My “Inner Accountant”

Although I have never written applied poetry on psychohistory in the sense Howard Stein defines, I have been involved in producing art (mostly drawings and some poems) over my lifetime. This has led me to develop a theory about art, which adds support to his ideas.

Growing up, I spent so much of my time drawing that it made me wonder what drove me. I was also struck by the paradox that although at the beginning of a piece of work I usually had no conscious idea of what I was trying to produce, I often gave up on drafts because they felt “wrong,” although I could not tell why. My best guess was that I was trying to strike a balance between something inside me and something outside me that the artwork bridged as the equivalent of a transitional object (I had the idea early, although the words are a later formulation). I have not found a better explanation yet. Looking back on my art, I can see that it was therapeutic; I was either trying to understand something new to me or, more importantly, family dynamics. Also, this process regularly involved subconscious material that usually took more than two years for me to consciously acknowledge.

Usually, observing myself, I had the sense that I had an “inner accountant” who kept track of certain things without me being aware of the rationale. I think what I observed is a basic step of symbolization, a statistical assessment of an observed object’s structure. One late example of this was a spontaneous thought during my psychoanalytic training while I was also working as an administrator of my institute clinic (without any previous relevant training or experience). Out of the blue, while working in my office, I was hit with this idea: “You are a farmer, but your crop is people.” It was useful to me as a metaphor for what I was doing and supposed to do at the time, but I also realized it was the conclusion to a decades-old subconscious issue: At the beginning of my puberty, during a walk, my family talked about the development of nobility. I could see everyone in my family as associated with nobility, while I thought of myself distinctly as a “throwback” and a “peon” (a judgment of my “inner accountant” at the time, which I kept to myself in embarrassment but did not doubt). I had not

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dwelt on this consciously afterward, but my subconscious apparently was percolating it and now proclaimed another, more refined judgment.

This was accompanied by the sense of something falling into place, which has often been associated with the experience of truth for me. That experience thus demonstrates the persistence of subconscious thought in the attempt to find a point of balance, a.k.a. the “inner accountant.” I have also had some dreams with a “prescient” element, which I think were based on the same process of “accounting” prior to language proper. Shevrin et al. (1996) is relevant in this context: Using the latent and explicit content of phobias, the experiment shows the effect of defenses changing the reaction to phobic triggers, contingent on the duration of their presentation (i.e., the presentation sustained during the time it took the defenses to process them). It is a supremely elegant demonstration of the difference between intuition, which is dominated by the subconscious, and our usual conscious perception, which is much more influenced and sanitized (made socially acceptable) by our defenses, including rationalization.

The “inner accounting” I have talked about, in my opinion, plays an important role in intuition, the task of which is to alert us to biological opportunities or dangers without much of a narrative elaboration, but instead simply as an assessment of the energies and, at best, short-term dynamics of a system (e.g., the presence of positive or negative feedbacks). It helps us synchronize with the systems we are in and seems to be most closely related to music and dance in that way. We know that music has been connected with mathematics, and I believe that this is generally true for art: We have not only extensive studies of proportions in Renaissance art (from Durer to da Vinci) but also analyses of very divergent samples, such as bee waggle dances, Pollock paintings, and implicit patterns in a Japanese temple garden renowned for its serenity, which converge on the identification of underlying mathematical patterns as basis of their aesthetic appeal (see also Leicher, 2010). We know that movement, and by implication, space (in which movement happens), is extremely important for our orientation and planning, so it makes sense that we developed a finely differentiated assessment system: aesthetics, which also starts to introduce a biological evaluation (things are aesthetically pleasant because they are conducive to supporting our lives); elegance means we can achieve an end with an economy of means; and beauty is an omen

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of a biological gold mine.

From this discussion, it should be expected that if we are intensively and extensively involved in an engaging enterprise, like a psychohistorical area of study, our subconscious (preconscious in Freud’s terminology) would process the dynamics involved and then also be able to reproduce them in a piece of art, such as an “applied poem.” The difficulty is in maintaining the dominance of the subconscious in recording and reproduction without the distortion of our desires and fears. Stein is aware of this issue, as his correct warnings not to “guide” our art demonstrate (although I would quibble with his use of “countertransference” because the situation does not involve a “transference” since it is not a clinical exchange). However, it is certainly an intuitive assessment (like a countertransference reaction would also be). It is still a tall order (as any psychoanalyst who is trying to be aware of “countertransference” reactions and not have them meddle with their interventions knows), but it is not impossible.

We know that mastery of any subject is associated with about 10,000 hours of practice (roughly the equivalent of five years of full-time work), and it makes sense to assume that in that time frame, we might subconsciously have distilled the dynamics of our object of study. Expressing it in the form of poetry presents itself as an ingenious way of short-circuiting our conscious defenses to speak the truth—and maybe even surprising ourselves with where we arrive when we can sideline our defenses for a moment.

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