Readers Choice: 8

Therapy (better or worse than cabbage)

What if the most ordinary things felt impossible. Or deeply troubling. What if the things that were vital for sociality and life felt overwhelming. How might one enter the stream of the ordinary in a way that does not feel harmful. In the origin story I prefer to tell about psychoanalysis, and specifically Freudian analysis, I frame it as a problem of how to live in the most ordinary way. A person might be unable to cross streets, and so cannot travel in certain ways. Or they might faint every time they hear a car hoot. Or they might be unable to open a door and must have doors left ajar. Or they might be compelled to wash their hands every 7 minutes.

While one origin story of psychoanalysis prioritizes a founding trauma—we live at a moment when trauma stories are ubiquitous and authenticating, which does not make them untrue; that trauma is ubiquitous is a problem we attempt to address—I am interested in what makes quotidian tasks difficult, if not impossible. The tasks without which we might not live, everything from feeding ourselves to acquiring food to seeking treatment to responding to care.

And so, therapy.

Trauma is more ubiquitous than is often assumed. Not all harm leads to trauma. On this, let me be conservative. Harm is more ubiquitous than trauma. Repair is uncommon. In the broadest sense, harm is when relation breaks or when relation is distorted, or when relation breaks because it is distorted, and I am trying to be broad here because I do not want to create a hierarchy of harm. And I am not framing harm as injury, though it might be, because I want to think with the sociality of harm, not with harm as isolating and individuating, though it may do that, but as a fracture in relation. Perhaps this framing might do something. I hope it can.

To be Freudian—I am being Freudian—what happens in the psyche is as devastating as what happens in the body. And the psyche does not distinguish between real and imagined harm. Take this as my brief nod to the wonderful work on fantasy by Jacqueline Rose, my favorite thinker about fantasy.

What I mean to say is this: harm is ubiquitous. It is simply a part of sociality. And if you read a certain kind of colonial anthropology, a large part of it maps processes of repair for harm. If you read indigenous anthropology, you find the same thing. A list of harms and the strategies for repair. And we might think about the importance of repairing harm within smaller communities, a village of 50 or 100 as opposed to a city of millions, though, of course, there are neighbourhoods and other smaller sites of relations where harm and repair are possible and necessary. Judith Butler puts it this way: to live with others is to live a vulnerable life. We live relation as vulnerability to each other. This is not the same vulnerability we experience from harmful institutions—the state, the police, the military. It is a condition of sociality: that we are vulnerable to each other.

And so, therapy.

Repair is not as ubiquitous as harm. And in the absence of communal repair, therapy has become an important stand-in. To enable one to inhabit the quotidian, to engage the social, to move in the world without the guarantee that repair to relation is possible, but that one can still live.

Perhaps I’m being unfair to therapy. I simply wonder what happens when we imagine harm is individual, rather than sociegenic; and this is not to say one does not experience harm as an individual. Your wounding words harm me. Your kick and slap cause me pain. I am the one to seek pain remedies. But this is a bad analogy. I am trying to get at what therapy cannot do and often does not claim to do: repair relation. And it might be therapy is what happens in the absence of the possibility of repairing relation. I do not want to fetishize repairing relation. Some relations are harmful, even toxic, and we are lucky if we can extricate ourselves from them. Still, the harm lingers from the fractured relation, and we try to find ways to persist with the phantom limb of relation.

Therapy might provide strategies to live with those phantom limbs of relation. Those missing parts. Those parts we mourn in our psyche, if nowhere else. One spits at the thought of a loved one turned harmful, but a twinge remains that it could have been otherwise.

And so, therapy: to manage the quotidian possibilities that may be overwhelming in the face of the unrepair we carry and live.