A Brief Foray into Psychoanalysis
It was just after my 38th birthday that N., a family friend and mentor, suggested psychoanalysis. She’d committed to her own analysis — four times a week, one hour per session — right around my age. The experience, she claimed, changed the trajectory of her life and had the potential to transform mine as well. Not because I “needed therapy,” per se, but because I now had enough life behind me — had gathered enough experience, enough self-awareness, enough intellect — to weather the emotional fallout should my subconscious patterns appear less flattering in the sunlight than in the hidden depths of my unexamined inner world.
The suggestion struck me as reasonable enough, maybe because the only other modalities for healing that lay before me were, alternately, a year’s supply of Ivermectin gifted to me by a neighbor or a neural feedback helmet that my 84-year-old father insisted I try each time the sound of my sobbing made its way upstairs — an expensive but delicate contraption replete with wires and carefully placed nodes that made it appear only slightly more upscale than a tinfoil hat.
Whereas N. had opted to undergo analysis while working as a partner at a prestigious law firm, however, I was living in my parents’ basement and could only afford to explore at a heavy discount.
At N.’s behest, I made an initial inquiry with a training institute in Baltimore: by chance would a psychoanalyst-to-be, presumably in need of hours, benefit from practice on someone like me?
A skeptical receptionist returned my call while I was in the beverage aisle at Harris Teeter, standing before a wide selection of spring waters in search of Mountain Valley. I lugged home cases twice weekly to the rural house my parents had rented at the onset of COVID — a twenty-minute drive on winding roads, past the bucolic scenery of rolling hills and pastures dotted with horses and cattle.
I’d never planned to stay with my parents long term, I explained to the receptionist, much less to take up occupancy in their basement two years before my 40th birthday, but a series of events — my brother’s debilitating injury and need for reliable transportation and care, our family’s surprise discovery of long lost family we wanted to host from Germany, the passage of time that made it so the upkeep of a five bedroom house was a lot for my parents to handle on their own — made it so my presence was requested at home — even if, deep down, I’m not sure my mother ever really desired it:
“You know what the Chinese say,” she would remind me. “Hell is two women in the same kitchen.”
Outwardly, like any well-trained elder millennial on social media, I pretended to be living the life. I made the most of Instagrammable landscapes and sunsets and stunning views from the house’s screened in porch. On long weekends and holidays, I invited friends to drive out and stay in our guest rooms for a mini-retreat; I greeted them with carefully arranged fairy lights and succulents, clean sheets and breakfast sandwiches from Middleburg’s famous Upper Crust.
I found some comfort in the sounds of birds chirping, and in my mom’s voice as she sung to the cows that grazed the land just beyond the backyard fence.
The larger truth was, though, that I felt stuck — trapped in a state of obligation and enmeshment, my time no longer my own, and paralyzed by grief in a house my ex and I used to visit as a unit. I was sleeping in a bed he assembled with his own two hands, driving on country roads we used to get lost on together, and hearing his voice every time I pulled into the parking lot of the local 7-11. I missed the literal and metaphorical strength he lent me when headlines and family logistics felt too heavy to carry on my own, the way he stepped out onto the back patio in the mornings and let out a cry from the top of his lungs just because he could, the way he delighted in the spaciousness of a property where other humans couldn’t be seen for miles.
He used to watch the crypto markets on his laptop beside me while I wrote; now, I watched Netflix alone on one side of our two-person faux leather recliner — a hand-me-down gift from my ex’s father after his own divorce. A gift that was, perhaps, in retrospect, some kind of curse.
“What is it about this breakup, in particular?” the receptionist asked.
When I indulged her curiosity with vivid specifics, she seemed to perk up.
“… what’s more,” I continued, “is the disintegration of that relationship seems to have precipitated a whole series of losses?”
Whereas I’d once earned a respectable income from transcription and translation gigs, the AI platforms my work had trained now had little need for my input. I’d had to laser off my tonsils after a COVID-inspired bout of tonsillitis caused them to swell to the size of golf balls, then lost my wisdom teeth, too, when my orthodontist insisted surgery was the only way back to a healthy smile.
I bided my time in convalescence with online writers groups — one group began each meeting with somatic check ins. We shared what we felt in our bodies (me: an absence of wisdom teeth and tonsil tissue), then registered our presence and commitment by saying “aho.”
My mom, who forgot when I was on Zoom calls, would yell out to me to ask where I’d placed the olive oil whenever I “aho’d.”
“I do think your cheeks look more gaunt,” she would add.
My brother, gesturing desperately to her in the corner background of my screen, would beg her to let me be.
Whenever I closed my laptop, I closed my connection to the outside world as well: all I could hear from our porch in the late evenings, quite literally, was the chirping of crickets.
And then, in the emptiness of it all, came S.
S., she said, had heard all about my struggles from her institute’s receptionist and would be delighted to support me in this next phase of my life, as I transitioned out of this rural morass and stepped into something with more structure, intentionality and purpose. While I figured out how to extract myself from the countryside and make my way back to life in the city, I could consider her couch a kind of home for one-hour sessions four days a week — a safe space to unravel my thoughts from wherever they began.
I liked the idea in theory, though I never did get the hang of whether I should be lying down or sitting up when she walked in the room. There were no set treatment plans or clearly defined rules in my experience of her psychoanalysis; whenever I asked a question, I was often met with a question in response.
Even for someone who enjoys talking and sees life as an endless supply of fodder, four days can feel like a lot.
At some point, I admitted to S. — in that moment, a disembodied authoritative voice hovering from a chair behind me — that she reminded me of the kind of woman who used to both inspire and intimidate me in the workplace. Confident, commanding, soignée. A woman who I might have perceived as perceiving me as a threat, back in my early 20s, when my cheeks were still perky and my dentition whole.
I felt myself reporting to her couch as I would report to a manager on a first day at an entry-level job: eager to please, even if the tone of S.’s voice rarely revealed whether or not I’d done a good job.
Did she think I didn’t take the whole thing seriously?
I’d gone into analysis blind; I didn’t know much about the psychoanalytic theory or have any preconceived notions about Freud or Lacan. I knew even less about transference, although, the more I got the hang of it, the more I started to develop —what felt like, at least — a pretty steady grasp of the ways my past showed up in my present. I did think it was odd how S. always thought that if I was talking about something else, I was actually, somehow, talking about her.
Still, I enjoyed the contours and rhythms of our conversations.
Call and response, like Marco Polo — albeit a game where I could never be sure if she’d respond, or if she’d let me keep talking into the void.
My voice was the script; hers, premium interpretative AI.
I’d be lying, of course, if I didn’t find entertainment in our sessions as well: our conversations became my go-to fodder when I hosted book club at my new place. Before we would get on to the business of deciphering Finnegans Wake, everyone needed an update on S. What absurd thing had she said this week?
“I told her it was overcast and raining the night I moved in here,” I’d say.
“And?” they’d ask.
“She said that sounds really unsettling. And that maybe I wished she’d been here with me.”
S. was full of lines like that — earnest responses she’d sometimes temper once she realized how they landed, but that sent my mind exploring all the absurd possibilities she evoked nonetheless.
Maybe it was true when I felt irritation with my mother, all I really wanted was more attention from S.
Atop floor pillows and beneath fairy lights, spread out over a hardwood floor brimming with new starts and possibility, my friends would burst out into laughter.
I’d feel for a moment, however briefly, that I’d come back to myself.
…
I’ve read that after six years of psychoanalysis, some people feel deeply transformed. If I had my own set of golden hand cuffs, I might have been tempted to explore it further.
Instead, my financial reality began to manifest itself as doubt regarding the process as a whole.
S. seemed to get nervous whenever I talked about quitting. The more I sensed her eagerness to keep me as an analysand, the more I wanted to keep my thoughts for myself. Eventually, it felt like I was submitting my rough drafts and ideas to another person much too early.
“You don’t like having someone in your mind,” she said bluntly.
Is that true? It feels ironic for someone so open. I’ll regale you with personal stories at a dinner party and, if I’m in the right mood, give a stranger complete access to my most intimate secrets.
Even so — maybe it’s age, maybe it’s experience, maybe it’s the times — there are, increasingly, some things I’d rather keep on lock.
I broke up with S. on a Tuesday.
Perhaps, as she claimed, the very fact I was able to stand up to her, to have a conversation that definitively ended our nascent three month relationship, is proof the process, however brief, must have worked.
Just a few months after stopping analysis, I began to fill my calendar with acupuncture appointments, instead, with a practitioner I still see on occasion today. I traded S. in, in other words, for needles. They reach the places that need healing without demanding that I overexpose myself, or open my deepest wounds.
The light bruises they leave behind don’t always make for the most clever fodder, but I walk away from the table feeling satisfied just the same.
I like to imagine if they could talk, they’d know exactly what I’d say.
Alicia now resides full time in Washington D.C. and writes Catalectic.