“I had to take a lift with my therapist, I thought I was going to die”

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Dear Black Tuesday,

Recently, on my way to a session, I ran into my therapist in front of his office building and we had to get a lift together. It was so uncomfortable, I thought I was going to die. Then two or three subtle incidents of the same kind occurred and, once the embarrassment had passed, I think I was relieved. I was scared, the setting crushed me, these grains of sand gave my analyst human form back and I needed it.

But then what happens when the session hasn’t quite started or finished? What happens in the meantime, when we are standing, in the waiting room, at the door, when we pay or put on our coat? These little things seem to carry a lot (too much?), which means, as if on the edge of the session, one of us is the focus.

Thank you very much for your work!

Naomi

Dear Noemi,

Thanks for this meaningful question that I want to increase with all the small gestures of psychologists that we sometimes tend to interpret, as if every little thing outside the framework also lives in this framework of analysis. First of all, I go back to what you say and the fact of seeing your psychologist outside of the office. As a child, when you meet your teacher in a supermarket or some other place outside of school, and the feeling of disorienting strangeness that this produces, to see a familiar person there, but who has nothing to do with this place.

But the question you’re asking goes a little deeper. You wonder if the little things around the session make sense, or if they should. First of all, who pressed the up button, you or your psychologist? I’m just kidding, I’m sure some people will interpret that. Did you, in a panic, ask her which floor she was going to?

It’s funny because for my part, I thought I was somewhat freed from these kinds of questions, at least at the end of my first eighteen years of analysis. And then I started again in November last year with a new psychologist. Without going into detail about the reasons that compelled me to continue this work, the theme of death, of disappearance, is quite central, as is my mother’s speech, which often and for a long time leaves the idea that my father is in bad shape. is , without necessarily passing the gun to the left. The speech of my maternal grandmother who kept repeating in my mind since my birth that she was going to die soon, it would never happen, yes, it was done but she was 93 years old, that was the time. Anyway, I tell all this to this new psychologist and the session ends with a sentence like: “People talk to me about death all day, but it doesn’t happen, but I know that sometimes it happens, it will happen eventually.”

A week goes by and my psychologist texts me the day before the next appointment, telling me she can’t see me the next morning because she’s going to a colleague’s funeral. It’s all a stranger, now that I’m writing it, that my therapist doesn’t say anything during the session, he punctuates, yes, but it’s a… serious. Yes, come on, let’s happily rave while we’re there! In short, I thought about it. I wondered if she gave me a reason to cancel on purpose; She could very well tell that she had an unavoidable obstacle, anything more vague. I couldn’t help but think this was addressed to me in some way. Deep down, I don’t know anything about it, I’m not in her head, I can’t say that she did it on purpose, maybe even that she was unconscious that spoke and it was a good thing, maybe she did it to all those patients that day. wrote the same reason. I couldn’t know it all and I took care not to ask him, because after all, we didn’t care.

The important thing here is that I have recovered and I take responsibility for that on my own account. So to come back to this “(Much?)” Meaning, I see, I believe what you’re saying. Because other times in analysis, you call “human form” For a psychologist, that’s a priority for me. It may also be reassuring to say that a psychologist is as human as any other person. In fact, I was a little afraid of the meaning, as interpretation could lead me to paranoia. Not that we even talk about delirium of interpretation. I think I’ve already said that my supervisor sometimes had a tendency to forget some of our sessions, well, I decided it didn’t matter as far as I was concerned, because that’s his thing. What is wrong in human beings, his “human form”, but obviously I could have interpreted that as “I’m not as interesting as he remembers me” and that would have been a central theme in my life, as it would have intersected with other things that resonated in this direction. Except it isn’t. Where death, funeral, illness, these are the themes that make me conscious (if I can say so), so obviously this text, I integrated it into a meaningful chain.

Coming back to your initial question, what should we do with these little things that happen in the meantime, outside of session? It’s about questioning what he does with it all, about discriminating between what makes sense to him and what doesn’t. I insist on discrimination, even elections, because really, if we start to interpret everything, it is offensive. A few years ago, I think I was afraid of my subjectivity and what you call it “Our attention is focused, kept on the edge of the sessions”. I was afraid to pick up what I realized, I let things slip, possibly too random that I should have given them serious attention.