A Mother's role is to create intimacy and smell is an elemental aspect of intimacy in life and in therapy. Mother and child, therapist and client, metaphorically and literally breathe each other in. Regardless of its effect on us, smell is part of the “mutual perfume” or sensory road map of presence with another human being. Weaving [Suskind, P. (1986/2001). Perfume: The story of a murderer. (J. E. Woods, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books/Random House Inc.] the novel Perfume: The Story of A Murderer through case examples from her drama therapy practice, the author explores her subjective countertransference and undertakes an aesthetic examination of abandonment and attunement in the therapy as experienced through and evoked by smell. This essay examines Role as a form of therapeutic agency (with particular focus upon the therapist in the role of surrogate mother) that can lead the therapist and client from presence with each other out onto the stage of potential therapeutic change.
For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they could not escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath. Together with breath it entered human beings, who could not defend themselves against it, not if they wanted to live. And scent entered into their very core, went directly to their hearts, and decided for good and all between affection and contempt, disgust and lust, love and hate. He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men (p. 155).
This essay will focus on smell as a physical trigger to countertransference, and its impact on me, a drama therapist. Drama according to drama therapist Landy (2008) is an integration of “actions and words, fiction and reality, past and present, thought and feeling, states of over- and under-distance” (p. 246). For Landy, drama therapists work in a dialectical world of metaphor and symbol that considers any single experience through the many truths and many roles that emerge from it.
Suskind's novel is about a sociopath. The story I am telling now is in part about the sociopath within me. It is about the sociopathy that I fear I may have helped to engender in the smallest and most vulnerable amongst us. The story I am telling is also about the loving mother within me. It is also about my ability as therapist and, within the therapy, to love.
In Suskind's (1986/2001) novel, smell or body odor is understood as essential to our humanness—to lack smell is to lack humanity. Suskind's anti-hero Grenouille is born and abandoned in the slime and putrification of a stinking fish market. Grenouille, though, has no bodily odor. His wet nurse rejects him for his want of fragrance. There is no sweet, milky smell on his forehead and no smell in his diapers.
Although Grenouille has no odor himself, he does possess an extreme, even super-human sense of smell. He becomes a perfumer. He discovers that smell controls his visibility or invisibility. So he experiments with creating an odor for himself.
And so, like Grenouille, I will endeavor the trace odorante of my experience—my perfume. Smell is elemental to intimacy. Regardless of its effect on us, smell is part of the “mutual perfume” or sensory road map of presence with another human being.
The novel Perfume ends in a paradoxically violent and loving self-annihilation ( Suskind, 1986/2001). The act of bearing witness through the olfactory/embodied encounter produced a struggle in me around a feared loss of self. The loss of self was like a death, like a suicide, in which I discovered that I played in part perpetrator and victim. Austin (2002) in her essay The Voice of Trauma asks, “How does one lose a self?” and then suggests the possible reasons including “sacrifice at birth to fill an empty parent… shattered into fragments from unspeakable terrors… numb(ed)… hidden…judged…shamed” (p. 1). The truly post-modern wasteland of abandonment in which these children live and where I met them is a place where self is potentially lost.
The smells (their smells and mine) functioned as a way to locate me in my body and in the moment of the encounter(s). Breathing in the smells permitted me to maintain connection through the suffering because smell was the ever-present reminder of the humanity in situations where dissociation and dehumanization is not only easy but at times a necessary or healthy defense.
