I only hope I can stay awake through this whole thing. I have contracted to spend the next fifty minutes, until the wee hour…

Oh, this is starting out bad.

What I‘ve wanted to say to you for several days now, maybe a week, is that I am disgusted with myself (not that I haven’t said that before) about how little you matter anymore, how you have become this literary trope rather than the person to whom I was supposedly going to continue to write in order to stay in touch with myself. Of course, last week’s entry I started by reporting (almost proudly) that you no longer mattered, but this time I am talking about the fact that these entries have become more about the people behind the curtain, my unmentioned friends to whom I have masturbatorily created this…whom I have told about this little non-blog (because, after all…although… I was going to say that no one ever sees it except for these few people I have told about it, but I wish I could post for you… I have this… I’ve told you this already, this counter that allows me to see how many people (not, again, the specifics of who they are…though even this factoid I am including in order to assuage the…whatever…of those friends of mine who may not want to be ‘known’ in their frequenting of my site (how self-absorbed this is))…I’ve lost count of the parentheses…anyway, I was going to say that there… Some people get to my site through a Google search, and my counter allows me to see what the search terms were that got them there. Very amusing, some of them. Perhaps I’ll share next time, if I have the presence of mind to compile them before I sit down to free associate.

Well, that’s a good place to go off from, the idea of free associating, because I’ve become…what?…aware?…convinced?…that I don’t free associate any more. If I did, I would tell you some things about some people whom I am afraid might be reading. Or I might tell you some really juicy things about, say, Persis. Not that I’ve toned down the disgruntled husband rhetoric all that much, but I’m acutely aware of an audience here, and part of me wishes I could go back in my shell and be writing only to you for the next year, and then tell my friends about it. I mean, on the one hand I feel very alone here, and I want to know that there are people out there who care about me who are sticking with me as I go through this year, this life. On the other hand, I want to feel like I am compiling something of value here, and having brought those friends of mine in on the secret makes me feel like I have sucked the value right out of it.

For example. This is about therapy, no? And one of the thoughts I have had in the last few weeks, months has been about a friend of mine whose particulars I will…

Well, before I get into that, let me just say that all this arose because – and I know these are all concerns that I’ve voiced here before – I was driving one day and thinking about you and I started to think about how long it had been since I really wrote to you. And I mean that your face occurred to me as a stranger’s…while here I had supposedly been writing to you all along. And that’s when I realized that you had become this figurehead, this excuse for me to show off to some of my friends. And by show off I don’t mean to say (because I know they’re reading) that I have been exaggerating or being purposefully dishonest (except insofar as omission is concerned); but rather that I have been doing this for them, so that they could see what a Great Writer, and Sad Lost Soul I am, here in Ecksville. And I thought about how…what was I going to say?...


…um…


And I also feel like there are a lot of things that I don’t purposefully omit but which are omitted anyway. Sexual fantasies that might be relevant. I don’t know. Things that I used to tell you about but don’t really anymore. (Reinhardt and I have started talking about my sexual fantasies about her, by the way. Kind of cool doing that with a woman.)

Anyway, so I have been fearing that I have gone astray, and the fact that I am no longer who I was in my notes to you, and that I have introduced this little eddy of self-reference with having told my friends about it, those facts have conspired to delete any historical, personal, psychological value from what I’m writing here.

So there.

I am tired. I am physically uncomfortable. I wish I could stop writing now, but I have thirty-five more minutes to go. I’ve had therapy sessions like this, when I just want to get out of the office. And it has always seemed like there has been something to get at that I am avoiding. And I suppose one of those things is this specific stuff that I have not been talking about because it might implicate some of the people who are reading. And some of that feeling is just being a little rusty. I have now had the second break between sessions in a row of over a week, and my deficit is widening. Now I have to make sure I both write and post this Sunday, and that I post this one by S…well, tonight would be ideal, but I’m not gonna be able to do that. Anyway, and to think I used to try to stay a month behind. No more.

So I’m out of practice, and I’m having trouble getting back into it, and that stuff always feels mundane and unimportant when it’s coming out on the couch. I wish I could just jump right to the meaty stuff, the stuff that feels important.

So anyway. This particular stuff that I have been withholding feels important today because it has ended up being, along with some things that I could say about Persis, some of the stuff that has made me feel good about being in therapy. And here I must apologize to you for not being able to be absolutely forthright about the specifics of who I am talking about, nor absolutely specific about the details that this person has shared with me. Let’s pretend that my friends are my patients; and that even if I wanted to, my canon of ethics precludes me from divulging…from betraying their confidences to anyone. I guess that feels like a suitable analogy. I hope it is suitable to them.

Anyway, one of the things that I was saying to Reinhardt last week was that I really felt like therapy helped me to maintain my bifurcated head (conscious-unconscious) in a relatively stable emulsion. That’s a good analogy. Because they tend to separate, don’t they? They tend to go two different directions, and the…especially with someone like me, who spends so much time in his head that…well, I don’t know how I would finish that sentence, but suffice it to say that I genuinely think there are people who probably…I don’t know, maybe this is elitist ultimately…but I tend to think that, as great as psychotherapy would be for everyone, some people need it more than others. And that the people who don’t really need it that much just aren’t very interesting. But that it can in fact be said about those people that maybe they wouldn’t get so much out of therapy. I mean, I’m sure they would get something. But I think of people…see, this is where I betray my elitism…I tend to think of it in nakedly socioeconomic terms…I picture an autoworker. His father was an autoworker, and whether or not he goes into therapy, his son will be an autoworker. And I think that that’s probably someone who…I don’t know. I think about being that person’s therapist. And it’s hard for me to imagine getting really really jazzed about that person coming into my office. This is terrible. I am ashamed. But there it is.

And the funny thing about all this is that I am about to totally contradict myself by saying that sometimes maybe it’s the people who seem like they need it least, who are the least complicated souls or so it seems, who are in fact tragically divided amongst them/him/herselves…whatever. And by tragically I don’t mean like I’m thinking about anyone who would self-destruct without therapy…at least I hope not…

But perhaps I could put it this way. And this is very hard for me to write. I don’t know starting this paragraph if I will be able to complete it.




I am pausing. I am thinking about how I will get through this…trying to. Trying to chart my way through these treacherous waters. Not wanting to make someone I love angry, but also wanting to express something that I think is important. Also of course not wanting to betray a confidence, not wanting to…

See, here’s the hard part. I think about what if I say something about someone with whom I really like having intense detailed private and unguarded conversations. And even if what I say is not attributable by anyone who knows me and my friends to a specific person, even if the betrayed friend is not personally embarrassed or worried about other people he or she knows being party to a conversation that would not have been had were those other people actually present in the room…the seeing of that person’s words, thoughts on a website might make him or her less likely to want to have those conversations with me in the future, might make…let’s just say ‘her’ for the sake of ease…might put her in the same position that I am now in relative to myself: that is, unavoidably aware that people are listening and so unlikely to divulge those things that might be divulged if I truly knew that what I was writing was in confidence to a therapist. If I cannot keep myself from succumbing to this kind of forced circumspection, how can I expect someone who is not me and so doesn’t even have the kind of, the intense conflict of interest that I have, the same pressure that I have to actually have those kinds of…that kind of freedom of disclosure?

Anyway…





So it appears that I haven’t gotten very far.





Basically what I want to say is that I know people whose left hand, whose psychological left hand I would like to introduce to their psychological right hand.

Does that make any sense?

And that I feel like it is the work, the benefit of therapy for me that it is able to at least keep those two hands of mine within flicking distance of each other.

Because the thing that I worry about is that…let’s take my dad. A … he’s a pretty straightforward guy. He says that about himself, and I think you’d think that about him were you to meet him. And yet, [his] mom dies when he’s sixteen, he claims not to remember much of anything about her, father is a celebrated judge, an autocrat, not a very nice family man apparently, his first wife has an affair on him and he runs away from her and his children to his second wife who is a real stick in the mud… One could surmise that there is some subterrain there, and one might even further be interested in digging into it. And yet one of my…and I’ve talked about this here, too…one of my fears, preoccupations about my dad is that he acts like he has no subconscious, unconscious. And yet you know that it must be there somewhere. You wonder…well, he’s a good example of the person who proves the rule of the unconscious in that…you spend time with him and you kind of wonder without much real interest what it could contain. I mean much of me feels like, you know, there probably isn’t anything that bad or interesting in there. And yet another part of me says, “No, it’s that dullness that is precisely the evidence that suggests that there are big bad wolves in there; and that it is those people whose wolves are out roaming the earth who are the most well integrated people in the world.” And yet it sort of flies in the face of this idea of people who need therapy being disordered and in trouble. I don’t know. I realize I’m talking around what it was that I wanted to come out and say, but this stuff is actually important to me, if a little arcane to the rest of the world. But here again: Persis thinks that she is objectively more functional than I am. And I think that her “functionality” is adaptive and very context specific. Which is to say that her functionality is sufficiently limited that in a context much different from the one she has found and in which she appears to be flourishing (and I am talking about academia, and I don’t think anyone with a positive view of therapy would suggest that academics are not often in serious need of therapy) she would not be able to see herself as being as functional as she supposedly is. Whereas I think that I would be equally dysfunctional in any milieu in which you found me and that this makes me basically healthy.

That was a joke.

But what I do mean to say is that…

Well, let me get back to my dad.


I don’t know that anything will ever happen to him that will be the kind of poetic psychological justice I hope for all those people I think should be in therapy but aren’t. He will probably die happy. He won’t have the best relationship he could possibly have with his son, and maybe that’s the justice I’m talking about. I just wish it didn’t have to involve anyone but him.

But the phenomenon I was wanting to observe, that would have involved talking too specifically about a friend, is one in which my dad’s rumbling unconscious finds a way to express itself…say, a belief in the death penalty, a desire to visit bodily harm on those people who offend his moral sense…I was wanting to observe the occurrence of situations tike that, where more or less mild mannered people who would disavow their unconsciouses are shown to have deep uncontrolled and only narrowly kept at bay or projected destructive forces within them.