Nigel's Notes

Dontcha

Why Would a Shrink Fall Asleep During a Patient's Session? (New York Magazine)

psychotherapy:

“I’d seen four shrinks in my life, and they’d all dozed off mid-session. Was it them—or me? I went back to find out.”

…Thirty years and four shrinks later, I’ve come to recognize these signs. I have consulted four therapists in my life, and all four have fallen asleep on me. The ritual—forms, waiting rooms, Kleenex—starts up again, only each time with my own special twist: I pay someone to explore my unconscious mind and instead they sink into theirs. So consistently did I lose wakeful contact with my shrinks that I began to suspect—honest to God—that feigning sleep was a technique for provoking patients to confront their fears of abandonment. “Once in a 40-year career,” said a friend’s shrink, an ancient and cheerful Jungian, when I asked him if he’d ever drifted off while on the clock—making me, I suppose, the Ted Williams of narcissistic monotony… I’ve now gone four for four. Are my own powers of resistance so enormous that the composite portrait of me, as an isolated, narcissistic evader, is unavoidable? Can an abandonment of minimal professional duty—to stay heedful of what a patient says, no matter how stonewalling—really be answered with an evasion, a theory, a cliché? Who are the bullshit artists here? Them or me?