As someone who has sat in both chairs, as patient, and as therapist (in training only), finding a television show that manages to recreate the experience is frankly, to use an old pre-Freudian word, Mesmerizing. That word actually comes from the name of one of the foundational practitioners of that which became therapy--Anton Mesmer. In pre-Victorian and Victorian days, even, I guess, hypnosis was the precursor of the "talking cure" which is what Anna O, that spinster neurotic (by the by she was also a fairly well known suffragette under her real name, Bertha Pappenheim) called psychoanalysis. The show is In Treatment, and heck, I believe Gabriel Byrne, with his slight Irish accent, is just about the perfect imagining of a therapist. There are different sessions we get to peek into each day, a half hour for the viewer instead of the 50 minute hour for the fictional patients. Occasionally, we get a peek, at the same time, into the therapist's life, every patient's curiousity--as in how does it compare to what happens in the room?
I find myself reacting to each session's individual, and in one case a couple in trouble (what else if they are in therapy), with real emotions, as if I am experiencing real people. The dynamic is about as true to the thing, that peculiar, surreal thing that happens in the room, as one person replays the maladaptive approach to his or her life, while the other tries, amid unconscious, and conscious, red herrings to offer a corrective one so that the patient will find relationships more satisfying and relate to others more authentically. I did not think that a movie or a program could capture the intangible of a therapy session, but somehow not only in the scripts, but in the pace, this show manages to do it.
One of the patients is Alex, a Navy officer who flew a mission over Baghdad, bombed what was supposed to be, what he was told, was a terrorist nest of some kind, but instead was a school for boys sixteen of whom he killed. We want him to experience the guilt that anyone would have over what happened. But if he does, and likely, somewhere within that armor he has built up, he probably does, he doesn't satisfy us. In fact, he is an arrogant well, you know, who tells the doctor what the doctor thinks without letting the doctor say what he might think, who projects his cold self-hatred outward. If the doctor is experiencing a counter-transferential (feelings from the doctor's past impressed on the relationship in the same way that feelings of the patient are impressed on the relationshp with the doctor) so am I as I watch it. I could reach through my not high definition TV set and wring his neck, which feeling, of course, if I were in Gabriel Byrne's chair, I would hopefully observe, without as Bion said, "memory or desire".. If I did the work right, I would observe what was happening between us, in the interest of the patient, looking for that thread of the dynamic with which I could work. The hard part, in all the confusion, is staying out of the patient's way and out of your own way. As a patient, I recognized some of my own, if not words, but fears, how will what I say be judged, because "out there" in the world, it will be judged. But the therapist is not a judge. He or she is a tool, a window, it has been said, a mirror for the patient. On both sides, I found it to be a sacred endeavor. My own therapy ended long ago. I ran away, a bit, no a lot, in fear, from becoming a therapist not long after when all I could see in the future of the job was liability, instead of the work and the patients. Long story. But this show has rekindled my interest and this is only week two of nine weeks.
Is it a perfect digital replication of the process? Of course not. It couldn't be, the tides and eddies of ambiguous emotion are simply so complex in the real experience they cannot be duplicated with exactitude, and after all each dynamic is unique unto itself. But what great television and it could inspire the work of a new generation, if it does not degenerate into typical melodrama. Maybe the short run will prevent that. But if it is successful, it will have a second season and I don't know if they could sustain the focus. On the other hand, I am glad they have tried, and if there is only the nine weeks, I will be running it on DVD for the rest of my life. That good, at least to me. Let me know what you think, ok?
