It takes a lot of courage to share your experience in therapy with the world. Many people conceal the fact that they see a shrink even from close friends. In some cultures psychiatry is blasphemous, think The Sopranos. But just as talking to a shrink is (obviously) therapeutic, writing about the experience can also serve the same purpose. So can reading about it. As such, Daphne Merkin’s recent New York Times Magazine article about her 40 year odyssey in search of that elusive analyst, the one who will truly penetrate her problems with precision and provide her with the requisite warmth and assurance she seeks, is a joy to read.

The essay as a whole is constructed very cleverly in that it conveys all the contradictory reactions most patients have to therapy and thus has the feel of a session in itself. The effect therefore was therapeutic for me, as Merkin’s article articulates many thoughts I’ve been aware of but have not explicitly formulated or stated. On the one hand, her hunt for the perfect doctor is reminiscent of Ahab’s insatiable quest for Moby Dick, as she implicitly longs for something that cannot be attained, or, more specifically, for someone who does not exist: “what I wanted was for her [a therapist from the author's youth] to be my mother, just as early on I longed for my male therapists to be my father… I wanted, that is, to be adopted-actually adopted-just as I would later wish for one or the other of my therapists to leave his wife for me.”

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