“Ours is a psychological age rather than an institutional one” – R. Moore & D. Gillette
Last week, I had a semi-funny chat with my analyst about the desk and the carpet in her office. As I’m preparing to embody the role of a therapist (hopefully in the coming year), we talk in our sessions not only about my childhood and personal traumas but also about random aspects related to the daily responsibility of showing up to work as a good-enough therapist, a ‘healer of souls’ who has to hold the patient’s emotions and do so within acceptable boundaries.
I see each day how much of what lives in the mind and inside of our selves has nothing to do with how others perceive us. I tell my analyst my impressions about how I felt intimidated by her large dark-wood desk or that once her carpet was removed from the office I felt like the rug was pulled from underneath my feet. She just laughs and says “My previous client said that he started to hear an echo in the room. But I just sent the carpet to dry cleaning and I do this every year with my rugs. I like to rotate them in my office”. One thing is the fabric of reality and another thing the many, creative and often self-sabotaging ways in which we can interpret it.
As I’m simultaneously allowing myself to be both a vulnerable client and an increasingly knowledgeable apprentice, I like exposing myself to a wide array of sources to get familiar with a therapist’s work and the various cases I may encounter. I began reading the “The mummy at the dinning room table”, a collection of short vignettes about the most memorable cases of celebrated therapists in the field. And I also finished Elyn R. Saks’ personal account of a brilliant woman living with schizophrenia in “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness”. And when I want to catch a break I watch some more shows about shrinks, because when I get in the zone, it’s hard for me to stop – I need to see the theme all the way through, and I blame this behavior on the Mercury trine Pluto aspect in my natal chart (which is also to blame for my attraction to the field of psychology).
I began this year, actually in the first week of January by going to the cinema through a thick layer of snow to watch Jodie Foster perform (in impeccable French!) the role of a therapist who spirals in chaotic ways once one of her clients commits suicide. It’s a very odd and unique movie that kept me hooked, primarily because it’s a movie led by a woman therapist (and sadly, we don’t have many of those around) and it is focused on her forgetting to practice probably the most important thing in her line of work, which is to listen (not just non-judgmentally, but to listen to people overall).
Caught up in her unresolved personal affairs and emotionally blocked by her client’s shocking demise, she begins to live a little outside of her clinical setting and finds her heart again. The final scene in the movie made me burst into tears as it was so impactful after the zaniness of the whole movie, which combines drama with savage laughter. I also just love Jodie Foster, who like my own analyst at the moment, is a Scorpio Sun.
Moving on to the second show I watched, which was Lazarus, about a distraught psychiatrist who communicates with ghosts and finds out some disturbing things about his own father’s legacy. Although, I have a bit of a crush on Sam and really enjoyed watching him unravel on screen, I was in general slightly put off by this show. It was overly dramatic in the directorial style and the “too cool for school” editing, so that really made me wince a couple of times. What kept me watching was Sam Claflin, who is easy on the eye and damn good at switching between emotions. Of course, I wouldn’t expect anything else from a Sun in Cancer with a Pisces Moon, so yes, I was happy to tune in each night and see a talented actor go over many professional boundaries in this desperate pursuit to understand why his patients are dying and why his father keeps haunting him.
Just for the record, I don’t know if I should write this or not, because it seems pretty obvious, but what therapists perform in movies has little to do with how therapy actually takes place in reality. Obviously, you do have a similar setting, usually a face-to-face conversation between someone who listens and offers advice and someone else who struggles and seeks help, but aside from that the similarities between on-screen therapy and real-life therapy end. It’s also good to keep in mind that there are so many different modalities of therapy you can practice or choose from, and one of my favorite games to play when I watch a show with shrinks is to figure out: a) “What modality is the therapist trained in?” and b) “Will this show confound psychiatry with psychotherapy again?” Believe it or not, they are different things.
A psychiatrist is more of a medical doctor who can prescribe medications and is usually having relatively surface-level conversations with you, about your medication intake, behaviors, diet and overall life-style. While a psychotherapist offers exclusively verbal support and cannot prescribe pills to help you regulate your system, but may use fun techniques to help you remember, to help you dream or to help you confront aspects of yourself that may heal you. I’m using ‘may’ because therapeutic work can be as frustrating in its lack of outcomes as any other profession, and the first things you are learning as a student of psychotherapy is that you should prepare to fail, to lose clients and to not know it all. Being humble helps a lot in this profession, in which power issues can be disproportionate and problematic.
I also really enjoyed the art deco, gloomy set design in Lazarus, displayed by the lavish psychiatrist office of Lazarus’ father, which to be honest, who can afford these days, especially on an NHS budget, but let’s roll with movie-logics and pretend that the gorgeous vintage office makes sense in today’s economy, although it fits better in a Spider Noir setting. Speaking of which, I wish that there would be more shows with shrinks in black and white or at least sepia undertones, like flicking through the pages of an old, vintage photo album.
From a personal pov, by watching Sam play Lazarus, I realized as well that I am uncomfortably drawn towards intelligent yet emotionally vulnerable men, to the extent that I had a whole session with my analyst about where this bizarre attraction comes from. So I guess I can thank this show and Sam’s charisma for helping me understand a part of myself that I was weirdly not aware of and may benefit by keeping it in check, as I assume a lot of my future clients would fit this profile.
And speaking of not being aware of a lot of patterns and blatantly crossing professional boundaries in your psychotherapeutic work, I watched the first two seasons of “Shrinking” and I have to admit I’m not sure whether I like this show or not. It’s irreverent in its depiction of cognitive behavioral therapists and their messy personal lives and you get that the show is trying to humanize them and to break through the intimidatingly impenetrable facade that most therapists have spent years creating (or hiding behind). And I like that, but in other parts the show can be kind of rude and insensitive.
Much like Lazarus, it just feels dramatic for the sake of provoking outrageous emotional reactions from its public. For example, I really don’t know if it was necessary to have Harrison Ford (a Cancer Sun) drive a fast sports car in the show’s pilot episode just to prove his virility and lust for life in spite of being diagnosed with Parkinson’s moments before. I mean, it’s ok to be vulnerable, weak and old, America. Some scenes felt too on the nose and this bothered me about this show.
The most controversial character in the series is Jimmy played by Jason Segel (a Capricorn Sun), who even has a whole episode dedicated to his unusual habit of “Jimmying” or going far too deep into his patients’ lives and adopting some shock-therapy practices to help them in their healing process (as a sidenote, one of his clients, a veteran with anger-issues, lives in his pool house! which is a gross ethical violation of the client-therapist alliance). On top of this, the screenwriters struggle so much to make Jimmy seem like a flawed man, a dad who is struggling as a single parent and a therapist looking for his father’s unconscious approval (as we see in his relationship to Paul), that he ends up becoming a sketch of a person, almost a poster man for the image of the ‘modern-day quirky and messed up White therapist with a good heart’. Just for the record, it’s not advisable nor commendable to act in such a way as a professional and actually most therapists put in years of hard work and analysis in order to tame the impulses that Jimmy so generously lavishes in.
In conclusion, as an apprentice Jungian analyst I watched three shows with “shrinks” and without a doubt, A Private Life was my favorite, the other two being “meah” and rather funny experiments into depicting what psychiatrists and psychotherapists actually do.
With cosmic compassion,
Lexi
The Spiritual Social 