THE LETTING GO: Natascha Stellmach’s Art Practice Through a Psychoanalytic Lens

Presented at the APAS Annual Conference on 30 August 2025 in Sydney, Australia.

Dr Matthew McArdle

Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst in Melbourne

What would you like to let go of?

Is it the grievance of past hurt, injury, or insult? The clinging to past disappointments and failures? The traumatic nightmares of childhood abuse, neglect, or deprivation? 

Later life abuses or traumas? The grip of life-controlling addictions? The melancholia of ungrieved losses? Obsessions? Compulsions? Retreats into a self-protective shell? Delusions of absolute control?

What would you like to let go of? 

In some ways, this is such a basic question. Perhaps every patient asks themselves this as they begin therapy. Perhaps every therapist should ask this question at the beginning of each session. 

We cling to so much: so much pain, so much of the past, and so many of our self‑protective (but often self‑defeating) inner structures. Whether we are protecting against vulnerability, uncertainty, uncontrollability, and the inevitable pains of life through retreat, obsession, addiction, or perversion—we seem, as humans, to find ways to cling to those things that we believe protect us, but which, in fact, harm us and hold us back.

We struggle to let go. 

If we let go—what is left to hold us together? 

Natascha Stellmach’s exploratory and experiential art practice, The Letting Go, provides us, as psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, with a unique opportunity to examine issues of trauma, loss, and potential healing. Through an immersive process involving bloodline tattooing of a chosen word, Stellmach intuitively discovers the central role of skin in the development of our sense of body and self. She explores wounding and healing. She examines the relationship between self and other. She highlights the connectedness or disconnectedness to ourselves and our bodies. 

Stellmach’s art practice defies definition. For over thirty years, her practice has developed, emerged and evolved—interweaving new elements shaped by time and experience. Her work is both evocative and provocative.

Across the following pages, I draw on my thoughts and associations with her work to evoke and provoke—hoping to inspire your own responses.

After establishing her method and project, Stellmach researched literature, performance art, Buddhism, and psychoanalysis to understand the impact of her work. She finds the work of the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu a useful adjunct to understanding her project.

Anzieu states that, “by placing the emphasis on the skin as a basic datum that is of both organic and an imaginary order—both a system for protecting our individuality and a first instrument and site of our interactions with others —I am seeking to bring into being another model: one resting on a solid biological foundation, out of which interaction with the environment 

(entourage) arises, and which respects the specificity of psychical phenomena in relation to both organic and to social realities.”

Stellmach asks each participant, “What would you like to let go of?” She speaks to the traumas that take hold of our bodies and minds. Some of these traumas have quite obvious external and physical origins, while others are deeply personal, psychological, and psychical in nature. 

The method includes tattooing without ink (a bloodline tattoo) to address a personal obstacle and initiate an intimate enquiry. A ritual of marking—even ‘damaging’—the skin and imprinting a personally significant mark—words (symbols)—onto the surface. The changes to the skin and the mark are then observed: the healing process and the disappearance of the marks over time.

When these ‘personal obstacles’ cannot be thought about or integrated into a coherent personal history or narrative, they remain within us as ‘stuck things’ (bizarre objects). These indigestible internal ‘stuck things’ become sites of traumatic rememberings, repetition compulsions, and bodily symptoms—the body that keeps the score. A process is needed to render these previously stuck and hidden experiences meaningful, thinkable and representable—in words and symbols. We know that that which remains unrepresented stays with us—and within us. It is these unthinkable things that become our ‘personal obstacles’, which we unknowingly cling to, and which cling to us—and maintain a tenacious grip on being.

Stellmach’s art suggests a process through which what was once unspeakable, unthinkable, and unrepresentable can become speakable, thinkable, and representable. This is Natascha Stellmach’s, The Letting Go.

Why is letting go so hard?

From our earliest moments, we develop psychic strategies to survive and protect our emerging mind and sense of self. We may form autistic shells, retreat into narcissism, develop addictive and compulsive behaviours, or seek perverse satisfactions. These defences serve as a means of survival when our environments fall short of being as perfect as we wish—and need—them to be. Some individuals possess greater innate resources; a stronger capacity to bear frustration. Others, however, face more difficult and painful external realities—environments marked by deprivation, neglect, or abuse; environments that fail them miserably.

In a perfectly containing, supportive, and protective environment, the ‘slings and arrows’ of life become bearable, and we learn to face and modify them. Yet, there are inevitably times when life’s crises are too much—unbearable, uncontained and overwhelming. It is then that we turn away from pain, seeking to evade or evacuate it. This only serves to entrench both the pain (trauma) itself and our self‑limiting defences.

However, when we are invited to consider letting go, we are faced with fears: that we may not cope, that we may fall apart, and that we may have no internal structure or protection to rely on—should we truly let go.

The Beginning

The Letting Go begins with the holding of hands, breathing, and a meditation that grounds us in our bodies. Natascha starts with connectedness—to ourselves, our bodies, and the other. Before entering into the worlds of trauma and then of words, she brings us back to our bodies: our first selves, the site from which the Skin Ego (Anzieu) starts, and where the self and not‑self begin.

Breath reminds us of the very essence of life and aliveness. It is associated with the psyche, spirit, and soul. While psychoanalysis has often preoccupied itself with appetites, hungers, and frustrations, Stellmach places us within the more Eastern and less conflictual tradition—one of breathing and being. We inspire and expire. We take in and expel. We introject and project. We absorb the nourishment of oxygen and diffuse out toxic elements. Michael Eigen suggests that “no bodily experience is more thoroughly permeating yet unassaultive and light of touch” than breathing. Natascha encourages this breathing meditation while holding hands, acknowledging the first place of physical and emotional connectedness.

The practice includes identifying, naming, embodying, and experiencing healing and impermanence in our bodies. Each step in the art process is significant and central to a healing process. Meditation centres the participant within the body. Then, the participant identifies an ‘obstacle’ (trauma) and names it, finding a meaningful word to describe what may have previously gone unspoken or even unspeakable. The next step of placing the word on the body via a semi‑permanent tattoo indicates the genuine embodiment of experience.

Much of our work is with trauma. And many traumas involve the split between the body (feeling, emoting, experiencing self) and the brain (cognitive, thinking, decision‑making self). These traumas breach what Esther Bick coined the Psychic Skin and disrupt the development of the Skin Ego.

Psychic Skin grows out of repeated experiences with the holding, feeding parent who provides security and satisfaction. Over time, these regular and reliable experiences are taken in (introjected) as a containing relationship (Internal Object) which enables the infant mind to develop a skin of its own: a Skin Ego. Without Psychic Skin and Skin Ego, the infant, toddler, child, and eventually the adult must establish for themselves secondary skins in which to live and survive.

In the absence of Psychic Skin and Skin Ego, individuals often rely on these metaphorical second skins—defensive coverings or façades—to navigate the world. Yet, when early relationships and experiences are repeated, regular, and reliable, they may be internalised as containing structures. These nourish the self, enabling ego functions to grow and a unique sense of identity to emerge.

Aesop’s Fables provide evocative illustrations. Consider the donkey in the lion’s skin: the donkey, clothed in lion’s skin, goes around feeling powerful and scaring others, but must ultimately confront the truth—he is not a lion, but a donkey. Similarly, the wolf in sheep’s clothing hides a more dangerous identity under the skin of innocence. 

Before moving on from fables of the skin, we must recall The Emperor’s New Clothes. It takes a brave and curious child to recognise what is obvious to all: that the Emperor is naked. As therapists, we too must sometimes face the reality that we are ‘naked’—uncertain, directionless, and vulnerable in the consulting room. 

We sit with our patients: their emotions, experiences, traumas, hurts, longings, and needs. We may become emperors cloaked in the finery of our theories and ideas, and it is often the child—within us or the patient—who calls us back to humility and presence, reminding us of our uncertainty and vulnerability.

We are often the ones who need to let go and simply be with our patients. It is this state of being with that creates conditions in which pain, trauma and inner conflicts may emerge and develop.

Early Traumas

Psychic traumas are often embedded in the psyche‑soma from our earliest encounters in life. As infants, we need to be met, handled, and held. Yet sometimes —too often, too early, and for too long—an infant goes unmet or mis‑met. These unmeetings cause deep ruptures in our capacity for what Donald Winnicott called “going on being”, disrupting the healthy development of a core, true self.

Such traumatic disruptions leave our psyche‑soma with no choice but to cut off from painful, overwhelming, and unmet experiences. This cutting off causes a split: a severing of brain from body, creating a divided self that ‘lives in the head’. This dissociated, cognitive (false) self copes intellectually, but is no longer informed or enriched by feeling and experience.

I would suggest that we are living through an epidemic of false‑self coping— cognition cut off from feeling; minds disconnected from our bodies. Stellmach’s bodily‑based art speaks directly to this crisis. The process of The Letting Go addresses our need to reconnect body and mind, to integrate thinking with feeling, and to become, once again, our unique, creative, true selves.

Finding the word

While Stellmach has worked across a wide range of artistic media—including photography, film, installations, and collaborative action—her practice has consistently returned to the central importance of narrative and text, and to the role of words as meaningful symbols of self‑realisation and communication. 

In her 2006 work Worry Dolls, she embroidered childhood fears and taunts onto handmade dolls, giving tangible form to internal voices. In the 2009 collaborative project Oracle (with Boris Eldagsen, as BORIS+NATASCHA), she used the technique of frottage to lift letters from tombstones of famous people, creating messages for the living: from the infamous dead. In 2012’s Agent Provocateur, she turned to text‑based body art as a means of critiquing the role of the artist in contemporary society. 

A transformation of this work is The Letting Go, where a single word or expression is inscribed as a semi‑permanent tattoo without ink (a bloodline tattoo). Stellmach developed this method to “address a personal obstacle and initiate an intimate enquiry”.

But first the participant must find the word.

I wonder: what would your word be?

What are your personal obstacles that cannot yet be thought—those that have become part of your felt personal history?

An Earlier Language

The Letting Go also reminds me of another language—a language that comes before words: a tactile language, a language of the body, of touch, sensation, and feeling. Perhaps this tactile language is our first and most fundamental mother (or parent) tongue. It is a language of being held, handled, and cared for.

Stellmach’s work returns us to foundational experiences of growth, trauma, and healing—to the infant self, and to the skin.

Anzieu describes the baby as being: 

“held in the mother’s arms and pressed against her body, whose warmth, smell and movements it feels; it is picked up, manipulated, rubbed, washed and caressed—and this is usually amidst a flood of words and humming”. 

This first sensory environment is essential for the development of an integrated self —a self that can fall apart when necessary, but also come back together in a meaningful and purposeful way. Only when this first idiom of bodily experience (Christopher Bollas) is adequately established can we begin to emerge as separate individuals, and risk exploring the world beyond—the world of not‑me. 

The First Letting Go?

I find myself wondering about the very first letting go in life, and how this moment is registered in our just-forming minds. Does Stellmach’s art practice represent this? In first holding hands—and then letting go of hands—does she point to the pain and potential trauma of separation and separateness?

The dawning awareness that I am not you, and you are not me can be profoundly growth‑promoting, yet it can also be overwhelming. I am not an extension of my mother, father, or environment. I am a separate individual, in my own skin—and so are you.

This gradual recognition, beginning in infancy, is often defended against—precisely because it can be so painful and overwhelming. With the recognition of our separateness comes the unavoidable awareness of our dependence, our relative helplessness, and our vulnerability. At times this is too much to bear. So overwhelming, in fact, that the importance of separateness—for autonomy, relative independence, and fuller satisfaction in life—can be forgotten, ignored, or never adequately discovered.

Stellmach’s art speaks to me of the lifelong dilemma: the tension between separateness and connection, between the desire for autonomy and the need for interdependence. Her work holds the paradox of being in one’s own skin while also reaching beyond it—towards a world and others outside the self. 

Our Body, Our First Home

Natascha Stellmach invites us back into our bodies—to recognise our physicality and locate ourselves within our own skin. We are not merely brains or cognitive apparatuses cut off from the somatic. We are skin and body, blood, heart, gut, and muscle. We are sensory beings—smell, sight, sound, touch, and proprioception. We live in and on our skin, housing inner organs and outer layers. From these inner organs and the skin, we become ourselves.

Stellmach’s art then guides us to the significance of our second language: words as symbols. In marking the skin with words, she intuitively addresses the link between our first language—bodies, touch, and fusionality with the maternal environment— and our second language (of separateness, symbolic thought, and speech). Stellmach recognises the necessity of symbolic words not only to communicate with others, but also to speak meaningfully to ourselves. 

She reminds us of the power of the symbolic word: to hold, carry, and contain meaning. At times, even a single word—if truly symbolic, emotionally resonant, and psychically nested—can signify a breadth and depth of experience. It can hold the violence of trauma, the pain of loss, and the hurt of profound disappointment and betrayal.

From this first tactile skin language also comes the sounds of voice, tone and music; smells, sights, and familiar sensory patterns that we come to rely on to feel secure, alive, and safe enough to begin to let go. Our skin is our first and lifelong interface with the outside world. It is the barrier that enables us to distinguish me from not‑me. Yet it is also a site of contact and communication. Through sensation and proprioception, the skin may be our first functioning sensory organ, active from as early as the second month in utero. It contains orifices—gateways to expel and receive. These sites of opening and boundary become locations of contact, communication, and intimacy—places where we become aware of separateness and at times lose it in nurturing, orgasmic or pleasurable union.

Skin is the contact zone between inner and outer. A well‑integrated Skin Ego, internalised through relational experience, allows for the organisation of many parts of the self, helping us to differentiate inner from outer. When letting go of infantile omnipotence becomes possible—and safe—it allows the recognition of the not‑me. A safe not‑me is non‑intrusive; it prepares the ground for the self to explore—curiously and creatively—the unknown within and beyond.

Stellmach’s choice of the skin seems to arise from an awareness—conscious or unconscious—of its centrality to the human condition, and to the development of our minds.

So, what would we like to let go of?

What—or whom—would I like to let go of? 

Perhaps I would let go of infantile omnipotence. But also the past hurts, neglects, abandonments, failures and disappointments. And then all the maladaptive strategies we have developed—often unconsciously—to cope and survive in our limited bodies, in an imperfect and unjust world. 

Stellmach’s art practice reminds us that letting go is not a momentary act, but a process. It unfolds over time—moment by moment. A process that may follow familiar contours, yet ultimately looks and feels different for each of us.

Making a Mark

In The Letting Go, Stellmach creates a bloodline tattoo to inscribe a chosen word on —and under—the participant’s skin. Bloodlining is a technique that creates a mark without ink. A tattoo machine is used to produce a temporary wound: red, irritated, or lightly bleeding—hence the term bloodline. Over time, the wound fades or becomes invisible.

It is difficult to think about tattoos without recalling the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps: numbers forcibly tattooed into the skin of dehumanised individuals.

Stellmach has herself explored her German heritage in earlier works. In The Book of Back (2007), she investigates Zerrissenheit (a sense of being torn) in the context of migration and identity, as an Australian and the child of German immigrants who moved in 1967. In Blood (2006–2013), she explores the unspoken aspects of her family’s story within the broader framework of German history. As she writes:

“These intense narrative collages illustrate the blurring of memory, fact, and fiction often associated with repression and the lasting scars of war and trauma. Their effect is to invite us to investigate our relationship to our own 

Geschichte (a German word used interchangeably for both 'history' and 

‘story’)." 

Tattoos, of course, have long histories across many cultures. Tribal tattooing has been used for millennia as a mark of identity, heritage, and spirituality. In Southeast Asian and Polynesian cultures, permanent tattooing is central—except in aspects of traditions such as Sak Yan in Thailand, which Stellmach studied. Her use of bloodline tattooing might also resonate with temporary ceremonial tattooing found in parts of the Middle East and Pakistan. In those contexts, tattoos are ritualistic, protective, celebratory, and spiritual.

Care and Healing of Wounds (Bare Attention)

Stellmach’s process involves deep and consistent attention to care—at every stage, from preparation through to aftercare. This strongly resonates with the psychotherapeutic commitment to a holding environment in which wounding can be seen, held, and gently addressed.

In clinical work, many patients engage in self‑harm—either overtly (on the body) or covertly (within the psyche). Healing begins not with erasure but with recognition—in the presence of a non‑judgemental and attentive other. Stellmach’s process draws our attention to the wound and its need for witnessing, containment, and indeed, analytic care. Attention is central throughout.

The psychoanalyst Nina Coltart speaks of the importance of bare attention in the therapeutic process:

“The use of ‘bare attention’ absolutely has to be the scaffolding of everything else we do. Even when we are doing nothing (or appear to be), sitting in silence, testing our faith in the process—our constant, perhaps I should say only, attitude is one of ‘bare attention’.”


Words, Wounds and Healing

Words can heal—and words can wound. They can be rich, alive, and symbolically charged. Or they can be dead, formulaic, and stripped of emotional meaning. There is power in the word, just as there is power in the wound. Perhaps Stellmach, in making the word-wound, draws our attention to both.

She begins with the body—specifically, the skin—locating us in the terrain of our earliest experiences. She then leads us into the symbolic realm: the emergence of the word. The word-wound is placed on and under the skin, creating a real physical mark that heals over time.

Participants are then invited to document the healing process—through writing and self-portraits (selfies). 

Back in 2012, when Stellmach began this project, the selfie was still emerging as a form of self-expression—a modern ritual shaped by a digital, hyper-visible world. Today, it has arguably solidified that role. For many, the selfie is no longer just a casual snapshot but a curated representation of identity and presence. Some even suggest that we don’t truly exist today without a digital footprint. But do we use social media to connect—or to retreat into a digital claustrum, a place that feels safe but may entrap? 

I am reminded of Winnicott’s notion of the psyche‑soma—the indivisible experience of self that must be dreamt, felt, represented. If trauma is not felt, not dreamt, not symbolised, the psyche‑soma cannot grow. Parts of the self become stuck—cut off from the emotionally nested body‑self. 

As Stellmach’s participants document the healing of their word-wounds, they provide a vivid image of this process. No two wounds heal identically. Each depends on the individual’s unique biology, psychology, and circumstances. Healing is personal and unpredictable—just as it is in therapy, grief, and growth. 

And what of wounds more broadly? 

Aren’t we all wounded? Wounded by early loss and disappointment. Wounded by hurtful words or actions of others. Wounded by our own perceived failures, unmet expectations, and vulnerabilities. Wounded by unconscious compulsions to repeat the past—and to repeat old survival strategies that may now limit or even harm us.

Yes, Natascha is right to ask: 

“What would you like to let go of?”. 

Perhaps the answer will always be: 

Too much.

References

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