SteppIng into the North London home of psychotherapist Morris Nitsun it was immediately obvious that it was inhabited by an artist. The space had been carefully curated with numerous portraits and paintings of nature and cityscapes, and what wasn’t hung up was neatly stacked against walls.
During the first lockdown, when Nitsun’s age, 79, and a chronic lung condition meant he had to be particularly careful, Queen’s Wood in Muswell Hill provided a welcome escape on many levels.
“It helped with my sense of hope, my mood and with my motivation to be creative because I could also see that there were lots of things I wanted to paint in nature,”he told me.
Tragically, just a few weeks after our interview, Nitsun died suddenly. But he leaves behind him a glorious legacy of artworks.
Between 2019 and 2021, Nitsun painted about 200 works. (Nearly all the pictures in his home are by him.) The culmination of this creative outburst is A Psychotherapist Paints, a book showcasing 50 of his paintings, interspersed with autobiographical reflections.
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One of Nitsun's doll paintings
But what sets it apart from other art books is that it also contains the responses of colleagues and friends to Nitsun’s art and the publication has received critical acclaim within the fields of psychoanalysis and medicine.
In his gently lilting Johannesburg accent, Nitsun described the book as “the convergence of my lifelong interests as a psychologist and psychotherapist and as an artist, two approaches which had always been very dear to me, but had lived in separate worlds.”
But the journey towards this “convergence” wasn’t straightforward, and as he spoke, it became clear that it had begun long before 2019.
Growing up in apartheid South Africa, the child of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, there were both the external and internal pressures to follow a conventional career path. An avid painter since he was a child, Nitsun nonetheless turned down a potential place to study full-time at the Royal College of Art.
“There were problems back home, and I think I was just too depressed and too anxious to take the risk of being an artist.”
Instead, after moving to London at 25, he got a job as a clinical psychologist in the NHS, later becoming head of a hospital department.
In his free time, he continued to study art part-time, while also successfully exhibiting and selling his work.
Despite this, his artistic side “was always nagging” at him. “It felt like a kind of unresolved, incomplete aspect of my life. I wondered whether I was really just a neurotic Jewish artist rather than an ambitious psychotherapist, understanding everyone’s problems.”
The idea that you could identify as both a psychotherapist and an artist didn’t sit comfortably with Nitsun, who continued to be plagued by the words of his art teacher in South Africa, the late Aileen Lipkin. “She said: ‘You can’t be both.’ She was very fierce about this.”
A turning point, or perhaps, more accurately, a tipping point came in 2019, when Nitsun exhibited a series of doll paintings, and after the show invited some of the visitors to share their thoughts on the pictures.
“The group touched on important issues, such as trauma and loss, which made me aware that the dolls were a way of reaching into an area of life that otherwise I couldn’t,” he said.
He arranged a similar gathering in New York, which, again, proved very revealing. When the pandemic struck, he took these meetings online, showing other series of his paintings.
Nitsun was keen to point out that these discussions were not the same as group therapy, an area of analytic work he is well-known for, although “they did have a kind of therapeutic effect on some people, and I do think now, more than ever, using art in this way could be therapeutic and illuminating.”
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Nitsun's My Mother as a Bride
A big difference was that the focus was now also on the therapist rather than solely on the group. Nitsun found himself talking about his own past and inner conflicts in relation to the
paintings.
“I learnt a lot about myself and was very open with people. Why hide things? Why pretend? Let’s just admit to each other that we’ve struggled.”He spoke to the groups about how difficult it was being gay in both an Orthodox Jewish home and in a society that was riddled with prejudice and discrimination.
“It was very difficult growing up gay in South Africa. I kind of wanted to be straight.
“I think if you were black, it was an absolute no-no. You just couldn’t even speak about it because it was so taboo.”
This “internalised homophobia” meant that he never told his parents that he was gay, despite having a long-term partner. “They were two people who had come from very restricted backgrounds with very Orthodox Jewish constraints, and I think it would have been too painful for them.”
Nitsun had a lingering sense of guilt from having been a white child in apartheid South Africa.
“It remains a kind of stain on history generally and on one’s personal history.”
He recalled being very close to his black nannies, who were often “more spontaneous, more immediate, warmer and more fun than the white mothers, especially the Jewish mothers, who were quite anxious, tense and neurotic”.
But this bond also served as a reminder that his nannies lived separately from their own children. “That was something that always upset me.” This latest project has forced him to confront these “warring parts” of himself and he recalls one particular incident when he was showing the doll paintings in New York.
“A woman stood up and said: ‘How come you, as a South African, have not painted any black dolls?’ It was quite a challenge to me.”
The question played on his mind and Nitsun went away and did some paintings of black dolls, including one holding its own small doll “like a mother and a child”, which is included in the book.
In fact, the theme of motherhood, with regard to both his own mother and Mother Earth, “who was ravaged during Covid”, runs through all five series of paintings.
Aside from dolls, they depict the fragility of nature, deserted cities during lockdown, and dancers.
But probably the most moving series is Four Women. This contains four portraits: his mother as a bride, Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa and Jan Morris, one of the first transwomen to undergo gender reassignment surgery. “I chose them because they all had very powerful identities.
"They all found themselves in a way that was very important to them and the world around them and that’s not what my mother could do. She didn’t have an identity of her own, so I wanted to give her some status, to recognise her.”
As for Nitsun’s own identity, despite the protestations of his art teacher, did he now think he could be both a psychotherapist and an artist, I asked. In the poignant last words of his final interview, he told me: “What I feel now is that I am both. I really am both. It’s not even so much about ‘I can’. It’s ‘I am’. This is me.”
‘A Psychotherapist Paints: Insights from the Border of Art and Psychotherapy’ is published by Routledge
