Hi everyone and thanks for your comments!
One could easily dismiss Daphne Merkin as a complete nut. 40 years in therapy with so many different therapists—and always the feeling that if she found the right one, she could be made to feel happy. Ms. Merkin has chronicled her pain elsewhere—we’ve talked about her before on this Board (
http://www.voicelessness.com/disc3//index.php?topic=8730.msg138560;topicseen#msg138560). I would guess there is a biological element (predisposition) to some of her unhappiness—and clearly she would be a difficult patient for anyone (witness how she threw up roadblocks with the one therapist she did think was terrific).
The problem is the characterizations and criticisms of the therapists she saw, I believe are correct. (Why she would continue to go to such therapists probably has to do with the New York mentality—where psychoanalytic therapy still holds sway. I also suspect that viable, intelligent alternatives are hard to come by.) I was trained in psychoanalytic therapy in the late 70’s, around the time the philosophy was nearing death. (There is still a psychoanalytic institute in Boston, but I was recently told by a graduate school classmate that there are more teachers/supervisors than there are students). I had come from a rigorous scientific undergraduate school, so when my first mentor in graduate school had me listening to his therapy sessions via tape recordings (after which we would have a five minute discussion—with me expected to say “wow” or “that was very interesting”), I felt like I was on a different planet. Things came to a head quickly. One day I said: I understood there are unconscious processes (I recently had heard a talk on the “split-brain” where one side did not know what the other side was doing), but I didn’t understand why psychoanalysts grouped them together into “The Unconscious”. I truly thought this would be an interesting topic of conversation. What followed instead was a 5 minute rant about the “f-ing American psychologists” (of which I was one)—and essentially, my mentor never spoke to me again, although I was still required to listen to many hours of his taped therapy sessions. Still, I gave the theory a chance in the years to come and in the course of my training listened to and heard about many more of what I considered to be damaging sessions by distinguished and renowned therapists--just like the ones that Ms. Merkin describes. At the end of my training, I had found only one or two therapists that I would send a family member or friend to—for most of the reasons/criticisms that Daphne Merkin lists.
I believe that good therapy (for people like Ms. Merkin—who, even though she is a terrific writer, fits the criteria of “voiceless”) absolutely requires a good match (see my "Are We a Match?" section of my web site
http://voicelessness.com/are_we_a_match_.html ) and is dependent on the human qualities of the therapist as well as the patient. And I believe strongly that there should be a two-way attachment. While I think insight is important, I consider it a by-product of the new and different attachment (and the parts of the brain that attachment affects). Insight, on its own is, at least for the people I see, largely pointless. The "brilliant" observations/clarifications of the unconscious only further separate the two parties in the room—and simply satisfies the therapists’ narcissistic needs. Finally, with the right matches and solid (but, of course, often difficult in the beginning) two-way attachments, over time (I am talking years) I have seen "character transformations". I’ll stop here and let everyone respond…
