On terminology
This essay is an exploration of my experiences as a patient in psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy—terms which I use here somewhat interchangeably. Strictly speaking, psychoanalysis is the original and more intensive form, while psychodynamic therapy refers to a family of treatments which rely on the same theoretical structures (e.g., the unconscious, transference, defense mechanisms, etc.) and general approach. Depth psychology is an umbrella term which I use to characterize any therapeutic approach/orientation that relies on the idea of the unconscious and on the symbolic representations of psychological experience.
***
I have been in therapy for almost forty years. Virtually all of my therapists have worked in the psychoanalytic or psychodynamic tradition. I have seen them for long periods of time and have built real relationships with them. Over time I have come to love them and they, me. We haven’t worked from a treatment plan so much as from our instincts (though in analysis, that is a loaded word). The two things I first ask myself when picking a therapist are: Do we share values; and do we like each other?
Psychoanalysis itself feels like someone I know, or someone who might get along with people I know. Psychoanalysis cares about things that I think matter. It thinks, largely, from the inside-out and from the past, forward. It cares about things that, for all intents and purposes, exist in the air that is both within and between people: structures that you can’t see; actions that you can’t either; transfers of invisible but potent stuff.
Once in my 30’s when things weren’t going well, I went to see a cognitive behavioral therapist for an initial consultation. She was wearing a big rock on her finger. I took one look at it and thought: She’ll never understand me. When I asked her about a sliding scale, she said—her ring refracting the afternoon light—
“You won’t value your therapy if it doesn’t cost you something.” Frankly, I was hoping therapy would cost me less. In the end, it would cost me almost everything I had.
***
I am 54 years old and live in a one-room apartment which, if I were trying to rent it to someone else, I would describe as ‘rustic’. Only recently have I found myself longing for a middle-class life: for a thermostat and air ducts, for a sweep on my front door, and a hood over my stove that was more than decorative. I long for the peace I would feel at being able to string a week of unremarkably pleasant days together. I long not to feel destitute so much of the time.
When, for two years, I was matter out of place in a natural-scientific psychology master’s program, I learned about the ‘downward drift’—both psychological and financial—of unsuccessfully treated individuals with severe mental illness.
Mentally healthy people, I learned, get healthier over time. They get happier. They also progress financially, and in other related ways. The young mentally healthy person buys a starter home; the middle-aged healthy person might buy their mother a home. The mentally ill person does not own a home.
I immediately knew that they were talking about me.
In spite of devoting almost four decades to inpatient and outpatient psychodynamic treatment and coming to know myself deeply and well—I don’t seem to get better, really. Though I have certainly gotten poorer. Therapy has been my most enduring expense—what I bought instead of security. Over time, paying for it has reshaped not just my psyche but my economic class. So, in middle-age, I am still an entry-level adult who has never really moved up the ladder. I am still learning how to make ends meet: in every sense of that phrase.
***
My relationship to money was first articulated on my childhood bedroom floor where rejected clothes lay tangled with unfinished schoolwork and loose change. When I tidied up, I would sweep the pennies into a dustpan and throw them in the trash.
Years later in my young adulthood, when credit card companies would send me money-saving offers, I would reflexively tear them up. Generally, overwhelmed by my experience, I tried to keep things simple where I could; and practical matters had a way of working themselves out. Inevitably, like used furniture just after a move, money would find me. I would get by. Not worrying about money was a way of telling myself things would be alright, that they already were. There were so many other things to worry about. It was my way of being free.
Value in my family was largely unpaired from wealth. And class was an attitude, a sensibility, an ethos. It didn’t answer to the finite, to the concrete, to stuff. You only confidently possess that which you don’t need to mention. And the class that we wouldn’t speak about and were unconfined by was effortless. We didn’t call people “classy” because that would be déclassé.
Both of my parents are artists who were raised in eccentric, free-spirited families of some means. They were the kind of people who had unusual pets; who played the guitar and lived in Greece for a time; who sat on the cement slab floor of their house in Greece talking intently with what remained of a Gitanes dangling from one hand. They valued wit, invention, depth. They taught me photo editing, plant identification, the etymology of words, and other impractical skills.
They did not send me to schools that prepared me for the world—which were either explicitly vocational, or which were the first stage in a process of professional development—but schools which helped students develop their natural gifts and live up to their full potential. While working-class kids were learning computer programming, cosmetology, and how to rebuild an engine, I was writing poems about the inside of my brain and taking electives in Totalitarianism.
My parents didn’t care about my grades, and while it was assumed that I would eventually support myself, they didn’t talk to me about how I would survive the adult world once I grew up. Instead, they were invested in the idea that I would have ideas. Ideas that would manifest in artistic or intellectual creations that others would come to know about. Because it was less important to be practical than interesting.
***
When I turned nine my father left, and my mother went back to work in heels. She was in a lot of debt, I think. Her wallet was a patchwork quilt of credit cards, unredeemed department store credits, and as yet unreconciled receipts. Yet somehow, I went to private school, she took me to Paris; paid for tutoring, clarinet lessons, and dance.
But not ballet.
My mother thought ill of the contortion and transformation it demanded of young girls’ bodies—forced to walk, literally on their toes. Contained rather than expressed.
Instead, I took Duncan Dancing. After Isadora Duncan, the early modern dance pioneer who, while riding in a convertible, had been strangled to death by her own hand-painted silk scarf. And during our class the other girls and I darted across the gap-toothed wooden floors of our teacher Christiane’s unfinished loft in bare feet and raw silk—like wood nymphs. Natural and free.
We were girls of what I sometimes call “Taxi Driver New York”. A New York through which we would walk home from school or dance class, often unsupervised, past drug dealers, pet shops, fabric emporia, leather bars and gay sex shops, chocolatiers, and suspected mafia fronts. Our parents—artists or creatives of some stripe—had mostly moved to the city in the late sixties, possibly to say something about things that they didn’t want to be a part of, possibly to join others who also didn’t want to be a part of those things. Our belonging, class and otherwise, was among others who also did not belong.
Then there was Narcisa, of the smooth brown skin and close brown curls. Of the purple leotard and brown pleather jacket. Narcisa who went to a different school than the rest of us. Whose family had likely moved from Puerto Rico to the Lower East Side of Manhattan for entirely different reasons than our parents had moved to the East Village, Chelsea, Stuyvesant Town, or Gramercy Park.
One thing I knew about Narcisa was that she was inside of something that I experienced myself as outside of. And in the minutes before dance class, while we changed and chatted in Christiane’s bedroom, Narcisa did a good business selling the rest of us candy and gum.
“How much for the Pop Rocks?” I would eagerly inquire. Everything Narcisa sold was a dollar or more. She would sell the Pop Rocks for a dollar. A single piece of Bazooka Bubble Gum? Well, that was also a dollar.
Narcisa cared about money. For her, money represented possibility and its limit. And no matter what her number, I was willing. The dollar which I might have unearthed from the clothes covering my bedroom floor was just a little piece of green paper to me. And here my financial maturity would become fixated, never elaborated beyond an economy in which I was willing to give it all to feel a little bit better for now.
While Narcisa played by the rules, I played by heart.
***
I first saw a therapist in my sophomore year of high school. To some it may have seemed inevitable. To me it felt natural. I was a sensitive girl—emotional, perceptive, intense. And by the time I was 12, my parents were locked in a legal battle that would make the local papers and last into my middle age.
The summer after freshman year, on the heels of a two-month trip to Tuscany with my father and a girlfriend I had never met, the last weeks of which I spent alone in a dark room wracked in pain, my mother took me to see a gastroenterologist. He diagnosed me with a psychosomatic illness and recommended I see a therapist to help me understand what was really making me sick.
I was not alone—at that time in New York, in thousands of quiet and elegant offices, scores of other girls were seeing therapists who would put stock in what lay below their surfaces—and was beginning to make itself visible in inconvenient ways. After all, this was the hometown of the Karen Horney Clinic and the William Alanson White Institute, of Woody Allen’s filmic enactments, and of Portnoy’s Complaint. Psychoanalysis spoke to us from the spines of 18 miles of books in the Strand; from the Cinema Village marquee, from the brass plaques adorning edifices on the Upper East and Upper West Side. This wasn’t only our therapy—this was our culture.
I have a theory that those of us who use ‘substances’ don’t choose those substances that balance out who we are, but those which make us feel more like we do already. Aggressive stockbrokers in the ‘80s snorted cocaine, underachievers in the ‘90s smoked pot. I am sensitive and anxious—so I drink too much coffee. And by the time I graduated college, I had been in psychodynamic therapy for ten years.
***
Dr. Chagall was a delicate Jewish man with long fingers who decorated his office walls with prints of the artist with whom he shared a name. He was the therapist who gave me my first diagnosis and who taught me about mother-anger as a way of understanding why my stomach hurt so much. He taught me, in essence, that everything higher up comes from somewhere deeper down. Not that this was entirely new to me: frequently after social gatherings my mother and I would ‘debrief’—sharing our theories regarding the unconscious motives of partygoers we felt less than favorably towards. So, Dr. Chagall’s psychodynamic logic had a lived-in rightness for me. Recently his name came up in conversation, and my mother admitted not paying the balance of his bill until I was in my mid-40’s, while also giving me the faint impression that a small portion of that bill might still remain unpaid. Sometimes for reasons of which she is not fully aware (my mother has been out of therapy more than in) she won’t pay her bills. After leaving for college, I paid for therapy myself.
***
The motto of the small liberal arts college I went to was: A place to think. My guidance counselor recommended it:
“A larger school just might be too much for you, India.” In the first semester of my sophomore year—when a terrible sinking feeling would overcome me at dusk and worsen until the world of inanimate objects became strangely and darkly vivified—I would make daily and desperate collect calls to my mother from the pay phone in the lobby of my dorm. Towards the end of the first semester I would drop out, travel back to the city, and move back in with her. Knowing that she was the root of my problems didn’t help me any. And after three months of picking fights and sleeping until 3 PM, I signed up for a writing class at Columbia, got a job arranging flowers, and found a psychodynamic therapist of an entirely different order who introduced me to the “sliding scale” and who charged me 20 dollars a session which I paid in cash.
Marie-Charlotte was a French Lacanian analyst and translator who worked out of a dingy six-flat on the Upper West Side with a black fire escape winding up its face. It took me over an hour to get there on the 1 train. Her street went downhill and was always two shades darker than the avenue it crossed. She wore black jeans, narrow rectilinear wire-rimmed glasses, and had short, grey, asymmetrical hair. Across her lips spread a small, wry smile. I liked her immediately.
If Dr. Chagall gave me my first diagnosis, Marie-Charlotte gave me a new way of thinking. We worked with language. Everything I said was a pun, a riddle, origami, a bind. She introduced me to the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. She took me seriously. Our sessions didn’t feel like help—so I didn’t feel helpless. It felt like we were thinking through an important problem together. Like we were untangling something, completing a puzzle. Making something obscured—visible.
A year later, when I went back to college at a big public university in the Midwest, I took a class called “Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought in France” with a decorous Frenchman who also wore narrow rectilinear wire-rimmed glasses. We read Lacan, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva. In my weekly telephone sessions with Marie-Charlotte we put these theories into practice. I looked up to her. She was a beautiful enigma. And she never invoked the variable session with me.
***
I saw Dr. Goddard high up in a prewar apartment building in the Chicago Loop. She was elegant, kind, motherly, deliberate. She kept copies of The Sun magazine (“forward with the people”) in her waiting room. At the time, I was having a recurrent waking nightmare that the electric company would shut off my lights before I had the wherewithal to pay my bill. I was terribly depressed. During one session, she drew a diagram of my relationships to self and other: a single small black dot in the middle of the page, arrows pointing outward to a ring of larger black dots. She commiserated that it must have been hard being the single small dot my whole life. My eyes welled up with tears of recognition, because it had been. When our 50 minutes were over, I never wanted to leave.
Therapy was as close as I knew to the experience of loving and being loved; of peace and oneness; of going to church. My parents made art; I made myself. I wasn’t getting better but I didn’t quit. Like with a slot machine, the less I seemed to get back, the more I paid in. You always want more of what feels good, no matter what it asks of you.
One late afternoon not long after I arrived in Chicago, my mother called to tell me my grandfather had died. His assets, she explained, were to be divided among his three surviving children and me and my cousin Alex—his only grandchildren. To me, the sum was astronomical. Like children who can’t count very high, what I couldn’t quite grasp might as well have been infinite.
Money had found me just in time. And with its blunt materiality I would reaffirm my allegiance to the archaeology of my soul—my psychodynamic life. The next day in session, imagining myself lying inert on the floor of my apartment with the lights shut off, I told Dr. Goddard:
“I just need someone to take care of me.”
And she handed me a glossy pamphlet: crisp white pillows and duvet, a wooden cabin nestled in shrubby pine and juniper, spirituality circles, wide western horizons, infinite skies.
“Maybe this would help?” she said.
I wired half the money up front on the day of my decision. All that money! It took my breath away. But I felt important to myself. This is what I value. This is who I am. I let the money flow through me, past me, but also for me. I would give them this thing; and they would help me access those powerful intangibles. It was a wager on transformation over stability—after all, the human is a force, not an object. I would hand them my money—and they would return me to myself.
Two days later I boarded a plane to New Mexico with nothing but a small backpack full of folded-up clothes and the single peach-colored rose that my friend had given me when we said “goodbye”.
***
The Holistic Life Center was my first time inpatient. I was 28 years old. There was so much therapy there—individual, group, body-centered, arts-based, spirituality-centered, substance-abuse. If you wanted to, you could be in it from dusk till dawn. Food was everywhere—bursting from the cupboards and the double-doored refrigerator, overflowing dishes, platters, and baskets. The skies went on forever, the whiff of piñon smoke lingering on the sharp night air. My therapist was a Jungian wise woman with dyed auburn hair who found myth and meaning around every corner. Everything was bountiful. Everything was beautiful. It was a utopia. How things should be but aren’t. Perhaps people get better if you give them what they need.
The center didn’t claim to change behavior or eliminate symptoms—it aimed to heal. Healing is a return to something better, right, real. It orients around the idea that we were okay in the first place. Pathology is a clue leading back to the real person. A cut that is healed looks less and less like a cut and more and more like the original unblemished skin. While behaviorally or cognitively focused therapies constrain, bend, order, revise—the depth psychology practiced at the Holistic Life Center put its trust in the inherent and endogenous wisdom of the original self, the self which only by going deep within would find its own way without.
When I discharged to live independently in the community two and a half months later, I felt saner than I had in years. I lived in a manufactured home up the road from a pilgrimage site; studied Hindu philosophy with an old Anglo woman in Hernández; and took West African dance classes where we washed our feet in holy water first.
I continued working with the Jungian wise woman because she could tell when I was not myself, because I liked the feeling in the room between us, because I liked the meaning we made together. I paid her $80 a session by check. With a knowing smile she would place it face down on the rug beside her. I was willingly underemployed. When new people would ask what ‘I did’, I would tell them that I drew, walked in the woods, and took care of my dogs. I had come to New Mexico like many others, it seemed, to relinquish my ambitions. Who I was, after all, was waiting underneath.
In the years immediately following, I relied on my grandfather’s money to pay for therapy three times a week at first, then two. No one questioned my spending. I wasn’t buying shoes—what I was doing was like education. It was education. I didn’t just want to be symptom free—I wanted to be fulfilled. The sessions were nourishing. Like food that tastes good because it is good for you. Therapy corresponded to a real need in me. It had become a way—maybe the only way I really knew—of being myself.
***
When I was 34, I left New Mexico for graduate school in the UK. A characteristically impractical choice made possible through a small inheritance from an Irish aunt. But London was heartless and sprawling. And while I excelled academically, I was lost to myself on its wet, winding streets. I briefly saw a counselor, but she got breast cancer and had to leave her practice. I had a single brief visit with an NHS psychiatrist who doubled my antipsychotic. Otherwise, and for the first time, I was out of therapy.
After graduating, I saw three DBT therapists, one relational psychoanalyst, and a couple of nonspecific counselors and social workers. I felt like a pathological person. I trained as a therapist myself, with all the ambivalence that entailed. I was good at it, because being a client/patient/analysand had been my life’s work.
But my mental health continued to worsen, and I wondered if there had been something magical about New Mexico. So, I returned there for a poorly paid therapist job at a community mental health clinic but never returned to the state of mind I had found there the first time around. And by this time, I had almost run out of money.
***
I remember watching myself pull into the Income Support Division parking lot one winter afternoon in my newly acquired gold BMW X3 with a pleasurable sense of irony. It was old and unreliable, but it was beautiful. A corporate car in its past life, it had been driven by somebody with a career, and a 401k. A person, I imagined, who was well-compensated for whatever they did five days a week and some hours on the weekend. Someone for whom this compensation was an organizing detail of their existence. Someone who lived within their means and planned for the future.
A year and a half later, I would quit my job and leave my dog and belongings behind to drive that car more than 2,000 miles across the country—willing to spend the very last bit of my therapy fund to help buy myself 3–5 months at the Clarke Center, a long-term psychodynamic psychiatric hospital specializing in the treatment of impossible patients.
I hadn’t realized how difficult it would be being a therapist. Not because the work was hard—although it was—but because I felt like an imposter. The weekends were even worse. I was dissociated while driving, paranoid in the grocery aisles. Hopelessness was a constant. I had to intervene.
I have always had a “whatever it takes” approach to life, but as I have gotten older my supply of what it actually will take has gotten smaller and smaller. I need more sleep; my arms are weaker; my hair is thin; my money is dwindling; and so I am slightly less likely to dive headfirst into the swimming pool whose cement bottom is clearly visible under a thin veil of blue water.
Nonetheless, the same willingness that would give Narcisa a dollar—or more if she asked—for a single piece of Bazooka bubble gum, would end up giving the Clarke Center my then meager nest egg: what remained of the money that I had spent the last twenty-some years paying for other inpatient and outpatient treatments with, in the hopes that I could reclaim that wholesome feeling of full-throated me-ness that the Holistic Life Center had left me with 20 years before.
I have never been a ‘stuff person’. My heart is heavy, but I travel light. And I only see therapists who don’t accept insurance, which I usually don’t have anyway. So, I have been happy to give up my material belongings in exchange for immaterial wellbeing. After all, is there any other kind?
But while my first inpatient experience at age 28 left me with a powerful medication cocktail, and a glorious feeling of the possible—which on one particular occasion spread out before me in the form of uninterrupted Western sky—the Clarke Center would cost me, at least for a good long while, my already tenuous grip on hope—my belief in myself and my life—and what remained of the very money that shielded me from an awareness of its own necessity.
You need to live in a state of relative comfort or imbalance to consistently choose the impractical.
***
Therapy at the Clarke Center had a subtle relationship to change which I appreciated, and which also scared me to death. I only had enough money left for five months of treatment.
The first time I met with Dr. Novak we sat in silence. I loved her and resented her immediately. She had the sorrowful face and heavy-lidded eyes of the Madonna, with the bearing and wardrobe of a runway model. I squirmed in my seat—I needed her to nod, to smile, to offer me her approval. But instead, she gave me her presence for exactly 50 minutes. And I began to cry.
Before I knew her well (and even sometimes after) I would bring lists of problems for us to address during our session. And on hard days (which were common) I would drown in a pool of my own tears, imploring her to throw me a life preserver—terrified I might not make it to the next session if she didn’t reach me in time—while she sat quietly in her chair.
When I would watch Dr. Novak in session, she appeared both utterly relaxed and deeply engaged. Indeed, relaxation may have been the condition of her engagement. Her treatment plans were more like sketches—drafted loosely in a few minutes. At the Clarke Center, no one forced progress; force is conscious-mind stuff, inorganic—like toe shoes—pushing the natural order around.
I remember patients—usually from somewhere like Texas—who were neophytes to psychodynamic treatment, sitting around the residence hall in the late-night hours, playing cards and discussing what their therapists might be “doing” with and to them. Because as far as they could tell, it might be nothing at all.
On the one hand, understanding the therapeutic relationship in terms of doing with/to was naive, and akin to the wrongheaded things that can be said about making art—like when a couple stands in front of a painting in an art gallery asking each other what the artist “is trying to say.” On the other hand, it was hopeful. Because it suggested that these patients saw their therapy as goal-directed, going somewhere, and potentially helpful.
I never broke it to them that what a therapist does in psychodynamic treatment is oblique, only visible when caught at certain angles by the sun. And in many moments not even visible to the therapists themselves (I know, I have asked). That this kind of therapy is less like fixing a leaky faucet and more like harmonizing with the music of the spheres.
And then there were the old hats, New Englanders and New Yorkers with great stores of undifferentiated old money (or family relations that led to such money) and unstructured time. These patients could afford to stay at the Clarke Center over a period of years—there was one patient who had been there for ten!
The privileged, of course, can dwell in process. And in their tenure, the old hats had come to understand and accept the subtle and oblique nature of the work and the change it might (or might not) catalyze. It is the poor who need outcomes. Outcomes are results—they are visible; they make a difference. You can get a job with outcomes. You can take them to the bank.
The Clarke Center was its own society with elections, jobs, mores, and social classes. The old hats were the top tier—they dressed preppy, traveled in groups, drank lavender lattes on the lawn, smoked cigarettes in the gazebo, and generally ran the place. While still a patient, I was friendly or even friends with some of them. After my discharge that changed.
In the middle of a December snowstorm and after five months of an inpatient treatment that felt like the psychic equivalent of having my house tossed, I ran out of money and moved into a motel up the road. I remember overhearing one of the female old hats whispering to another old hat about me with the false concern of gossip: “You know, she discharged too early.” No one knew that better than me! I pined to be back in treatment because when therapy has undone you, what do you long for more than more therapy?
By March I had gotten a job as a barista at the cafe around the corner from the hospital, where all the old hats, Dr. Novak, and everyone else at the Clarke Center—patients and doctors alike—got their lattes, cappuccinos, cold brew, drip. And I came to know each patient’s drink, as well as I had known their triggers. This was our new relationship—asymmetrical and commercial. My new class status reiterated with each cha-ching of the register.
One busy Saturday with a line out the door I was rushing around, pouring with sweat—making one patient drink after the next, when a young and attractive old hat who aspired to a life in the theater called out to me from the end of the line, playing at sympathy as a means of possibly accessing it:
“India, are you okay?”
I don’t remember what I said. But my face flushed with anger. She no longer had the right to ask me such questions. I shouldn’t have to expose myself emotionally in the very moment that I am fulfilling an economic transaction—especially one that, unlike the hidden economic nature of all the transactions at the Clarke Center—is so brazenly itself.
***
In the first year of my doctoral program, after many years of deep and nuanced work with my relational analyst, Elizabeth, we broke up when—desperate to get a grip on my problems—I told her that I needed homework. While I believed in analysis (at least in theory), there is nothing like the fluid and bottomless organicity of severe and persistent mental illness to get you to move towards the outside, towards meds, towards more or less bare mechanics, towards homework.
Had I insulted her? She was no technician; she was an artist (at least in my mind). And artists aren’t behaviorists. Behaviorists predict outcomes. Artists are in the business of processing the unknown. Behaviorists know the rules, artists know the exceptions to them. My parents are artists. Artists have made me who I am.
The work Elizabeth was doing was powerful—that wasn’t lost on me. I was doing it with her. It was process, not object. It did not have an outcome and there was no ‘coming out of it.’ While for the analyst this guarantees a relationship of longevity, for the analysand, of course, it guarantees the same thing.
And I needed to get better.
***
Art is costly, and psychoanalysis has never really been within my budget—financially or psychically—but for almost forty years I have paid out-of-pocket anyway. It is my ungainly, expensive habit, my gamble on hope.
Unlike evidence-based therapies, where you put your trust in the “evidence”, in psychodynamics you put your faith in affinity, in relationship, in the third space: the invisible but palpable. Like my despair, my willingness is bottomless. And no one leans into a trust fall like me. I am a risk-taker—this helps me change and grow but it also puts me at risk.
I gave everything to my treatment at the Clarke Center. In each individual and group session—I questioned myself, I dismantled myself, I laid myself bare. But when I left five months later, I did so with empty pockets, a troubled mind, and no discharge plan.
It is difficult to take two positions on one thing at the same time—to both deeply believe in psychoanalytic work and also see its dangers, oversights, lacunae. To love your therapist and to, in moments of disillusionment and despair, hate her for ruining your life.
Psychoanalysis is the architect of my self-understanding, and it has become an important way of knowing my world. But it is easier to tear something down than to build it up—and psychoanalysis has opened more wounds in me than it has been able to heal. I remember asking Dr. Novak, in session as I crumbled in front of her:
“Do I have enough ego strength for this work?” And she answered:
“Just.”
Recently after a particularly deflating session I ranted to a friend about never getting better. I needed more, maybe not homework, but something! He asked if that was the case, why I kept going back. And I told him:
“Psychoanalysis is my language; it makes sense to me; it feels like home.” Psychoanalysis also appeals to me—it has the oblique delicacy of poetry. And as William James famously observed, our philosophical (or therapeutic) commitments are shaped and determined by our temperamental leanings as much as anything else. While a therapist with an orientation incompatible to our own might help us change (because of this apparent “incompatibility”), we tend to choose the therapists and therapies which feel sympathetic and familiar—which reflect how we see the world.
My therapy had to be subtle and profound. I had to experience it as meaningful. It had to engage my imagination. It had to stretch my mind. My therapy could not merely consist of rote cognitive reframing that I performed in the same marble notebook every day. It could not involve feeling better by “acting opposite” to sadness with a half-smile. So, I chose a therapy that I could defend to my friends, and that my mother would approve of. And I chose a therapist who I like to look at and listen to. Who organizes her books by color. Who laughs at my jokes. Who reminds me of people and things that I also like.
Most people step into and stay in a life which forms a Venn diagram with who they ‘are.’ Or they find ways to be themselves within an outline which is sometimes too loose and sometimes pinches in. But they don’t run through life as I have run through it with the aim of first ‘finding’ and then ‘being’ themselves. But living that way just comes naturally to me. I am a naïve existentialist. I am a searcher. I am, among other things, an expression of a bohemian family culture which eschewed economic class and prized inner riches. A culture in which “interesting” trumped “practical” every time. And indeed, I have led an interesting life, at least to look at from certain angles. But the more money I have spent going to cafés where I write poems by hand in unlined Moleskine notebooks; traveling to the Balkans to get pleasurably lost alone, studying niche subjects in marginalized and/or impractical disciplines, and participating in long-term psychodynamic or psychoanalytic treatment with no articulated goal or end in sight, the poorer I have become—ultimately confining me within the very class system I have, in all other respects, lived my life in defiance of.
Be that as it may, I continue to go to therapy. I continue to go to therapy because I want to feel better in my own skin. Because I want to feel happier. Because I want to know and feel like myself. Because I want to feel good, and because for a large portion of most 50-minute sessions—which I can now only afford once a week—I do. I continue to go to therapy because those “wants” are bigger and more influential than the voice that says: “This isn’t working.” And I hope that if I can trust in the therapeutic process, and in my inherent ability to find the road back to myself—with the support of someone attuned and skillful—I will get better. And maybe, if today’s vibrant session with Dr. Novak is any indication—in which I laughed, and cried, and saw things I just hadn’t seen before though they stood right in front of me—I already am.
