in treatment

Music: Eluvium: copia (2007)

I just finished screening the first season of HBO's now discontinued series, In Treatment. The series is about psychotherapist Dr. Paul Weston, , and four sets of patients who meet weekly for half-hour sessions. The show originally aired five nights a week on HBO, and judging from online reviews and stories about the show, was fairly well received. Although each character with which Weston interacts develops relatively independently, they are eventually woven together in three interrelated arcs that converge with Weston's personal life, particularly in respect to his strained marriage and his relationship with his children. The dramatic dynamo of the narrative, at least for the first season, is the difficulty Weston has maintaining a boundary between the personal and the professional because, of course, the professional is so deeply personal.

I enjoyed the show very much, although I have the predictable quibbles regarding poetic license. I find it somewhat implausible, for example, that a therapist would let the countertransference work him or her so thoroughly (Weston allows himself to fall in love with a patient)---although we know it happens, especially in the history of psychoanalysis. But this and related quibbles are just that---quibbles---and knowing I am watching a television show and a work of fiction made the show enjoyable. I especially appreciated how the show wove resistance to the therapeutic method into the plot, often at key moments (characters most resistant to therapy, such as Alex's father or Sophie's father, ended up falling most dramatically into naked confessions in the manner of minutes).

As I was watching the show, part of the enjoyment was the triangulation of the script, my own personal experience in therapy, and what I know and have been reading from an academic vantage. I would enjoy talking with practicing psychotherapists about their own perceptions of the show, if only because it's very unclear from what "school" of thought Weston is coming from (my own therapist hasn't seen the show). For example: Weston almost never allows silence in a session, which is an important tool of therapy. Of course, that doesn't work very well for television (I can imagine, for example, how poorly an episode would rate if it really did depict a psychotherapeutic session in which the client didn't say anything for ten or twenty minutes, which has happened often in my own experience). Weston also interjects theories or interpretations when, I think, most therapists would remain silent or wait much longer to do so. The only analyst Weston ever mentions is Christopher Bollas, a well-known American-cum-British analyst, novelist, and cultural critic usually associated with the child psych/object relations school, but not associated with cottoning to a particular party-line. I suspect this is deliberate on the part of the writers, but still, after the first season the question remains: to what ultimate end is analysis put?

Well, we know that end is "good television," and In Treatment is that. I'm anxious to see how the second and final seasons will play out. We cannot expect entertainment to cling to academic approaches or clinical experiences, of course, but it sure is fun watching something with that tacit promise. It's a little, I guess, like science fiction: the promise of a practice, but without farts on the couch of innumerable butts.