And How Do These Books Make You Feel?
Janet Malcolm once wrote that psychoanalysis requires the analyst and the patient to wrestle with an arrangement whose “radical unlikeness to any other human relationship” is dizzying for both parties involved. They consent to meet alone at the same time and place every week. Their mostly one-sided and confidential conversation is often staged with painstakingly positioned props: the couch, where the patient lies and lets their thoughts wander; the analyst’s notepad, where those thoughts are apprehended and transcribed, all in the service of hearing the patient’s underlying, unconscious needs.
That this therapeutic relationship—so awesomely abnormal, as Malcolm put it—has become relatively common speaks to how deeply Sigmund Freud’s ideas about analyzing the psyche saturate our world. A century and change since pairs began to meet in “sessions,” therapy is now a cultural trope. In fiction, for example, a premise that doesn’t seem to promise much narrative possibility—two people talking with each other in the same room again and again—becomes engrossing and mysterious. They vow, with a constancy unmatched by other commitments in their lives, to follow a largely unspoken contract of strict mores, and, as if casting a spell, invoke language as a cure.
More and more of us have been seeking entry into this arcane ritual. found that nine out of 10 of more than a thousand American therapists reported that “patient demand” was growing. The realities of a pandemic, combined with the , have upended therapy: Many of us in treatment have reimagined the practice through our screens, sitting on our own couches. Chatbots can now offer a simulacrum of a fully objective, floating ear, incapable of judgment. Critics of these services have called attention to their glaring practical concerns: . But these services also lack the grist of that risky, human relationship. There’s both threat and promise in the therapeutic encounter: the ineffable, fallible, and intimate play between two strangers, one witnessed and one witnessing, talking it out.