Couch is a series about psychotherapy.
My career in therapy has been a long and varied one, spanning four decades and calling on different aspects of my presented self. One of the odder things about therapy, I’ve discovered, is that it comes with little in the way of a code of conduct as opposed to other situations you find yourself in — little, that is, beyond showing up, paying your bill in a timely fashion, leaving when the session comes to an end and not upending any of the shards or vessels that might be lying around the office in homage to Freud’s passion for collecting antiquities.
There is no one, in short, to tell you how to behave. Indeed, the assumptions you make about how you should behave can reveal as much about you as what you actually say or do in therapy itself.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about of late because I’ve noticed a subtle but not inconsiderable change in the way I conduct myself with my current therapist, an elderly psychoanalyst whom I’ve been seeing for almost three years and the one with whom I intend to bring my investigation into the causes of my psychic distress to a close.
You see, for the longest time I thought my role as a good patient was to entertain, to tap-dance around my troubles, like a Ms. Bojangles, aiming for a heartwarming response from the gallery. Indeed, I became so skilled at casting my issues in an amusing light that one of my therapists asked me if I had ever considered becoming a stand-up comedian.
Although I think people who know me well would describe me as funny, I am avowedly not that funny, but that did not deter this shrink from bursting into sustained bouts of chortling throughout our sessions. He laughed so hard and so unstoppably that I once characterized his laughter as “orgasmic.” There was something so unconstrained about his evident mirth as to be almost embarrassing to witness.
In looking back on this therapist’s response to remarks that were at best mildly witty or comic, I have come to the conclusion that there was something about my perceptual style, my sardonic habit of reducing people and events to their naked (and often forlorn) essence, that he found liberating — or, as it might be called, disinhibiting. What I know for sure is that I felt obliged to keep up my end of our dialogue by trying for a humorous note even when I didn’t feel particularly lighthearted.
There is a chapter in the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz’s book “The Examined Life” called “On Laughter,” in which a patient named Lily transforms a painful visit home “into a series of comic bits.” She explains that joking about traumatic situations helps her “defuse” her anger and that getting the therapist to laugh assures her that her version of events is accepted and believed.
In my case, I would say that some of the impulse to amuse at any price came from my experience as a child with many siblings (five in all) and a difficult set of parents, neither of whom was inclined to pay much attention to me or my multitude of feelings.
My father, who had married at 42 and was more of a distant bystander than an engaged parent, barely took me in at all. My mother was mercurial and easily distracted, brisk rather than lingering in her affections. I learned early on not to take anyone’s interest for granted and was in the habit of checking whether people were actually attending to me — “Are you listening?” I would ask, interrupting whatever I was saying; “Are you really listening?” — or just going through the motions, their thoughts elsewhere. I suffered, you might say, from the anxiety of insignificance — my own insignificance — and assuaged it by developing a dramatic raconteur’s voice, primed with ironic asides meant to keep my audience with me.
It worked, to an extent, and I saw no reason to drop this narrative device when I first started seeing a therapist those many decades ago. How could I trust that I wasn’t as negligible to the therapist as I was to my parents? The only way to ensure that I had this person’s ear was to work up a captivating story line, one that kept the therapist in question entranced. If we are, as Mr. Grosz says, “imprisoned by our history,” we are also often confined by our renditions of our history.
And then came the moment several years ago when I stopped trying to be an entertainer and took the risk of narrating my life more straightforwardly, in all its mundane details and interludes of stuckness, with the broken-record aspects left in, rather than edited out for a smoother delivery. I did so because I was growing older and more desperate for relief and it seemed to me I had found a therapist who wasn’t interested in being charmed by me so much as he was focused on helping me. I did so in the full knowledge that I might end up boring him to tears, even though he was paid to be attentive.
It was just this possibility, of course, that I had always feared and endeavored to avoid. In doing so, it now seems to me, I was denying myself one of the things therapy allows for, which is precisely the repetitive nature of a person’s inner life, the constant regurgitation of ancient grievances and conflicts. In ordinary, above-the-surface life, we’re endlessly exhorted to move forward and not hang back, when the truth is that the psyche is not such an efficient piece of machinery and is marked by recursive clankings as much as anything else.
I wish I could pronounce that things have steamed forward ever since I gave up on the old soft shoe, that my problems have receded into the distance now that I am tackling them more directly. The discomfiting reality, however, is that I find myself more resistant to the therapeutic process now that it’s become a matter of confronting my issues head-on rather than beguiling the therapist. There are days I don’t want to go in and face my dreary self again, days I wonder why I keep exhuming the material of my life when most of the people I know seem to live in happy ignorance of what makes them tick.
I MISS the laughs, there’s no way around it, especially the way they filled the silences that sometimes descended after one or the other of us made an especially telling observation. Then, too, there will always be a part of me that feels it’s impolite to hold someone hostage with your darker side, even if he or she happens to be your therapist. It goes way back, as these sorts of beliefs always do, to when I was young and susceptible and had infinite trouble getting myself heard. I remember being a fat-cheeked 5- or 6-year-old, skipping along, my hand in my mother’s, and her saying to me: “Don’t talk so much about yourself!”
These days, I gush like a spring. And if that isn’t the last laugh, what is?
Daphne Merkin is the author of the essay collection “The Fame Lunches.”