On Therapy

I took some heat for a post in which I referred cynically to the benefits of psychotherapy. Notably, my wife pointed out, with her usual subtlety, that “[you] know absolutely nothing about it.” “You should stop talking,” she added in case the point wasn’t clear enough, “about things that you know nothing about.” Ah, my dear, limited knowledge has never hindered me from talking before, and has helped to get you into that nice apartment we have.

Anyway, I have had therapy, 2-1/2 sessions with Jerry Pecker, an analyst provided by my wife’s health plan for career counseling, when I was between jobs in 1993. (I had expected him to say when I came in, “YOU have a problem? My name is Pecker, what should I say?!”) Because Pecker was in an HMO, he was only given 5 sessions to help me, which sent him into a kind of speed-therapy: I sat down and he barked out, “Okay, tell me about your mother. Tell me about your father. Tell me about your childhood.” Etc in rapid-fire fashion, so that by the end of the first session he had a preliminary diagnosis, and by the end of the second session I was cured. I showed up late for the third session and missed the last two.

How was I “cured”? That’s a long story, but in short he demonstrated to my satisfaction that I wasn’t suited to work in a big organization, where I would likely rebel and undermine myself, but would be much better off in a small group or ideally as my own boss. He gently pushed me in the direction of the then little-known business called a “hedge fund” that I was considering launching with a few friends, over the option of going back to work as a lawyer at the firm of Schmendrick, Putz and Naar (not their real names). Good advice — we started working on our fund almost the next day.

Pecker notwithstanding, I have these serious reservations about the psychotherapy industry. Maybe it goes back to my childhood friend Mike, who spent much of his youth in therapy dealing with the suicide of his father, a veteran who had returned from war (Korea I think) with shellshock and mental problems. Mike couldn’t learn to read, which was of course in 1967 attributed to his “trow-ma” (supply Viennese accent) over “ze det fazzer.” Will you believe me when I tell you that it took 7 years of therapy before a teacher at his school finally figured out that he was dyslexic? After a few months of special ed he was reading perfectly well, and went on to a fine college and career with no particular trow-ma.

Then there was my high school, Franklin, whose notably lax admissions standards rendered it the last stop on the private school express for kids who’d been kicked out of everywhere else. (The school still exists but now is called Dwight, or by insiders, “Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together.” Paris Hilton went there, enough said.) Most Franklin students were thought of as losers, potheads, lazy, and dumb and, unsurprisingly given this feedback, by the time they arrived had mentally checked out of the educational process. (I was a scholarship boy at Franklin, and loved it because the prevalence of the above-mentioned lazy potheads made me a big fish in a small pond.)

Over the years I have thought about Franklin and it has come crystal clear that these kids were neither lazy nor dumb, but were burdened with undiagnosed learning disabilities. If they were potheads, let’s say they were self-medicating to handle the constant stress of being out-of-sync and inadequate. To the extent that these kids got any personal attention at all, it was centered on a (usually futile) hunt for the trow-ma — divorce, parental neglect, etc. — that had made them lazy potheads, and not for the neurologically-based LD that today would be the first diagnosis.

Postscript: two weeks ago I saw a bunch of these kids for the first time in many years at my 30th reunion, and most agreed that the poor preparation they had gotten at Franklin (in my translation, inappropriate learning environment) had dogged them for the rest of their educational lives and, I would assume although we didn’t discuss it, their careers as well. On the other hand, they were the warmest, funniest group of people I have met in years, and only one or two laughed at my bald head. (Or rather, nodded in recognition when they saw it, as if to say “Okay, okay, I see, this is what the passage of time does.”)

Now I am not going to sit here in my boxer shorts in a London hotel room and deny the efficacy of therapy, especially when combined with meds — indeed, plenty of evidence shows that emotional trow-ma can be the source of neurological change, making both forms of therapy necessary — but what does irk me is when the talk therapy “industry” gets its hooks into a kid who mainly needs chemistry, a trained special ed teacher, or both.