9 June 2018
I have never undergone psychoanalytic therapy, but I’ve always been on the point of doing it. What pushed me? Often a feeling of inadequacy. More often a feeling of excess, one that made me feel as if I had drunk so much water that I was drowning in it. And then a sense of permanent discontent, always stifled by my habit of good manners. And then the tendency to distance every desire that wasn’t consistent with the idea I had of myself. And finally, a faint unhappiness that wouldn’t go away—like minor joint pain that one learns to live with.
What, on the other hand, made me hold back? The idea of telling an unknown person, someone with no weight in my life, everything that passed through my mind. I had no wish to. It seemed like a violence that I was agreeing to submit to—devoutly paying for it. I felt I would be giving in to blackmail. I took for granted a sort of mute speech by the prospective analyst that went like this: I have the power to help you, but if you want me to exercise that power, you have to provide for me, at a fixed time, and in exchange for money, memories, thoughts, beliefs, everything, even the lies you tell.
To sneak away from the need I felt for analysis, I used the excuse of lack of money. You can’t worsen your family’s financial situation to improve your own, I said to myself. And I consoled myself by thinking: there are so many people who don’t have the money; your discontent is part of the discontent of an enormous slice of the human race that surely needs help more than you do.
But even when my financial situation improved, I did not go to therapy. I refused to form a relationship in which I would be in a subordinate position, forced to yield to the enormous power of someone who is silent while you ramble on, asking you questions without ever really responding to yours, concealing from you his drives – while you reveal yours in the most vulnerable way.
Today I would go to therapy without making excuses; in fact, I would give free rein to a decades-long impulse. The moment has arrived, I say to myself. I have no financial problems, and, especially, I no longer have the need to prove to myself that I will not be subject to any power, great or small. Then what holds me back? Probably I’ve read too much and my curiosity has diminished. Probably I think, presumptuously, that I know enough to explain myself to myself, without recourse to experts. Probably, as I grow old, my discontent has also grown old, and is as if asleep. Probably—and perhaps this is the real point—I was never truly ill. Those who are truly ill must, and do, look for help right away.