest relationships in one’s life and how they color the present.

What do art and therapy have in common?
Art-making is self-care. Not making it, one can feel like a slice of one’s self has been taken away. In that sense, art is very similar to therapy, because its practice can bring you in better contact with yourself. Art is a healing dialectic with the self, whereas therapy is a healing dialectic with another person—which is ultimately a more effective and efficient way to bring about personal growth and understanding. Another mind helps decipher between reality and fantasy.

Did your evolution surprise you, or had you always been curious?
My evolution surprised me mildly. I tend to be very persistent, so to “give up” on the art world felt like a huge rupture in my life’s narrative. On the other hand, it felt like I was always going to take this road, knowing that my values are not aligned with those of the art world.

What has surprised you most?
Working as a trainee therapist has been humbling. Starting a new skill from scratch can be difficult at times. But I am surprised by how fast I am learning “on the job.”

Has working as a therapist changed your art?
It’s made my practice feel much more open-minded and expansive, less concerned with distinct purposes and goals in mind.

Maslansky (b. 1976) is a painter who has exhibited at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, the 2014 edition of “Made in L.A.,” and elsewhere.

Why did you decide to become a therapist?
I was interested in the little I knew about psychotherapy from a young age; I had this Freud book on dreams. After getting my MFA in photography, I began seeing a therapist whose office was in the consultation rooms of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP) in New York. I saw a brochure for courses and decided to audit one. That course was on Borderline Pathology, and I became engrossed.

I enrolled in the Training Institute of NPAP and began taking classes very slowly, in part because I soon moved to Panama, where I spent the next three years. It took me 14 years to complete the training and arrive at the stage called Readiness for Control, which means you have done enough self-analysis to understand the countertransference that can arise when working with patients.

What kind of therapy do you practice, and why?
I practice self psychology, which was developed by Heinz Kohut. The modality is part of the developmental psychology movement and involves repairing the negative unconscious voice that can be internalized as a consequence of, for example, a narcissistic parent. Positive transference with the therapist is meant to repair the patient’s sense of self. If someone may have internalized the negative voice of a love object, self psychology aims to override this negative voice with a new positive one.

What do art and therapy have in common?
I have used some art therapy in psychoanalytic sessions, and it can be very helpful for the patient to place an image to a feeling. I do not believe that talk treatment is very different than the process of creating. But talking and being heard, and placing language to one’s feelings, are distinct. Both are helpful.

Did your evolution surprise you, or had you always been curious?
In retrospect it makes sense. Psychoanalysis allowed me to understand myself and my family history, which I also do in my artwork.

What has surprised you most?
The spiritual connection that develops between therapist and patient. Giving therapy can be very spiritual work in the end. It is work about two souls that connect. This is the healing part in the work.

Has working as a therapist changed your art?
I was surprised by how much psychoanalysis impacted my practice. The more I listened to my patients, the more oral history became important to my art. The intersections between languages, the words people choose, and also the somatic feelings held in the body became more interesting to me as I continued with psychoanalytic work.

Mozman Solano (b. 1972) is a photographer and recipient of a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Why did you decide to become a therapist?
I think becoming a psychoanalyst was an intuitive progression out of my art practice. I was first introduced to psychoanalysis by way of a Lacan seminar in graduate school. I understood virtually nothing, but it had an impact. I remember making photographic work at that time that explored a fantasy of liberating images from their real-world referentiality so that they’d become “autonomous.” I was transforming found images into large black-and-white prints.

My first solo show was, in retrospect, very self-therapeutic. My family had abruptly moved out of my childhood home, and I was coming to terms with their new house as an adult. It was then that I became interested in the Freudian uncanny and began to think about the domestic space from a psychoanalytic perspective.

I had a fortunate run in the New York art world in the early 2000s, but after the 2008 financial crisis, I had to find regular work, which compromised my studio practice. I started my own therapy, and as that work deepened, I began to reject the idea of audience as my artwork became more introspective. I had a hard time reconciling the personal meaning I found in my work with the hard realities of the art market circuitry.

While teaching at the New School in 2014, I audited an advanced Relational Psychoanalysis class. I was captivated by the clinical experience of psychoanalysis and the close-process examination of human interaction. I then embarked on an independent study, attending psychoanalytic colloquiums and lectures throughout the city, eventually finding the courage to apply to the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in 2015.

What kind of therapy do you practice,
and why?
I practice psychoanalysis, or psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It’s the only mode that makes sense to me ethically and aesthetically.

What do art and therapy have in common?
Freud and many psychoanalytic thinkers have grappled with this question and view creative capacity, artistic and otherwise, to have a therapeutic aim. In both, there’s a meeting of the mysterious and the familiar, a fluctuation between indulging in the free play of fantasy and then organizing these fragmentary impressions or giving them a shape.

The pictorial is part of the psychoanalytic process. Images populate the consulting room when one is free-associating and they can have a transformative power as they light up the analyst’s imaginary, which hopefully facilitates an insight or internal shift in the analyst that the patient can sense and make use of. Some analysts believe that the only kind of transformation that can take place is through a pictorial representation in the mind of the analyst.

I think these disciplines are distinct in that psychoanalysis prioritizes the patient’s needs and psychic contents. In some ways, as an analyst, you have to be selfless and give yourself over to the patient’s inner milieu.

Has working as a therapist changed your art?
I’m not currently making art because I feel more engaged with my clinical work. I do fantasize about returning to a studio practice at some point; I miss it quite a bit.

Did your evolution surprise you, or had you always been curious?
As is often stated in this line of work: It both surprised me and didn’t. I think it was mostly a matter of finding courage to explore this other side of myself.

De Holl (b. 1976) is a painter and photographer who has exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; and elsewhere.

Why did you decide to become a therapist?
It’s an idea that I had circled around for years. In my art practice, I always engaged my own interiority and my own history. I love having a studio practice and its solitudes, but there’s something about sitting down with another person that I was really craving. Then I had my son, and started training. At first the process felt daunting and long, but it started to make more sense.

What kind of therapy do you practice, and why?
I’m training with the Jung Institute, which is also known as depth psychology or analytical psychology. I chose this a little bit by chance; it’s not what I planned. My mother is a psychoanalyst, a Freudian, so I had been researching Freudian institutes in New York. But I’ve found that Jungian psychoanalysis is closer to some Eastern thought, and that resonates with me. I think a Jungian approach can be amazing for artists, because it revolves around this idea that the psyche works in images, and emphasizes the role of symbols and amplification. One never completely concretizes a fixed meaning for a symbol, which feels very generative.

What do art and therapy have in common?
As a photographer working in the studio, the shift to the consulting room feels natural to me. Both spaces are based on this dyad, and involve a heightened awareness and sensitivity: looking, listening, and using all your senses. Also, in both the artist-object and the analyst-patient dynamic, I find that a kind of co-creation happens.

There’s always this question in the Jungian world as to whether Jung was an artist or a scientist. He was a scientist, a psychiatrist—but the work is so creative.

Did your evolution surprise you, or had you always been curious?
Having grown up with my mother [an analyst], there was some familiarity. Even my grandfather was a psychiatrist, a refugee from Bengal. Looking back, it makes sense as an evolution.

What has surprised you most?
The extent to which things I’ve learned in the studio inform my therapeutic practice. Also, the diversity of patients—it’s such a range. Yet, with each patient, you start to create something together, to make meanings, and connect with one another.

Has working as a therapist changed your art?
How could it not? My last show featured a source-material wall that drew from Jungian concepts—not specifically my clinical practice, but from his ideas of archetypal symbolism. I would love for analytic ideas to be taught in art school. It’s human nature, psyche, interiority. There’s so much there that art students would benefit from.  

Nayar (b. 1975) is a photographer whose work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Guggenheim Museum, among others.