Starting Up

On the impulse to return to therapy

In March 2017, I ended a fourteen-year psychoanalysis that had seen me on an analyst’s couch five days a week, forty-eight weeks a year. When I stopped, the mourning was for both the relationship I was losing and my sense that I would never again seek any kind of psychotherapy. I’d had enough. It was time to live without professional help.

The analysis was not my first time in therapy. As a psychotically despairing teenager, I got blackout drunk one night and managed to drive on I-91 to a McDonalds near the airport – an event which shook my parents out of their denial and led them to (miraculously, as neither had any experience of psychoanalysis) find me a Winnicottian psychologist in Hartford, an odd man who went shoeless and cracked his toes during our sessions. He was mercurial but essentially accepting of my desperate need to express myself through my clouds of shame. A year of weekly sessions later, I went off to college, feeling hopeful and stable.

That didn’t last – I got to NYU and felt the same painful alienation I’d felt in the Connecticut suburbs, only now without the fantasy that salvation awaited in the form of screenwriting classes. I dodged a cult that tried to recruit me, but couldn’t resist falling in love with a messed-up guy. The resulting agony led me to an NYU-referred therapist. I saw her on and off for nearly a decade, at first using her as a kind of sponge for my anxiety, then realizing I had to actually try to understand myself. I left her only when I learned that a low-fee psychoanalysis (through an institute training new analysts) existed and that I could see someone five days a week, not just twice.

So I’d been in some kind of psychodynamic treatment more or less non-stop between 1998 and 2017. That’s a lot! And what did it get me? A lot – I was an insane person and I’m (basically) not one anymore. There are some external markers: In 2002 I stopped smoking (two packs a day at my peak). In the early 2010s, I pushed through a tough period where I lost favor with theatre critics and was able to keep creating authentic work. Most crucially, I stopped falling for men who desired and punished me in ever-maddening cycles. By the mid 2010s, I began to feel like I’d reached the limit of what psychoanalytic treatment could offer: the rest was just Freud’s “ordinary unhappiness.” My interests turned to anthropology and philosophy and my final years of analysis were as much a dialogue about the nature of reality as a treatment.

When I terminated, I hardly thought that my psyche was without pathology, or that life would now be smooth. It’s more I thought: is there really more here, inside me? More trauma, more unconscious fantasy? More disavowed desire, more dissociated emotion? And if there were “more” of these things, shouldn’t I be able to figure them out myself now?

I had built my life in such a way that, I hoped, I could do just that. I meditated daily. I read analytic literature as a spur to self-analysis. My non-fiction reading circled the psyche one way or another, and the fiction I read mostly existed in a reality where the unconscious was a given. Surely this would be enough.

Then the other day I found myself on the 4 train, heading from my apartment in Crown Heights to the UES to meet a new therapist.

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Why was I doing this, if I felt like I’d hit the limit of what psychotherapy could offer? It’s not as if I lacked for engagement with my psyche. I keep a daily dream journal. If I feel conflicted or distressed about some aspect of my life, many insightful people I’m close to are happy to talk. When others share their problems with me, I experience a kind of self-therapy as I try to understand how my situation resonates with theirs.

And really, isn’t a massive drag on my psyche just how fucked up our world is? I hate that we live in an increasingly digital reality and that more and more people build their emotional lives there. Nothing that happens in therapy will change that. The psychotic violence all around us, the endless objectification of human life – all will be untouched by therapy.

And yet…

Starting the process – finding a therapist (circuitously, via a psychoanalytic podcast), sending the initial emails (is this a repetition compulsion?), having a first phone call (wow he really listened!), walking towards his office (is this strange neighborhood about to become familiar?), a dim hope stirs in me. During the first session, I hear myself recounting the contours of my life – forty-nine years condensed into minutes, weaving in my psyche’s various confusions. The clock (digitally) ticks, he listens warmly and sympathetically…

And the hour’s up. On the walk back to the subway, I feel a gentle throb of excitement; the next morning, I feel waves of sadness. Are these both types of libidinal stirrings – reawakened feelings from a numbed inner world? Or are they transferential illusions, destined to further alienate me in the end? In some ways I already feel too libidinally alive – endlessly curious about other people, desirous of generating creative collaborations, passionately struggling to understand what I believe about reality… Do I really need to come more to life? Or is a more pragmatic, effective deadness what I’m secretly after?

Maybe it’s that kind of intractable question therapy is best designed for exploring. How can I better live in a world I find so disappointing? Perhaps therapy can offer nurturance of a sense of possibility – movement, discovery, states that can be hard to generate in less formal relationships. Your social circle isn’t ever going to be devoted to your existential crises and often, friends need to psychically stay where they are – which means folding you into where they are, regardless of your needs. If the potential for unpredictable inner shifts is part of what one needs to stay alive, the ritualized sameness of psychotherapy may (paradoxically) be the best place to find that. Therapy is a zone where anything (except sex) can happen and you can be anyone (except a physically violent person).

Not everyone will need therapy to feel their inner world shake loose. But for some, it may be the most consistent and reliable route to that. Perhaps one day the process of generating new inner dynamics in a deadening world will be available to anyone with friends, as more and more people who resist social and psychological stagnation discover new forms of intimacy together. And who knows, maybe material conditions will shift in such a way that some of our despair shifts with it. But for now, in these depressing times, I’m fantasizing about session two – and the stranger I hope to meet as I put words to my uncertainties.