My Life in Therapy

By DAPHNE MERKIN
New York Times Magazine

All those years, all that money, all that unrequited love. It began way back when I was a child, an anxiety-riddled 10-year-old who didn’t want to go to school in the morning and had difficulty falling asleep at night. Even in a family like mine, where there were many siblings (six in all) and little attention paid to dispositional differences, I stood out as a neurotic specimen. And so I was sent to what would prove to be the first of many psychiatrists in the four and a half decades to follow — indeed, I could be said to be a one-person boon to the therapeutic establishment — and was initiated into the curious and slippery business of self-disclosure. I learned, that is, to construct an ongoing narrative of the self, composed of what the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller calls “microdots” (“the consciously experienced moments selected from the whole and arranged to present a point of view”), one that might have been more or less cohesive than my actual self but that at any rate was supposed to illuminate puzzling behavior and onerous symptoms — my behavior and my symptoms.

To this day, I’m not sure that I am in possession of substantially greater self-knowledge than someone who has never been inside a therapist’s office. What I do know, aside from the fact that the unconscious plays strange tricks and that the past stalks the present in ways we can’t begin to imagine, is a certain language, a certain style of thinking that, in its capacity for reframing your life story, becomes — how should I put this? — addictive. Projection. Repression. Acting out. Defenses. Secondary compensation. Transference. Even in these quick-fix, medicated times, when people are more likely to look to Wellbutrin and life coaches than to the mystique-surrounded, intangible promise of psychoanalysis, these words speak to me with all the charged power of poetry, scattering light into opaque depths, interpreting that which lies beneath awareness. Whether they do so rightly or wrongly is almost beside the point.

IT WAS A SNOWY Tuesday afternoon in February, and I was inching along Fifth Avenue in a taxi, my mood as gray as the sky, on my way to a consultation with a therapist in the Village who was recommended to me by Dr. O., another therapist I had seen in consultation, who in turn was referred to me by a friend’s therapist. Once again — how many times have I done this? — I was on a quest for a better therapist, a more intuitive therapist, a therapist I could genuinely call my own, a therapist who could make me happy. I liked Dr. O., a man in his 80s who struck me as having a quick grasp of the essential details, the issues that dragged along with me year after year like a ball and chain. He seemed to get to the heart of the matter — had I ever felt loved? Had I ever loved? — with disarming ease. But then, after several visits, during which I envisioned myself finally and conclusively grappling with things, toppling over the impediments that stood in my way and coming out a winner, Dr. O. suddenly announced that he couldn’t take on any new patients. He said he had given the prospect of working with me a great deal of thought but in the end didn’t think he was prepared to commit himself.

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