Sondheim & Psychotherapy

By Matthew Steinfeld, PhD

Into the woods –

You have to grope,

But that’s the way

You learn to cope.

Into the woods

To find there’s hope

Of getting through the journey.

-All 

Recently, when a friend asked me how people change from psychotherapy, I found myself recommending that they see Stephen Sondheim’s 1989 musical ‘Into the Woods,’ which is being restaged this summer as part of the Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in the Park season. In it, Sondheim takes the characters from several well-known fairytales (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack of Beanstalk fame, et al.), dissolves the boundaries between them, throws them all into a forest, and creates conditions from which each character grows and changes despite circumstances that are quite challenging. 

There is a lot to learn from how these characters engage with the change their story undergoes. As one of the main characters, the witch, cautions, “Careful the tale you tell, that is the spell.” Psychotherapeutic communication is no different; stories are very powerful things. In the very recounting of experience (attempts to recollect and communicate what is felt into language), we inevitably shape the narrative of who we tell ourselves we are.

When one has an opportunity to listen to as many life stories as most psychotherapists do, it becomes readily apparent that particular ‘things’ and ‘events’ out in the world in and of themselves are devoid of intrinsic “meaning.” Rather it is the meaning individuals make of their experiences that constitute the emotional architecture within which they live.  And due to the fact that humans are ‘meaning making machines,’ essentially we are always telling stories - albeit ones of varying personal and collective significance.

However, with this tendency comes a rather heavy existential burden to carry. For if anything can mean anything, well, then there is no “right way” to walk through this life. There are merely choices. And this can, at times, make life feel confusing, uncertain, and overwhelming.

One of the many insights that Sondheim offers into how people grow and change, is that growth is the  product of a dialectic in which people allow themselves to become ‘lost in the woods’ (e.g. to live within a framework of fluid and changing meaning) and then ‘find themselves’ (e.g. by telling a story) – over and over and over. It is an iterative process; a journey which if lived honestly over time, creates the soil from which new things grow.  He reminds us that working with honoring what one is feeling, thinking, and doing (while one is feeling it, thinking it, and doing it), is a journey of great importance. And, the only way through the woods.