IlanaSimons wrote:A friend of mine who thinks psychoanalysis is useless asked me why I was training to be a clinical therapist. He knows I'm also cynical about psychoanalysis. For one, I don't think analysis is always helpful. And, I don't think it's so specia--or categorically different than any other type of conversation you have with a friend. But I do think that psychotherapy fills a specific need in our fast-paced, often superficial lives.
I think that therapy is useful because it's a regularly scheduled hour for intimate conversation, which is something a lot of us wouldn't otherwise get. Good therapy gives people a regular interval for intense dialogue, and through it, you can develop a relationship with someone who really knows you, who believes in you and becomes an internalized support team.
I told my friend that therapy is useful if only because it's a scheduled timeslot for good talk, which a lot of us crave today. I think you can take that further and say that a similar description applies to literature. Literature offers a conversation about the world that we don't usually get in small talk. Good books offer sustained, deep discourse. They're a relatively private refuge in which language operates in a different way than it does elsewhere.
Books and therapy are special, rich conversations. I also think therapy and books are siblings in the world of language because both of them are practices that tend to value observation over bias or quick judgment. That is, both therapy and literature help us practice observing the world longer than normal, without assessing it too quickly.
I do think that's a chief value of psychotherapy: A good therapist helps you name your complexities without the shame, or the need to edit, that you might feel outside the therapist's office. Simply speaking openly and boldly--and having someone calmly and accurately reflect what you're saying--builds confidence. In ordinary life, people often just engage the sides of us that fit into their own agendas, or they judge us quickly. A therapist can help us talk about ourselves and not run from what's actually happening inside. Having these honest discussions--even without any other "cure"--is constructive.
Along a similar line, good books present complex situations without boiling them down to a simple plotline or moral imperative. Think of Oedipus. In that Greek play, a man plans his life with good intentions but commits grave sins (killing his dad, romancing his mom) anyway. A reader doesn't finish that story with some simple moral judgment about Oedipus's character; instead, the book offers language for what it means to be a complex, flawed human being. In this sense, good books beg us to observe reality without our normal reactivity to so-called sins or other rote situations.
I do think that's a great skill: learning to snuff bias and observe for a longer time than feels natural. That's what the novelist Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary weeks before her death. As she was writing a diary entry, she started to make fun of some women she'd seen that day, but then she stopped herself. "Observe," she wrote, as a moral imperative in her diary, "Observe perpetually." When she felt her own self-protective instinct taking hold--her need to satirize those strangers she'd seen on the street--she stopped herself. She muzzled her more reactive emotions and forced herself to simply transcribe life in all its strange detail. She was a great writer because she could favor the information-gathering stage for longer than most people do. Doing it really means shutting down the emotions we normally resort to when people or situations unsettle us.
Along the same line, consider what Sigmund Freud said happens in dreams. Freud said that dreams are a space in which we say "yes" to everything and "no" to nothing: "Falling asleep," he wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams, "involves a renunciation of...the voluntary guidance of the flow of ideas. ...The dream...reconciles, without hesitation, the worst contradictions; it admits impossibilities; it...shows us as ethically and morally obtuse. ...Dreams are quite incapable of expressing the alternative either-or. [Instead,] the dream...carries out all [of its] possibilities, which are almost mutually exclusive. [Those] alternative[s] are to be treated as equal and connected by an ‘and.'"
That is, the dream doesn't say, "I can walk but can't fly"; instead, it lets you fly. It refuses to logically cut one thing from another. A dream, Freud said, is life before conscious judgment.
So, I do think that books offer a special space for deep conversation, in which things happen without as much judgment as normally happens. And I think that one good practice we exercise through reading is observing life without a native reactivity. I think that both literary and psychotherapeutic studies help us observe life while snuffing our knee-jerk emotional responses.
Of course it's not just literary minds who practice sustained, nonjudgmental observation. Well-trained scientists are great at this too: They might start their experiments with hypotheses, but it's then their job to suspend judgment until stuff reveals itself, even against what the scientist hoped for or predicted.
