Before we go
further, I want you to know what I think about psychotherapy,
sometimes called talk therapy, sometimes called psychoanalysis
although not as commonly today. I think it is mostly an entertaining
mistake from the early part of last century, one part scam, one part
Jewish intellectual disease, one part self-deception. (1) I have
friends who are the children of very successful psychoanalysts and
who have been in therapy all their lives and clearly it hasn't
helped.
There are many kinds
of therapy of course, and the kind I am being dismissive of is the
one in which the patient talks about his life and the doctor
concludes that the patient is hostile because he secretly wants to
have sex with his mother.
But keeping an open
mind, when I was in NY and consulting for Viacom, I decided to give
it a try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Besides, I had as
close as I was going to ever have to a steady
income, so now was the time.
A great scene from the President's Analyst (1967) right before he confesses to killing the Albanian.
Anyway, I tried it
for a year and did get some benefit out of it although I did not
realize at first what was going on. What happened is that I noticed
that when I saw the therapist, I leaned less on my friends. I live
alone and so other than talking to myself, the only way I can release
certain kinds of stress, to share as it were, is to talk to my
friends. I suspect my friends find this tiresome. But when I was in
therapy I noticed that because I could spew once a week at my
therapist, that I did not do it as much to my friends and in fact
that I was also a bit less neurotic in the workplace.
Apparently this
benefit is sometimes called “Rent a Pal” and is not unique to me. One is still as fucked up as before, may have as many neurosis or unrealized desires to have kinky sex or whatever, but at least one is not as compelled to blab about it to your long-suffering friends.
I wonder whether I
am getting a similar benefit from writing this blog? In writing many
of these posts, I get my entertainment by trying to find an amusing
way to beat the shit out of things, events, concepts or people that annoy me.
I am in touch with my feelings so there are a lot of things that annoy me.
I am in touch with my feelings so there are a lot of things that annoy me.
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1. There was a
period of time, perhaps the 1950s or so, when between three apostate
Jews we were able to fuck up nearly everybody in the world. The
three of course were Jesus, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.
Technically, Jesus was an apocalyptic rabbi, and not really apostate.
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