This discussion is self-indulgent but there are a few people out there who might enjoy it as much as I do. It will take time and a bit of background. You might want to skip it.
Sam Vaknin was a brilliant child who was awarded public honors and family abuse. He's been an achiever and his frankness and unflinching analysis have made him into a penetrating observer of humans. Then one day this woman comes to him and says he has it all wrong. That his job is to make her feel good.
Sam's "ouch" is right away followed by his need to figure out whether this woman is right in any dimension. She's willing to go along with that.
In recent years Richard Grannon, who is almost a reverse version of Vaknin (cheerful, physical, a Spartan Life Coach), has been engaging in conversation with Sam. He's called upon to have an opinion about this, but he seems a bit flummoxed. This woman is NOT Spartan!
So I made flimsy remarks in the comments section, mostly because I'm fond of these two guys for their personalities rather than their therapy skills. They are so DETERMINED to figure it out. I share that. But maybe because this client is female, she seems to me a church type: the woman who demands that the world be a thornless rose. I suspect she's a cruiser, a challenger, a dissenter because there is something deep she doesn't really believe can be "cured," as if a cure were what was wanted.
The idea of two people privately (almost secretly) sharing a room while one talks and the other listens, is a version of the object relations people's and anthro thinkers' idea of creating a liminal space, like that between a mother and infant. It is play, attachment, deep conviction, a vocabulary without words -- just shadow concepts with emotional penumbras. Call it psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, counselling, listening, coaching or whatever. The Euro obsession with naming, categorizing, creating binaries and boundaries, are not very helpful when the issues are deep.
The first necessity is attachment. It doesn't sound as though this client is attached. In fact, she seems to be throwing up many excuses for not being attached, in spite of demanding to be embraced and even nursed. In fact, the concern she identifies is that she is not being made to "feel good." It may be that she is not feeling anything and therefore "living in her head critically". Some people have a tendency to feel bad, just so they can feel something. On the other hand this morning I was reading about a brain-glitch that does indeed prevent feeling -- an organic missing bit. Anhedonia is a failure to feel pleasure, a name before there was any suspicion of a brain problem.
So the person who is being there to listen will need sensitivity to the client's position. I can't think of anyone less suited to provide a lullaby-based view of the world than Vaknin from Israel, spending much of his life in the anguished Middle EuroAsian nations. But this client claims she is married to the same sort of man, judgemental, narcissistic. Co-dependence seems an obvious subject for discussion. This demand of hers also sounds like fabulism, a story she makes in which she is the client who cures the shrink, potent and significant. The magical daughter of a tyrant.
One theory -- NOT a game system -- is that when one is damaged somehow, broken, that it is possible to use another person -- family, friend, professional or simply sympathetic -- as a splint until one's psych bone knits. Grannon's gift is to be so solid and available that he seems to do this pretty easily. But he is also probably able to tell a critical woman like this to go look for other help. I don't think she'd want to stay with him.
But she seems to have hooked Vaknin, so maybe that's Grannon's real client.
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