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Led by Eileen Dunn, a seasoned clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, The Art of Listening explores the transformative power within the space between speaker and listener. Join us and our guests on this collective journey of self-discovery, as we navigate the depths of human connection and the power of listening.
Rosa Aurora: [00:00:02] Psychoanalysis itself in a very organic, natural way is a creative process. It's a wonderful creativity facilitator at many levels where sensing and we are making connections. We are assembling this multi-dimensional puzzle where a lot of things are happening at the same time, kind of like an orchestra that is having a lot of different melodic lines and rhythmic lines going on at the same time.
Eileen: [00:00:37] I'm Eileen Dunn, and this is the Art of listening, a podcast that delves into the incomparable power of human connection and the magic of good depth. Talk therapy. Today's guest is Rosa Aurora Chavez. I want to start this episode with a simple thought experiment. Think about a memory you hold dear. Imagine it. Immerse yourself for a few minutes. What comes to mind. Is it an image bright and colorful? The echo of a song and a dance. A handful of words that made you feel seen. Is it a scent reminding you of someone or something you loved? Or even an emotion? A certain way of feeling that brings you back to a single moment in time. Now alive with this memory. Notice the work of imagination. You have engaged in the very creativity of remembering. It lives at the heart of the therapeutic hour. Within the confines of the room we share as speakers and listeners. We recreate images that encapsulate our inner worlds. We give a voice and breathe life into the thoughts and emotions that we carry with us day after day. Or, as my guest, Rosa Aurora, would say.
Rosa Aurora: [00:02:12] We are hearing when we're listening very closely. We begin to have a very vivid movie in our minds to what the patient is telling us. All the sudden, a visual image that becomes almost a symbolic representation of of something that is related to what the patient is telling me, and it becomes kind of like a painting. Then when I see it, I can understand a lot of these elements.
Eileen: [00:02:35] Rosa, Aurora and I first met at the Washington Baltimore Center for psychoanalysis, where we were fellow candidates in training to become analysts. There is a warmth and a gentleness about Rosa, and even more so, a striking sense of curiosity, undaunted, that I so admire. It has taken her from the arts to science, to the use of creativity for healing and growing through psychoanalysis. In today's episode, she shares her journey into the study of the human mind. We discuss how creativity works cognitively and explore the significance of imagery, the transformative power of imagination to heal and to inspire our daily lives. As you listen, I invite you to ponder how do you think about creativity in your own life? What are your creative outlets and how much stock do you put into them for expressing and discovering yourself? And now please welcome Rosa Aurora Chavez. She is a creativity researcher, a psychoanalyst in private practice, and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University, with over 15 years of experience in the field. Listen before we dive into studies and clinical work, and we want to hear about your upbringing. When you look back on your early life, what images come to mind? Could you even draw a picture? You know, of what your childhood looked like?
Rosa Aurora: [00:04:24] I think it would be a collage more than a picture. So many images pop up in my mind, but I think that probably the most essential one is the environment that we have in my family growing up, and even until now, both of my parents were academics, they were physicians, they were very interested in science, but also in culture, in arts and history. And they had an amazing library. So I remember that when I was a kid, I was just reading everything that I encountered. That was a wonderful opportunity. So I had the opportunity to read most of Shakespeare's plays when I was eight years old, and whatever I understood. It really left a deep mark in me. And they took us to museums, to concerts, to exhibitions, to popular culture festivals. And but most importantly, they are very caring people and very caring about our fellow human beings. So I think that that part of the family culture was probably the most important, where we were always seeing others as our fellow human beings and caring about others, especially my parents, both being physicians. So that's something that left a really big print in me and my mom said psychoanalyst. She asked me during her training to translate her papers from English to Spanish, and and she wouldn't pay me for that. And I found that what she was studying was totally fascinating. So I think that all those experiences made me very interested in in the care of others, but also in, in culture, in arts, in creativity and and in psychoanalysis.
Eileen: [00:06:15] Said again, your mom is an analyst and you translated her papers.
Rosa Aurora: [00:06:20] Yeah. When she was in her psychoanalytic training, she was very busy because at the same time she was the chair of the psychiatry and psychology department at the National Pediatrics Institute. So she was extremely busy. So and she had a lot of readings for her training, and many of them were in English, so she asked me to translate them. I was in middle school, but reading my mother's papers and translating them and and sometimes summarizing them made me really, I think, ignited a vocation in me. Really. Because later, when I had to choose what to do, it became clear that I wanted to do that. Wow. So at the same time, I was going to the lab with my dad is an immunologist, and he and his colleagues were doing certain experiments, and I was sometimes I was in charge of doing the blind administration of the drugs to the mice and then measuring them and taking all the samples to do so. So I was really very curious about everything. I was fascinated by science as to how things work, how things happen, and soon after, because I also began writing poetry myself, and I was totally intrigued by the experience of automatic writing.
Rosa Aurora: [00:07:42] I became very curious, like, how does this happen? How does this happen in the brain? How can we make poetry? What happens in our brain that we can create art? So everything was connecting. So I think that at some moment when I decided to study medicine and study psychiatry, there was one institute that the National Institute of Psychiatry, that they had all these areas, the clinical area, the neuroscience. They have a whole neuroscience buildings with state of the art brain imaging and and ethology unit and immunology, genetics, um neurophysiology labs, but also another unit of social research. So I thought this is the place that I want to go, because it tries to study our minds from a very holistic point of view. And and eventually I got support there by the founder, Ramon de la Fuente, to, I mean, he supported my my research to be able to do not only cleaning metric research with with artists, with scientists, with very, very accomplished, highly creative people, but also to do brain imaging, to study their genes, to do a lot of phenomenology. So that was nice that I also got the support at that place to to study creativity.
Eileen: [00:09:09] Rosa Aurora's upbringing is a perfect blend of intellectual and artistic exploration. Her family's passion for science and history, her seminal cultural experiences attending museums, concerts and exhibitions all were building blocks for her creativity. They seeded a curiosity, an intent to learn more. Woven together, these moments formed a question, yes, but more so a determination to dig in and find out more about the very roots of the creativity process. Where does this force come from, and how does it reach the material world to shape the artful ways we move through and handle our existence? These thoughts were the starting point for her work and her studies. I mean in the name of the relationship then, between creativity and neuroscience and who we are and how we are and how we create. What did you find? I wonder if you could say more about what you.
Rosa Aurora: [00:10:26] So the research was done in three steps. The first one became my thesis to graduate as a psychiatrist, because also in Mexico you have to write a thesis, kind of like a dissertation to to graduate from a residency program. So that one was about what is creativity? So I thought that first, to be able to study it, I needed to come with an operational definition to be able to study. And I decided that for me, it was more important the process. What I found at that time was that the process has like three different domains, and that they can happen simultaneously or overlap with each other. In the first domain is when we do associations, and where associating between elements that were not previously related in in very spontaneous way, sometimes random ways. And we are connecting ideas. And this is something that also later became very important when I went into the psychoanalytic training, because this is the basis of free association. The other part is what we do with those ideas, and that's more the elaboration, how we work with these ideas, the famous perspiration after the inspiration. And then the third domain is how do we communicate those ideas? In one hand, it inspires other people to create, but also it comes with other challenges, like who are the gatekeepers for communicating ideas or or what are other kinds of innovations that could come about communicating and sharing our ideas and putting them in the world? Then in the second stage of the research, I continued doing that research, and I took the opportunity to do a master's in clinical research in psychiatry with that project that was trying to find out what's the relationship between psychopathology and creativity.
Rosa Aurora: [00:12:15] So for that one, I was studying a lot of scientists, artists, writers, musicians that they were very accomplished at the time. Also, everyday ordinary people that didn't have any mental illness and also psychiatric patients that they were outpatients and that they didn't have psychosis episodes, but all kinds of diagnoses. And it was a very big, big, big sample. And what I found in that project, interestingly, is that there is a very strong inverse correlation between creativity and psychopathology. The the more psychopathology, the less creativity. Which is totally contrary to the cliché of the that you need to be mad to be a genius, and one of the reviewing literature in the discussion of that project in some of the papers where they found a positive association. The sample, the subjects that they studied, they were having a bad time at the time, they were accomplished artists or accomplished writers, but at the time they were sampled, they were having a blockage, they were having a creative blockage, they were having a really hard time in their lives, and they were not as productive as they were before. And they were also having depression or other kinds of disorders. And in the sample that I had, they were at the peak of their production. And that was a substantial difference, because at that time they were actually quite mentally healthy.
Rosa Aurora: [00:13:56] But there's also another thing is that the World Health Organization has noticed that creativity is one of the key components of resiliency. And it makes sense also with these findings and also very high. Cooperativeness Self-directedness. So we're talking about people and persistence that are able to persist in spite of difficulties, in spite of rejections, and with the self-directedness to see the goal, even if it's really, really far away and go like an arrow to that goal. So that was also an interesting finding. And finally, that highly creative people are more excitable Neurophysiologically excitable. So stimulation stays longer and it's more intense too, especially all the experiences that all the sensorial experiences, they create a bigger impact. And then the next stage with that project, it was inviting this cohort, the same cohort and in one hand, inviting the people that had the highest scores in creativity and do an in-depth interview about the phenomenology of the process. How was the experience of creating but also doing some neuroimaging while they were resolving the the tolerance test for creative thinking, so we could see exactly what was happening in their brain when they were creating and score that creativity performance that they were having in the brain scan. So that was super cool. And the results were really fascinating because in one hand, both hemispheres were activated. Not just the left, not just the right, but both at the same time. In addition, there was an activation at the same time of prefrontal areas and temporal areas, and the way temporal areas were activated were very similar to what happened sometimes in psychotic processes, but in psychotic processes the prefrontal areas are not activated.
Rosa Aurora: [00:16:09] So here they were activated at the same time so they could experience what. Now as analysts we know it's the primary process. But at the same time they have all these prefrontal areas that they could be experiencing at the same time and making sense of this primary process, experience with secondary process. So there was an integration of primary process and secondary process. Other two interesting findings is that all the multimodal, all the sensory information that comes from different senses and where they integrate, they were more activated, significantly more activated. That makes also sense because in highly creative people, the rate of synesthesia is much, much, much more higher than in regular population. And all the areas of imagery were very highly activated. And when I was asking them about in the phenomenology interview about their experience, they were telling me that imagery was like really at the core, because a lot of the creations, whether they were artistic or were scientific, they came from an image, from a sensation and something very vivid that they had, especially the kind of imagery that is the motor imagery. That is what we see ourselves doing. And that area, the motor imagery was very activated, and that's the area that in Albert Einstein was bigger than other areas, significantly bigger than in other. And he was someone that came to his theories imagining himself riding a rocket and having all this imagery.
Eileen: [00:17:57] Rosa Aurora's research opens up new ways of thinking about creativity. Her results reframe the assumption that trauma and pain are the foundation for creative depth. They refute the idea that art only happens through suffering. Instead, they show us that, like so many aspects of our lives, our creative abilities flourish when we are in a state of nurtured well-being. Not only that, they activate pathways in our brains and keep us feeling motivated, energized, and happy. So when we do find ourselves paralyzed with fear. Grief. The grip of the unknown. Creativity can lift us up. Dig us back out. Returning us to ourselves again. I found myself, you know, wanting to shift into thinking about treatment and, you know, the practice of analysis and how you think about creativity and the use of imagery and symbolism and metaphor.
Rosa Aurora: [00:19:15] I think that it was precisely all these findings that brought me back to psychoanalysis, actually, because I realized that that psychoanalysis was what could make be helpful to to make sense of all these experiences, the meaning of these experiences, but also in the case of blockages, uh, how creativity gets tangled and frozen. I couldn't think about any other field of knowledge that could be as helpful as psychoanalysis to really explore all those processes in depth. In that regard, I have to say that psychoanalysis, despite maybe the some beliefs it has actually anticipated a lot of the more recent findings from neuroscience, I mean, decades ago. And that's something that just now neuroscience is finding that it's totally true.
Eileen: [00:20:12] So I'm trying to picture you in your work these days, or in your practice and your ongoing work with people, like, how do you how do you use it in the hour to hour work?
Rosa Aurora: [00:20:24] It's just natural because psychoanalysis itself, in a very organic, natural way, is a creative process. So I really don't have to do anything differently because the nature of psychoanalysis, it's it's a wonderful creativity facilitator at many levels. First, it's how free association, it's at the core of the process, both in the patient that is free associating, but also in us that we are having this analytic listening when we are kind of putting in in parentheses our own experiences without denying them, without letting them intrude in what is happening between the patient and us in the room, but still very present. And we are sensing and we are we are also associating what we're hearing. We are making connections. We are assembling this multi-dimensional puzzle where a lot of things are happening at the same time, kind of like an orchestra that is having a lot of different melodic lines and rhythmic lines going on at the same time, and we are more and more trained to listen all those simultaneous things that are happening. That's something super important in creativity, because if we have free association, if we have the ability to to listen and observe and get inspired by different things and multiplicity of things happening at the same time, that's very much a creative process. But how it comes alive with emotion, which is also something very important in the creative process.
Rosa Aurora: [00:22:01] And not only that, not only in what comes alive, whether it's in the feeling or in what is said in the session, but also what happens over time. That's also a fascinating thing because psychoanalysis itself, it is a creative process in the moment, but as a psychoanalytic process that takes time over days, weeks, months, years, sometimes it begins to change. Also, the the person in a very deep way that creativity becomes more possible. So one side effect that I have always observed in psychoanalysis is that people are freer to to create their creativity. It flows more, it's lighter and they know more about they own more, more their own. Creativity and creativity is really a human trait, but it is in everyone. That's what I mean. This is not something that only extreme geniuses have. No, this is something that is part of who we are as human beings, and something that is very related to what makes us feel alive, because a lot of vital forces are also activated with creativity. And what makes us feel that we have sense that we are fulfilled, that our existence has a meaning. So it's it's beautiful because psychoanalysis itself, it's a process that involves a lot of creativity while it happens every hour, but it also becomes in a person that feels more creative, more fulfilled, with more meaning.
Eileen: [00:23:53] As Rosa Aurora so eloquently expresses it, the therapeutic setting is all about our creativity. It's an invitation to live in perhaps the most natural, organic, and unbridled form. It gives us freedom to listen, observe, and make connections. And that's fertile ground for our creativity. It's intrinsically nurturing. In this way. The psychoanalytic hour itself is its own act of creation. You know, just to say it. One more way to join with you. I'm. I'm imagining that you're not just talking about the person standing at an easel or the person creating a sculpture. I mean, I hear you when you talk about feeling alive and every day that there's a sense of aliveness and that what's going on in mind, body and perception of possibility takes a great day and sees something that's not just one color, but that really brings things to life, as you say. So I want to ask you to take one more step. Rosara when you think, you know, we're talking imagery, we're talking these wonderful words imagination, symbolism, metaphor, psychoanalysis, imagery. Like, can you think of some specific examples of the use of imagery in analysis?
Rosa Aurora: [00:25:27] Yeah, definitely. Imagery is present in analysis in many ways. Sometimes when we are hearing, when we're listening very closely, we begin to have a movie in a very vivid movie in our minds to what the patient is telling us. And in some regards, more than a movie becomes almost like a holographic 3D VR movie that is happening between both of us in the room when it gets very intense, and sometimes it can be like a sudden image that we have that is unexpected. That could be visual, but sometimes it can be kinesthetic, or it can be of any other sensorial type that it brings some meaning. So, for instance, I also listen to that as another aspect of listening, all the images and sensations that pop up in the room that pop up while I'm listening to someone. But sometimes those images, they come kind of like a very condensed, sudden knowledge about the other person, about the experience with the other person that can be the source of further exploration or even interpretation. So that's in one instance. It could be kind of all of a sudden a visual image that becomes almost a symbolic representation of, of something that is related to what the patient is telling me the story. And, and it becomes kind of like a painting. Then when I see it, I can understand a lot of these elements. And then when I try to put them in words, most of the times, if I follow what the image is telling me, a lot of interesting things are are open in that session. So I definitely put a lot of attention of the images that suddenly pop up in me when I'm listening to someone else, but sometimes it's the opposite is the patient that comes with that images, and we explore them as we explore a dream. And often the session becomes like a dream that we dream together.
Eileen: [00:27:39] Right? Bringing into being. So you're not using the word unconscious, but it seems woven with everything you're saying.
Rosa Aurora: [00:27:47] Yeah. The unconscious is is flowing like a river that is connecting everything with enigmatic and beautiful canals.
Eileen: [00:27:56] And trying to make a connection with the unconscious that can be trusted and welcomed and.
Rosa Aurora: [00:28:02] And exploring all those eruptions of primary process in the same way we explore a dream.
Eileen: [00:28:07] Right? And just in case the people listening to us don't know the meaning of primary process and secondary process, of course, as vividly as you do, how would you explain it?
Rosa Aurora: [00:28:19] Well, the primary process could be that kind of thinking that is present in dreams or in psychosis. It's a thought that is not logical, but it's very symbolic. And sometimes it's condensed, which means that it can have many different meanings at the same time. And actually, dreams themselves are one of the most magnificent creative productions because they are almost infinite in the amount of symbols, the amount of meanings that they could have. So dreams come from something that is in the unconscious that sometimes it's making us feel a little bit of conflict. But instead of being just the plain expression of that conflict, it becomes these guys in very sophisticated ways sometimes. And that's what makes them more livable. Because sometimes when we have a dream that is so explicit, it becomes a nightmare and it wakes us up and we also need to sleep. So the dream, it says that it is the guardian of the sleep because it disguises. And then we can continue sleeping and we can begin to process to, to symbolize and in both in mental way, but at the same time in a biological way. So in the primary process, we are experiencing that kind of thoughts in the secondary process. On the other hand, that's the logical thinking, the Aristotelian thinking, when everything makes sense and and there's reason and we can analyze and there's causality causes and consequences. And that's a very different kind of thinking. And what happens in creativity is that we have both at the same time.
Eileen: [00:30:14] Right. So now I'm flashing back to the movie Alice in Wonderland, and I feel like I've fallen through the ground, and I'm sitting at the tea party on the one hand and balancing all kinds of thoughts and energies on the other, and so many. It makes me think too. Like the dream the movie made out of The Wizard of Oz is just an endless source of everything you're describing. It seems the dream itself, the creative production with the dream, you know, back, back to reality.
Rosa Aurora: [00:30:46] Those are wonderful examples.
Eileen: [00:30:53] It might often seem like there's a mystical quality to creativity. At times we struggle to fully comprehend or control it. It flows from the depths of our inner worlds, weaving together imagination, symbolism and emotion. It can strike us suddenly, inspirational after days of not seeing clearly. But listening to Rosa, we can understand how it comes alive through thinking and feeling from the conscious and the rationalized to the unconscious and instinctual. We can see, too, that our work of creativity involves what we care about most deeply. Listening to Rosa Aurora here, I'm struck by the thought that creativity in this way, that's a work of love. The very feeling that organizes the means and the ends of our work as analysts. The point of the process, really.
[00:32:00] So, you know.
Eileen: [00:32:02] When I thought about inviting you to do this episode with me, and I thought about, as I told you, how keeping an eye on the love, if you will not not just the sentimental, comforting stuff, but the real, deep, committed, believing pursuit. I'm thinking of everything you're telling me about your feeling with your folks and in your family and values, but not just values. It sounds like just a very deep who they were and are. I'm wondering if you could say something more about about love. You know, love, psychoanalysis and creativity as you think about it.
Rosa Aurora: [00:32:42] I definitely think that is very important. I mean, psychoanalysis, everything that is important for us as humans, everything that means the human experience is there in psychoanalysis and and love is one of the most important experiences in our human existence. And is there from the very beginning is what opens our psychological being into being born. And it's also what marks how our the rest of our love experiences in the rest of our lives. Gladly, we also have moments of hope where we can heal some patterns of of love, the way we connect lovingly with others and and heal and develop healthier, loving connections. And that's also what psychoanalysis is about. I don't think about any other therapeutic treatment that can achieve that kind of result at, at that depth that you can sometimes require a little bit the patterns of attachment. And that means the ways we love, the ways we relate lovingly with others. So and for that love becomes very alive also in the room too. And some of those, I mean, it becomes love and at the same time a love with boundaries, a love with limitations, a love that has restrictions. And it's okay that it's not omnipotent and it's okay, but that has persistent, that kind of persistence that you're talking about, the love that doesn't give up. Like what? The love that is necessary in in creativity, there is a manifesto for creativity that the Torrance Manifesto for creativity, one of the items says, find something that you can love with intensity. And one of a very early psychoanalysis, professor, Doctor Louis Feder, told me that another item was missing that find someone that you can love with intensity and don't be afraid to love with intensity. And that's what psychoanalysis is about to my parents a long time ago. They say that sometimes the most important thing is, was not if you had hard time in your life, but if you keep trying to be better. And I think that was a beautiful teaching.
Eileen: [00:35:18] In the end, creativity and love are not so different from each other. In the same way that artworks reveal the deepest parts of the human soul. Love unveils what lives in our hearts. Raw and pure. In fact, creativity can be seen as a language of love. Whispering desires and dreams that words alone cannot capture. The two go hand in hand. Love fueling creativity and creativity fueling our inner passions. Intertwined in their essence. Both give color to our emotions and our experiences. Rosa. Aurora speaks to this truth in all that she is. Since childhood, her boundless imagination has led her on her path to psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Unraveling the purpose of creativity, working with others intimately to help them discover themselves. Rosa Aurora has found that imagination is not merely an abstract concept, but a powerful force that defines human existence. It's a part of our cognitive wiring, a tangible piece of us, both rational and emotional, here to support us as we form a picture of who we are. And in this way, creativity is a natural companion for the psychoanalytic journey. When we think creatively about who we are, we open up new pathways.
Eileen: [00:36:58] We listen and express ourselves better. And we add new texture to this work in progress we call the self. So session after session. And layer upon layer. Let us draw on our creativity to speak and to listen. To live and love better. I want to thank Rosa Aurora for her inventive work, her effervescent way of seeing and inspiring possibility, and her generous sharing of herself with us today. I feel her love with intensity. And I hope you do too. Her professional approach and personal insights are a true masterpiece. This has been the art of listening. Again, my name is Eileen Dunn. Please join us for our next episode as we continue to dive into the space between speaker and listener. You can follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and we'd love to read your thoughts on the show. So if you have a minute, leave us a review and let us know what you think. We want to capture what you feel as you listen. It helps us find out how we can keep bringing you new conversations. We'll see you the next time.