psychoanalysts' furniture supply co
He was a jerk, my psychoanalyst says of the first boy with whom I fell in love. This therapist is a very direct German woman who calls me Ms. Svitak. I address her in emails in the same pattern, as Dr. G—-. When I’m lying on the couch, in a Victorian house near the Divinity school with rooms rented as offices by various therapy practices, I don’t call her anything at all. I joked to a friend when I switched therapists (leaving behind the bespectacled man I’d been seeing in Manhattan, whose office had a couch he never directed me to use) that I would maybe finally work up the courage to ask if I could get the real cinematic psychoanalysis experience and lie down. Then with Dr. G I didn’t even ask; she said, Would you like to lie here? and draped a napkin across the pillowed portion of the couch’s arm. Is there a specific company that sells this kind of settee, a Psychoanalysts’ Furniture Supply Co.?
My old therapist wouldn’t have said something like, He was a jerk. My old therapist didn’t issue many judgments like this, or prescribe behavior or interpretation to me. I can think of only a few instances. One time I told him about how scared I was about playing soccer with a certain group of people, and he responded rather neutrally after my long soliloquy on the subject, What I’m thinking about is — what happens if you just go? (I did. It was fun. Also, I got such a gnarly bruise that my big toe was half purple, and the toenail fell off later.) Another time, I related that a friend had had a spontaneous (ambiguously enjoyable) adventure to a local casino in the middle of the night. He responded, Maybe you need a trip to Mohegan Sun. And when I complained about how everyone in PhDs was applying to law school, he remarked, Why aren’t you applying to law school?
When he said this I felt keenly the disjuncture of how I wanted to react and how I felt I appropriately could. The question felt strangely intimate, teasing. If it had been R. saying it, I would have made a gesture as if to lightly rap the side of his head and say, Dhakkan! in my bad Hindi (“lid,” a chastisement). If it had been a friend I’d have said, Fuck you, man (in a friendly register). But this was my therapist sitting in a black leather chair, so I gaped and laughed. Another time I griped about how all I wanted to do was read novels and he said, Why aren’t you studying English?
Sometimes I left our sessions wondering if he saw his mandate less as providing succor and more as creating productive chaos. It makes me think of a very good book I read last year with one of my departments’ reading groups: Sexuality Beyond Consent, by a different NY psychoanalyst. There’s something powerful about resisting the idea of cure, teleological progress in the therapist’s office, and instead working towards circulation — that you can’t get rid of your wounds, but you can set them into motion. The author writes about this, and the types of experiences to which you cannot consent (else you fundamentally change the nature of the experience). She gives the example of a child who playacts with her mother that her mother is the Tickle Monster. The mother stops tickling the child when the child says Stop! Then the child asks the mother to keep tickling her past when she says Stop! The child wants a certain kind of pleasure that comes from being out of control, but also the safety of knowing another person is a trustworthy custodian of you; they will stop at the right time. But how will the mother know when that is?
The worst part about being a human being who makes decisions is that you have to be the child and the mother at the same time (cue Meredith Brooks) and know how much chaos you want to invite. One’s desired relationship to chaos versus order is not a static thing. My therapist now said with a tone of certainty, You don’t want that much chaos. She said it as I was relating an event from a summer that had been emotionally exhausting, but also deeply necessary, a hedonistic interregnum between two relationships and the two ordered stages of my adult life — work and graduate school.
I fell in love with my jerk during an interregnum too, from an unconventional and sometimes isolating childhood of travel, public speaking, and being homeschooled to fully participating in quintessential American high school life. He was my sister’s friend from orchestra, in my grade but — because I’d skipped two — two years older than me. He had a mop of brown hair that fell almost into his eyes, covering the forehead he said was bizarrely large, and bright blue eyes. He talked about Plato’s Republic and dressed up as Pheidippides one Halloween. We had our first long conversation when we stayed up all night at a 24-hour charity event on the high school track, lying on the high jump mat next to my sister and her boyfriend. There were candles inside brown paper bags all around the field. The next morning I messaged him on Facebook to ask for the title of a novel he’d mentioned. It was nakedly a pretense to chat with him. He knew this, he told me later. Within a year or two I’d know what it was like, that feeling of knowing someone was taken with you, and in a few more years I’d get better at feeling its first twinges — in either direction — and not chasing it to its ends, but this was when everything was new. We spent so much time together, sometimes him and me and sometimes my best friend too, or more people, in the co-ed sleepovers my friends with more conservative parents marveled at. The morning after a sleepover we woke up so close on a mattress on the floor our noses were touching. But we didn’t kiss. I wondered at this fact then. What were the rules?
Another time, I’d just gotten back from summer camp and he came to see me. We went into a guest bedroom in the basement, the same room we used sometimes for those sleepovers, and he tickled me under the covers, this dusty purple duvet always leaking down. I laughed and wriggled around trying to wrestle him off. Then suddenly we heard the floorboards creaking, my dad was walking downstairs. I think then we stopped, guiltily, or at least I felt sheepish, even though we weren’t doing anything, right?
He asked me to the Homecoming dance. I sent him a letter saying I liked him.
That was brave of you, says the therapist.
My jerk was so freaked out that I liked him that he acted extremely distant when he came to my house to pick me up, didn’t speak to me most of the night, and left me during the dance to jump around with his gangly circle of track and cross-country boys. That’s what made my therapist say, He was a jerk.
I wonder what my old therapist would have said. I wonder how my relationship with him was different because we sat across from each other and I looked him in the eye, or when I couldn’t bear that, I looked at the small sliver of window close to the ceiling — the office was an overheated Soho garret — or the frosted glass cup he kept on a side table and so rarely drank from I once filled a long silence by asking if it was a candle. I see this weird montage of moments like that in my head like the Oscars In Memoriam segment, even though he’s not dead, but because there’s no script for keeping the people you once paid to listen to you within your life.
There’s not a good reason I began seeing psychoanalysts except for the fact I’d seen primarily CBT therapists on and off for 8 years and I was getting bored. I was doing my homework: identifying my black-or-white thinking and catastrophizing, taking deep breaths, using I-feel statements. Then psychoanalysis seemed to come into vogue again: one day I was reading a psychoanalyst writing about abortion in the NYRB and the next there was an oversubscribed class about it and this hip new magazine called Parapraxis and a Gender and Psychoanalysis workshop in Paris I went to over the summer. I fantasized about having a therapist who was also a writer, and a thinker, in a way I’d never had before. I guess I wanted to talk about my problems to someone I admired and who I felt had had to master some arcane body of knowledge, a literature less positivist and more riddle-like — Lacan’s impenetrable wordplay over RCTs. (Is this pretentious as hell? Probably.) You could say it was a rebellion against the forces of standardization and the way health insurance companies dictate the terms of care with their diagnostic codes (shoutout to my F33.1 homies) and modalities they will or won’t reimburse, a rebellion against the cookie-cutter psychotherapy of telehealth services — I’m kicking it old-school!
I don’t really think there’s anything valiant about this. For one, I have sufficient savings from my time working before school that I can pay out of pocket, whereas therapy (of any kind) is often way too expensive for most people who could stand to benefit. Also, I live in a social milieu that makes me inclined to tell my problems to someone who also happens to be a poet and translator who’s written an academic monograph, because I feel like I have to explain myself and the things that take up space in my head a lot less. Is there something grim about therapy as assortative mating, swiping through profiles until we find the one with the right vibe, using modalities as the heuristic to get there? (I’m not saying psychoanalysis is just for the navel-gazing neurotics of the ivory tower. There’s a great — though notably elegiac — Parapraxis piece called “Broke Psychoanalysis” about Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic. But I suppose I’m asking: who are the people who find psychoanalysis attractive right now? And what would a Bourdieusian analysis of that population tell us?)
Anyway, my therapist is probably right. My jerk was a jerk to me, mostly at that Homecoming dance that marked the end of those six months when we were close. The rest — the confusion of how we were so physically affectionate and close, how he signed a letter to me with I love you (but in Spanish) once — I chalk up not to malevolence but a kind of carelessness, in the way teenagers can be but really anybody, 28-year-olds too. I’ve always loved these careless people, even when I can see the knife’s edge of their glittering entitlement. That second interregnum summer when A. said to me, I can’t believe he says he’s not into you but the way he holds you, holds your hand. Like who does that?
I didn’t say, I’m glad he does, I would rather have that warm chaos than cold order.
Sometimes you don’t want to live in the divisions of healthy or unhealthy and exert a muscular control over the fevered workings of your brain. You just want to unglue yourself from something. What happens if you just —. You play soccer, you lose the toenail, you don’t go to the casino, but you keep telling the story of how he told you to, you always keep telling the story.
Some dreams (send me yours)
Dream 1: all the missed calls I’ve been getting from 425 and 206 numbers recently (scams) are actually from a college friend I haven’t spoken to in a while. One voicemail: he says This is my final attempt. I quickly try to call him, filled with a sense of foreboding.
Dream 2: someone I know, who has been very aloof to me, is shockingly warm, solicitous, and kind, and we have a nice conversation.
(I wake up and feel a sense of loss.)
Image: Repose, John White Alexander (1895)