Playing Scared (15 page)

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.

“To make one’s self conspicuous is to detach one’s self from the herd, to stand apart and alone,” wrote Dorsha Hayes, an actress and dancer who, after a bout of rheumatic fever ended her performing career in 1936, became a poet, novelist, and essayist on Jungian psychology. In an article titled “The Archetypal Nature of Stage Fright,” she analyzed the dread of poets who read their verse in public. “In our long human history, severance from the group has always held an element of danger, and we may assume that a behavioral pattern has been formed and is deeply imbedded below the level of consciousness … Down through the centuries, the one who stood alone was vulnerable and helpless against the massed attack of his fellows; he was the outcast, the victim, the one who could be lynched, tortured, stoned to death, crucified. Man’s fear of man is causal in origin. It is the individual who has known the inhumanity of man.”
²
The archetype of the stoned man or outcast, embedded in unconscious memory, is, in Hayes’s words, countered by the image of the leader who has led his people to clear water, the one who “can walk safely among the many for as long as his counsel serves the general good.” The unconscious image of the stoned man underlies the fear of every individual who steps out onstage alone.

John Beebe, a Jungian analyst who lectures internationally, told me he used to suffer deep anxiety from public speaking. “I was standing up there, quite literally trying to perform to a group of people with very high standards. And I had imagined
that I was like a bride before her wedding and that I could not see the groom. As though I were pure and virginal and white. I decided that image was all wrong. So what I began doing was, when I came into an auditorium, I would go up to people I knew and shake their hands. It surprised people. They don’t expect you to do that. But by affirming them like that, when I got up onstage I felt I was speaking to people I already had a rapport with. Now I do that all the time and it comes very naturally.”

We were sitting in his San Francisco office, the same small, brick-walled room he has maintained since opening his practice forty-five years ago. Beebe is a film buff who has written widely on the power of cinema to illustrate ideas of the shadow: “the thing a person has no wish to be,” as Jung put it. He is especially drawn to the archetype of integrity, which he sees as a dialectic between persona, the face we present before the world, and anima, or soul. This tug and pull between showmanship and sincerity implicitly shapes the way we respond to performances. The great ones are explorations of honesty, searches for truth.

Beebe threw a leg over the arm of his chair. The actor and singer Liza Minnelli, he said, was a case in point. In 2011, she gave a comeback performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London. As Beebe began to describe it, he grew so animated that he stopped the conversation, drew himself straight up in the chair, and turned to his computer. Yes, there it was, a YouTube clip of Minnelli singing “But the World Goes ’Round.” She was her usual ebullient self, glamorous in purple sequins, holding tight to the microphone and belting out the words with vaudeville intensity. When Minnelli came to the part about broken dreams not mattering, she sang,

Take it from me, there’s still gonna be

A summer, a winter, a spring and a fall

I was aware of her overly wide vibrato and cracked notes; it was the voice of an aging performer. Minnelli struggled a few minutes and came to an abrupt halt. She turned to face the band and muttered something about the second verse. Either she had just lost her place or she wasn’t happy with her singing. She wanted to go back and fix it. The pianist groaned but started again, a few bars before where they’d left off. This was her signature song, the one she made famous in the 1977 movie
New York, New York
, and now that she was sixty-five, the words sounded as if they were about her.