Apples and Ids : Psychoanalyst’s Mind Focuses on Patients While His Hands Carve Intricate Artworks

Sitting in the office of his Birdrock home, veteran psychoanalyst Erwin Angres held the polished apple, turning it slowly, silently considering its shiny contours.

Then, using a small paring knife, he deftly cut several thin circles of golden peelings. The doctor talked about past patients and their deep-seated problems as the artist’s hands delved deeper, slowly revealing in the apple the face of a Slavic woman.

Minutes later, she was clearly there--the remaining apple peel becoming a scarf about her head, the stem darkening her eyes. After a few days of drying and a coat of varnish, the shrunken figure would join Angres’ thousands of artworks--many of which have been created as he consulted with patients in his book-filled office.

For more than four decades, the German native has engaged in the unlikely combination of art and psychoanalysis--often at the same time. As his patients reveal the hidden quirks of their own personalities, Angres often works to expose the aesthetic secrets of an apple, a polished stone or a piece of driftwood.

During the 1950s, Angres said, his artwork made him one of the first psychiatrists to deviate from Freud’s theory that psychoanalysis must be conducted in a setting devoid of personality, for fear of impeding progress with the patient.

Around Chicago, he soon earned nicknames: the Apple Doctor and, because of the drying process of his apple art, the Original Shrink.

Since moving to La Jolla 13 years ago, he has spent countless hours consulting Midwestern patients over the telephone, his mind concentrating on their innermost thoughts as his hands work on a new creation.

All around him sit his life’s work. Not only apple art but intricate figures made of bananas, grapefruit rinds, bricks, seashells--even plastic foam.

Like satisfied patients, solved challenges, they’re strewn about his home office and downtown La Jolla studio, perched on shelves beside books with titles such as “Emotional Problems of Early Childhood” and “The Erotic Arts.”

Bearing themes from the Bible and Greek mythology, most of Angres’ creations possess multiple personalities. Viewed one way, the shard of oak rescued from a friend’s woodpile shows a man’s face and tells a story. Turn it around and there’s a different man telling another tale.

But it is the apple creations--his renaissance of an Indian art form--that have given Angres notoriety. They’re grinning heads straight out of man’s unconscious--bitter faces, kings, clowns, sad old men from another century.

“I don’t have the patient in mind when I create,” Angres said in his accented voice. “It is something behind the patient, perhaps, but not the patient.

“And I don’t do it behind their back. It’s to help me concentrate. In psychoanalysis, when you are listening, if your hands and eyes become inactive, they start to act up against you. They have to be employed.”

Some patients are so engaged in relating their stories that they don’t notice what he is doing. But the images of the sessions stay with them. Years ago, said Angres, who is in his mid-70s, there was a young psychotic man being diagnosed by a pair of psychiatrists at a Chicago hospital.

The man fitfully described seeing with his mind’s eye a peculiar, bald man and seeing strange miniature faces peering from walls and bookcases.

“They assumed he was having another hallucination,” Angres said. “Then they asked him if he was actually seeing an analyst regularly, and he said, ‘Yes.’ They laughed because they suddenly realized it was me. He was seeing the Apple Doctor.”

Angres acknowledges that he has little idea if or how his patients’ revelations find their way into his art.

One winter day, for example, while listening to a suicidal woman patient, he drew on a piece of cardboard at his desk. The result: a Nativity scene, with Joseph posed as a garage mechanic and Mary as a working woman, holding the infant Jesus in front of a 1940 Ford.

“I asked myself, ‘What’s the connection?’ It’s not a direct process. I have no idea how it works. But I know I haven’t invaded anyone’s private world with my work.”

Dr. Allan Adler, a La Mesa psychiatrist and medical director of the Alvarado Parkway Institute, a 198-bed psychiatric hospital, said he had never heard of an analyst who combined art with his practice.

“But analysis is an open field as far as ideas and creativity,” he said. “There are no such standards of what’s appropriate and inappropriate to do with patients. Some people smoke pipes. Maybe this is his way of smoking a pipe.”

Dr. Paul Keith, president of the San Diego Psychoanalysis Society and Institute, added: “Although analysts occupy themselves in many ways behind the couch, this would be unusual. The question is, ‘Does it distract him from paying close attention to what is being imparted by the patient?’ ”

Dr. Bernice Neugarten, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Chicago and a friend of Angres, said patient sessions would not suffer in intensity because of the psychoanalyst’s artwork.

“Dr. Angres once mentioned to me that he had a certain restlessness during psychoanalytic hours, and that he liked to keep his hands busy,” she said. “I know that he’s been very successful as a psychoanalyst at a time when others have lost patients.

“It’s like the practice of some women therapists who knit during patient sessions. It doesn’t draw their attention away--rather, it helps them concentrate.”

One patient visited Angres for months before noticing his work. “I was really in a horrible stage when I first began seeing him,” she recalled. “I was suicidal, and I truly didn’t see the artwork for months, I was so tied up in myself.”

Marilyn Mathes, another Angres patient, said she and Angres now regularly discuss his work as a warm-up to their sessions.

“You have no idea what it takes to become a psychiatrist, and so it makes it special to see that part of him, what he sees in an apple or an orange,” she said. “You wonder what he’ll see in you. And, at the end of every session, he’s always right on with his summaries.”

For Angres, art and medicine have always been almost equal pursuits. As a student in Germany in the 1930s, he worked his way through medical school at the University of Leipzig by illustrating anatomy textbooks.

He moved to the United States in 1938, continuing his education at University of Chicago medical school and the Institute of Psychoanalysis there. As years passed, however, the artist’s instincts remained intact inside the doctor.

“The family folklore has it that he was a reluctant psychiatrist--he really wanted to be an artist,” said Noll Evans, a San Diego clinical psychologist and Angres’ son-in-law. “But when he realized that he had a family to feed, he pursued the medical end of things.”

In each pursuit, Evans said, Angres uses his talent and training to detect what is not at first apparent to the eye.

“He allows the rock or the apple rind to speak to him, making connections that are not immediately apparent to others. He does the same thing with people as he does with his art.”

Angres began his apple art by accident. During the mid-1950s, he was so consumed with his private practice that he often skipped lunch--until his wife began giving him apples to take to the office.

One Friday, he absent-mindedly carved an apple, and then threw it away. Three days later, the shrunken fruit was still there--bearing the beginnings of a small, shriveled face.

“In the organic process of shrinkage, the apple begins to take on life,” he said. “And, because we’re dealing with nature, there’s a certain dignity in the distortion. So you see, the real work is done by the apple in my absence.”

His apple art soon made a minor splash in the Chicago art world. There were showings and news stories. Then imitators began to sell apple art. So Angres began to make his work more intricate--and moved on to other media.

Today, Angres talks as freely about the art of psychoanalysis as he does the psychoanalysis of art. In a 1969 interview in the Chicago Tribune, he explained the importance of both.

“A person should have many interests,” he said. “It’s a dangerous thing to overspecialize. The specialist is prone to live and think only within one sphere. When he no longer can continue with that, he begins to die--unless he has other deep interests, and the world is filled with so many wonderful things to interest him.”

More than 20 years later, he still harbors the same beliefs. And one day, Angres says, he’d like to conduct a seminar for retired people on redeveloping forgotten skills and interests.

“It would be a way to dust off some very old interests that have been long junked by people, pursuits that have been snowed under by their careers.” he said. “When they get through with their specialty, many have all this time and they don’t know what to do with it.”

Angres, however, has too little time and too many pursuits. He still flies back and forth to Chicago to see some patients. While in San Diego, he divides his time between his patients, his studio and art gallery off Prospect Street.

Several mornings a week, he dons his denim jacket and a leather fishing hat and scours the beach near his home for raw materials. His home office is littered with pieces in the process of becoming art.

One of his artistic heroes is Pablo Picasso who, late in his career, took an old bicycle and transformed it into a perfect re-creation of a goat.

Angres points to a mounted lobster shell that, when turned around, becomes a woman performing a sinewy dance. “It’s proof that even the ugliest of all creatures can become a seductive belly dancer.”

Then he picked up a polished rock from the floor and turned it in his hands, marveling at its possibilities. “This piece is loaded,” he said. “This hole here could be a nose or a bellybutton. It has so much, I’m waiting for inspiration.”

Eventually, like so many of his patients, the rock will reveal its closely held secrets to Erwin Angres.

In his psychoanalytic career, the doctor will always be proud of his claim to be one of the first medical experts to challenge Freud’s theory that an analyst must pose an impersonal face to his patients.

But, in the end, he would rather be remembered for his art.

“Psychiatry,” he said, “is ultimately vague. At the end of the day, you often don’t know what you’ve accomplished. It’s sometimes only after years and sometimes decades that you see what you’ve done.

“And, even when the patient goes away happy, you never know. After 10 years, what will happen to the children? But with art, you can hold the finished product in your hands--even after an hour or just a few days. Art is much more satisfying.”

Standing amid his creations, the artist was asked to analyze his own work.

“I would say,” said the doctor, “that this is definitely the work of a very odd person.”