A Sack of Coins and some Spiders from Mars
On the Psychoanalytical Situation, artistic freelancing and getting paid (or not)
In school1, a couple of weeks ago, our depth psychology teacher, a psychoanalyst, told us a story. It concerned a colleague of hers from when she was a trainee.
In psychoanalysis, there is an old convention around scheduling, timekeeping and payment. Freud’s approach was this:
I rent you a chunk of my weekly schedule, come hell or high water. You pay for every session, plus any missed sessions, upfront in cash at the beginning of the session. There are no exceptions. There is no cancellation policy. It doesn’t matter if you cancel with good reason ahead of time or simply don’t turn up. You still have to pay for that slot in my calendar.
The session starts on the hour and ends at fifty past. No exceptions. No wheedling. If you open up a Pandora’s box of childhood trauma at 48 minutes, in 97 seconds, the session will still finish.
If this sounds harsh, it’s worth mentioning that Freud’s patients were neither children nor people with severe mental disorders. They were described as “healthy neurotics”: mostly functional, though invariably miserable, adults. After Freud, it took generations of psychoanalysts to adapt the work to a broader demographic.
Setting up the (so-called) “psychoanalytical situation” in this way had the following rationale: If patients have troubles with money, timekeeping, scheduling, professional boundaries, etc. — and many of them did — isn’t it better to intensify and confront those issues in psychoanalysis and, hopefully, spare them from other areas of their lives?
If you’re going to be bogged down with it anyway, isn’t it better to fight it out three times a week with Siggy Stardust?
That’s what they did, and by all accounts, it worked. By many accounts, it still works if done in the right way with the right people.
So, while many therapists today deal with scheduling, timekeeping, payments, agreements and the nature of the professional relationship differently to Freud — arguably ways which feel more congruent with contemporary life — if you work psychoanalytically, you are likely to keep the psychoanalytical situation intact, give or take a few tweaks here and there.
During her training, my teacher’s colleague had a client she saw three times per week. The agreement was that he pay in cash and, exceptionally, to do so in one single payment at the end of the month. Even at a trainee rate, which in Vienna is around €50 or more, with three sessions a week, that adds up.
They worked together for over a year, and he paid his fees. The deal was that they would terminate when she graduated. At the very last session, he brought that month’s payment of over €600 in cash, following the agreement to the letter.
He brought a sack of small change.
SMALL. CHANGE.
A substantial portion of the session was spent counting out the cents to ensure the correct payment was delivered.
I don’t think you need to be a psychoanalyst to entertain the notion that this was not random — that there may be a message he had for his therapist, and possibly for himself, that he was compelled to deliver in the way he did. The details of the interpretation, in the sense of making unconscious material conscious, I don’t know. One could speculate it might have been something along the lines of that paying €600 every month for therapy is uncomfortable, inconvenient, awkward, tedious or generally a pain in the ass.
And I have some sympathy for the man. Although I’ve had funded therapy (see On Starving and Independence), I’ve also paid from my own pocket, and therapy is expensive, even at a low rate.
My first therapist was psychoanalytically trained. I was very broke, and he gave me an excellent discount. I still wanted to wheedle my way out and persuade him to make this one exception. For me. Because I needed it. Because I was a special snowflake.
I paid and struggled with punctuality and he politely, but firmly, refused my excuses and kicked me out of the door at 4:50 p.m. every Tuesday.
As I sat in class listening to the story of the man with the sack of cash, I thought about a dramaturgy client I worked with. I did about €2k worth of work, half of which was pro bono (yes, I know!).
When I sent the receipt, she demanded an even bigger discount and threatened to sue me if I didn’t give it to her2. I held my ground.
Perhaps… just perhaps, I thought, I can learn a thing or two from the psychoanalysts.
A week later, two people didn’t show up for coaching sessions. One wrote on the day to say they weren’t coming, and the other just didn’t show up. I waited in the studio. When I came home, I got an email from a theatre company I had written programme notes for. They told me they would not pay for my work because they decided not to use my text, despite the fact I had already written it, handed it off and invoiced them.
I held my ground, and they paid but concluded our “working styles are incompatible.” Well, I couldn’t agree more.
Hmmm... those psychoanalysts are onto something...
Working Pro-Bono
As artists, we have a bizarre professional culture when it comes to money, payments and professional boundaries. We get into our line of work for the love of it, then gradually professionalise it or not. Nobody sensible goes into the arts for economic stability, though plenty do so naïve about the economic precarity.
Although it should go without saying that we need to get paid more, and more often for our work, I don’t believe there is a straightforward answer to the issue of working for free in the arts. In other professions, it may be clearer cut. Each project has a certain amount of risk, and the decision to become involved is often more akin to that of an entrepreneur or venture capitalist than a decision to take a job or not. The closer you are to the work’s authorship, the higher this risk is, and some pieces you make are more for your portfolio than for any hope of immediate compensation.
If you only lift a finger once the budget is settled and the ink is dry, you will not get your foot in the door in this field. Whatever the ratio, there are times and places in the artistic profession when you don’t expect to get paid, and times and places when you do (or should).
The case of the unpaid dramaturg?
I do dramaturgy because I like artists and their processes. I like seeing them thrive and their work blossom. At the same time, as a dramaturg, the work is not my baby. It’s not my brainchild. It’s not my vision. It’s not my work.
I get a credit in the programme notes, but, as Marianne van Kerkhoven said the dramaturg “always shares the frustrations and yet does not have to appear on the photo. The dramaturge is not (perhaps not quite or not yet) an artist.”3 I work closely with the lead artist and am sometimes part of the core artistic team; however, this does not make me an author of the work. Dramaturgy is, first and firstmost, a supporting role.
Regardless of my contribution, not bearing final responsibility for the work makes me somewhat dispensable. If a performer is sick, you might have to postpone the show, but if you decide you can do without your dramaturg, then fair enough.
To make matters worse, the dramaturg’s role is already inherently ambiguous, particularly in developmental dramaturgy—getting an idea ready to begin to make a show out (as opposed to production dramaturgy — accompanying the rehearsal, getting the show ready to be shown to an audience). Much like being a friend, being an artistic dialogue partner is less cut and dried than a conventional consultancy service with clear billable hours.
When I am invited into someone’s process and raise the topic of professional boundaries and compensation, I often hear artists say, “I am also working unpaid.” I can not and do not argue with this. I am well aware of the unpaid hours, days, and weeks spent writing funding applications that may or may not get rejected. You take on an uncertain situation where someone on whichever committee decides the fates of project after project, including yours.
So yes, everyone, I know you are working for free.
The truth is, as a dramaturg, I also don’t mind working for free on occasion, provided I have enough other work, I believe in the project, and I am the one deciding the work is pro bono. The question is more about how to collaboratively navigate the fact that some projects don’t have budgets when they most need dramaturgical input.
I want to try to interpret what people might mean when they say, “Yes, your work is valuable, but I/we can’t pay for it.”
If this is said simply, plainly and in the spirit of transparency, then I have no problem hearing it. I also have nothing to interpret into it. Receiving such clarity is already a gift. On occasion, I have worked with people following such a conversation, making a mutually informed choice that I am working pro bono. It’s not what you’d call optimum working conditions, but everyone knows that, and there’s a basic respect surrounding it. In that case, the question is more about finding the amount of time I can offer as a gift without overstretching myself or otherwise muddying the waters.
In other cases, however, a similar statement means, “I am interested in taking what you have to give, but I have no intention of giving anything back.” Well, no thanks.
More often, I think there’s a projective element: “I don’t value myself and my work highly enough to deserve this support.” If you’re an artist working with contemporary performance and care about the quality of your work and what you offer your audiences through it, you already “deserve” dramaturgical input. Whether your spreadsheet can accommodate it or not is a separate matter.
Intentional Generosity
So, the business model of a dramaturg, or in general as an artist working collaboratively, is tough, at least in the short or medium term. In the long run, generosity has a place.
In A Choreographer’s Handbook, Jonathan Burrows says, “ Choose your collaborators VERY CAREFULLY, then trust them completely.”4 I always considered this in terms of what you do in the studio: “the work itself.”
Now, I am inclined to believe that the frame and nature of the engagement are not separate from “the work itself.” Perhaps Burrows’ Law means, amongst other things, working with people inclined to recognise what they receive and inclined to be generous back. And I’m not just talking about cash — I’m talking about care, attention, clarity, rigour, humility. You can’t work with people who whine about whether or not their discount is big enough.
In some contexts, I think it is fair to haggle about rates and fees before the rubber hits the road, but I don’t know how sensible this is for collaborative artistic work. If you are a professional, you know every other professional is navigating precarity. To create half-decent working conditions to collaborate on something meaningful is already pretty herculean.
The most satisfying projects don’t feel transactional. Whatever the budget and payments, there is mutual recognition — you give something of your being because you care about the people, you care about the work, you care about the craft, and then receive something in the spirit of that back.
The Psychoanalytical Situation again
To draw the circle to a close, in contemporary psychoanalysis, people often pay by card or bank transfer, asynchronously to the session itself. Some psychoanalysts even have cancellation policies. What is most clearly leftover from the Freudian version, however, is the clarity! Each detail of the professional frame of the work is clearly and explicitly negotiated out between the analyst and the analysand. Some aspects will accepted easily and others begrudgingly, but nothing is ambiguous or left to the whims and fancies of either therapist or client.
The therapeutic value of this is understood to be the clarity itself and the fact that the agreement has been reached collaboratively and held up, whatever compromises and discomfort are involved.
HoPP — postgraduate Psychotherapy Propädeutikum at the University of Vienna
This makes more sense if you know they paid a chunk of the fee in advance.
van Kerkhoven, M. (1994). Looking Without Pencil in the Hand. Theaterschrift, 5–6. http://old.sarma.be/docs/2858. On another note, there are two spellings — dramaturge and dramaturg. Since learning French, I have known that one is the feminine and the other is the masculine form. I know no consensus about whether to use one or the other. Since I refer to my own work, I use the masculine form.
p.193. Burrows, J. (2010). A Choreographer’s Handbook. Routledge.