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.”
And yet at the same rate, Merkin honestly grapples with the grim limits of psychoanalysis: “therapy, as Freud himself made clear, is never about finding a cure.” Its aim is rather “to convert ‘hysterical misery’ into ‘common unhappiness.’” Consequently, “there is no absolute goal, no lifetime guarantee.” But in her most sober moments, she recognizes the plain virtues of the predicament when she describes how “it is a place to say out loud all that we have grown accustomed to keeping silent, in the hope that we might better understand ourselves and our missteps.”
The concluding paragraphs function as a nice microcosm of the overall article. In explaining her recent decision to stop seeing her analyst, she reviews the pros and cons. Although therapy may be correctly construed as, to use her daughter’s apt terminology, “emotional prostitution,” and even worse, a futile exercise of fixating on childhood traumas that need not be examined to death, lest they hold her back from living in the moment, it has also helped her understand elements of her personality on a deeper level than she would have been able to otherwise. Merkin wisely uses the word “addict,” perhaps the key adjective of the essay, in her closing comments, to characterize the contradictory and inescapable nature of her union with analysis-it may be riddled with flaws and frustration, and at its worst it can serve as a sort of crutch, but with realistic expectations therapy can also be an extremely beneficial, palliating process.
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