“In Treatment” is a television remake series that lasted for three years, which was in addition to the previous years the original series ran in Israel. Today I watched the last week of the third year of the American version, the only year not based on the Israel stories. After all this struggle the psychotherapist, “Paul Weston,” 57 years old, played by Gabriel Byrne, goes off into the Brooklyn crowd determined to close his practice because he doesn’t know how to love. Of his last three cases, the gay boy is collected by his MASSIVE Italian adoptive father, the Calcutta man deceives him enough to be deported (which is what the man wants), and the actress is “all alone in the world” trying to decide whether to “pull the plug” on her dying sister. She might do better to slap her daughter. Paul’s own therapist can’t talk him out of quitting. Off he schleps down the sidewalk like an Irish Woody Allen with his muffler wound tight.
What good is this psychotherapy stuff anyway? This series throws the doctrine into doubt even more than “The Dangerous Method” which at least makes it seem exciting. I’ve always been a skeptic about Freud anyway -- preferring Jung and seeing more common sense in Victor Frankl’s version of the “talking cure.” (His ideas came out of working with holocaust survivors.) Maybe I’m just not Jewish.
A friend suggested that “In Treatment” was well-Americanized, but I counter-suggested that it was well-“Manhattanized” even though it’s set in Baltimore and Brooklyn. The more I think about that idea, the better I like it. In Germany there was a high culture of bourgeois people, mostly Jewish, very educated and tightly socialized, squeezing their corseted women into hysteria, and distorting their children’s lives with arbitrary discipline while they regarded their own cigars with phallic attachment. When the rise of the Nazis threw them out of their cushioned surroundings, many landed in Manhattan where their high skills were seen as the pinnacle of civilization. The same in Israel. And they WERE, in fact, gifted and educated -- and now free to bloom, which they did. Think abstract expressionism.
But maybe they were in fact and reality, the same sort of searching -- indeed, ransacking -- of human nature after the death camps to find what was true and dependable. And in their trauma and suspicion and supersensitivity, maybe they came to the position of Paul Weston, who can’t accept a therapist who won’t enable him. This guy sympathizes with the patients whose parents ignore them, and yet will not pay attention to his own children and lovers. Indeed, when he isn’t ignoring them, he’s rejecting and critical. Who wants him? Only the co-dependent, the enablers.
So IMHO this series is a brilliant exploration of the problem, but not much in the way of solution. The one true solution I see (aside from the final therapist, who must give up her opportunity to relate to this man in order to stop the co-dependent process, choosing profession over romance) is in the man from India, who has a strict personal code and lives by it. It does not include being honest with one’s therapist. It is near-Viennese in its rigidity and preoccupation with family honor. But it works. Samil is not depressed, not confused, able to act to change his life in the way he chooses. He provides much needed friendship to his therapist, using his different culture as a cover.
It has been said that this series and “Paul” himself are most interesting when the script explores the boundary between culturally dictated duty and the real -- nearly biological -- response of one human being to another in the way that creates bonds and loyalties, even true love. I suppose one is skeleton and one is flesh, but I’m not sure where that gets a thinker trying to find a principle of reconciliation. People get lost on both sides of the line between the two. Nor are they helped when the line blurs.
But by the seventh week of the third year I was getting to the point where I wanted to give this “Paul” character a good kick in the pants. He WAS helping his patients, at least some of them most of the time. But he had only a few theme songs that he played over and over. Of course, this character is a creation by several writers sitting around a table, sketching out plot lines and discussing how to stretch and re-invigorate what is actually a very confined template: an office, two or possibly three people at a time, only talking. The ultimate “character” that results is a composite of those writers: mostly Jewish, probably mostly middle-aged, mostly in Manhattan. That is, the same people who have controlled the media and the publishing industry, as well as much of banking -- systems now collapsing.
These people were raised to believe they were intelligent, to aspire to creative work of some importance, and to assume this “earned” world would continue as usual. It has not. In some ways the electronic revolution and globalization have erased a way of life to the same degree that WWII did, though I suppose it’s heresy to say so. They ARE “Paul Weston.” Confused. Mice in glue traps. At least feeling that way.
The Valier librarian and I confer. She says the fastest moving books she has are fantasy -- that’s what she has ordered the most of for this year. People are in escapist mode. Or is it “speculative mode?” And the BEST books she’s been reading have been “YA” or Young Adult, a genre of books that is almost gruesome in its willingness to look at social problems. Very “gritty,” as they say.
YA gritty fantasy. It’s fun to imagine a panel of Paul’s imaginary young patients sitting down with him to try to crack that Eeyore carapace of his. “What are you doing for the poor people?” one might ask. “Where is your dedication to the welfare of the earth itself?” demands another. “What is this elitism thing you’ve got, this fascination with class?” “So -- you had no mother. Why won’t you let us mother you?” Or, as many of his patients demand, “What do you want from me, Paul?”
Indeed, Paul wants to mother everyone else, even the ones who yearn instead for a father or lover. Or a teacher or limit-setter. And would it hurt to have a few belly-laughs now and then? If human beings in therapy aren’t ridiculous enough to provoke both laughter and love, what is? Better for us all to be out in the world, but this series can’t hurt you and might give you ideas. I thought it was interesting that in the sidewalk-ending Paul was occasionally obscured by a closer, bigger, handsome, briskly-walking, black man. Maybe that’s the other Manhattan.
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