ELISABETH CRIM, MA, MA, PhD
Psychotherapy and Art. I am a psychologist who trains, consults, writes, and offers psychotherapy with my whole being. I see, feel, think, and engage other through a psychodynamic and holistic mind- body-spirit lens. It is through my unique lens that I approach each distinctive individual and couple I treat, each clinician with whom I offer consultation or collaboration, and each audience for whom I speak or write. Who I am determines how I experience and make meaning of what each individual and relational system offers or keeps hidden. This mutual engagement (transference) between see-er and seen, is often a powerful, fascinating, curious and affecting dance.
As a photographer, yet another fractal of my own being, I prefer the up close, intimate, inward, inside view. Whether plant, flower, architecture, or person, my curiosity and excitement for discovery builds as I see more closely and discover new layers of shadow and light, each with their own inimitable energies to be discovered and experienced. Whether camera or therapist chair, the shared psychological, relational, and dynamic fractals are real... exhilarating and terrifying, disinteresting and unseen, blocked and revealed, by me, the subject, or the space we share. In art as with psychotherapy, I am changed through my lens, what I see, how I make sense. Psychotherapy as Art. Art as Psychotherapy.
Luminous Fractals
(Photograph)
The view through my lens captured me. The fractal veins of the leaves exploding with light. As with all fractals, there are seeming disruptions, explosive or subtle new experiences yielding hope or caution, that ultimately make for or reveal another expanding fractal. I was pleased with my camera’s capture of what I saw with my human eye. The lines, angles, patterns are so beautiful, so satisfying, so luminous! The unforeseen bloom startles and delights me. Fractals offering dynamic patterns of familiarity with occasional bursts of the unexpected, all with life pulsing through.
In 2021, Luminous Fractals stirs me to contemplate our recent collective traumas, experienced disruptions, surprising discoveries, and hopeful recoveries. Dynamic fractals, all.