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In her press interviews Lena Dunham has proudly announced
that she has been in therapy since she was 8.
Doubtless she feels that she owes some of her success to her
therapy. Credit where credit is due.
If we ask what Dunham has learned from therapy, we
get an occasional glimpse of it in her hit television show: Girls.
In the first episode of the new season, Hannah Horvath was
trying to break up with her sometime boyfriend Adam.
Adam had been hit by a truck in the last episode of the old
season, and now he is laid up with a full leg cast. He needs someone to care
for him and Hannah has been making a half-hearted effort.
It is fair to mention that Adam is not what one would call a
very good patient. He seems to know it and is showing his gratitude by expressing his loving feelings
for Hannah.
With Adam incapacitated Hannah has fallen for another man.
Now she is trying to navigate the treacherous moral shoals of breaking up with
a man she has loved, a man who loves her and who now needs her.
Why waste time with a man who needs
to be cared for when you can enjoy a man who can stand on his own two feet?
Finally, Hannah breaks up with Adam by uttering lines that must have come straight
from some therapist’s mouth.
She tells him, in my transcription:
I have tried
the whole thing, OK, of being selfless, of taking care of everyone else around
me, worrying about everyone before myself. But, you know what, I’m an
individual. And I feel how I feel when I feel it. And right now I feel like I
don’t ever want to see you again…. It’s not your choice; it’s my choice.
Do you think that these are words to live by?
If you apply them to the demands of motherhood, what do you
get? Surely, not a very good mother. If a man were to say that he needs to find a new girlfriend because he is tired of taking care of his sick wife, what would you think?
The therapy culture has been passing around these empty platitudes
for some time now. Some people take them to be pearls of wisdom, principles
to live by.
Amazingly, therapists pretend that their discipline has
something in common with “science.” I defy anyone to show me what there is in
Hannah’s speech that represents objective, scientific information.
Of course, Hannah Horvath is a fiction. She is not real. Her petty narcissism makes her less likable as a character.
In the best of all possible worlds viewers are going to
watch Hannah breaking up with Adam and understand that her therapy has made her
self-absorbed, self-involved and narcissistic.
They will understand that she is not ready for anything
resembling a relationship. They will know that she is anything but a role
model.
Yet, when young people learn these precepts from their
therapists they often take them as words to live by.
3 comments:
"I defy anyone to show me what there is in Hannah’s speech that represents objective, scientific information."
Here it is!:
"And I feel how I feel when I feel it."
I'm pretty sure that if we hooked her up to a brain scanner, we would find that this statement is completely true. The feeling parts of her brain would come to life when she feels what she feels.
So, I think this is a scientifically accurate statement.
She does in fact feel what she feels when she feels it.
Point well taken... and yet, at some point when Hannah is explaining that she is over Adam, a friend tells her that she speaks about him all the time.
You might say, correctly, that she feels what she feels when she feels it but that does not necessarily mean that she knows what she feels when she feels it.
"You might say, correctly, that she feels what she feels when she feels it but that does not necessarily mean that she knows what she feels when she feels it."
I think that she only knows that she's feeling strong feelings.
And she knows that it's important to act when you feel strong feelings.
So, she feels feelings and then acts in response to this intense wave of feelings.
However, as you note, she may be skipping the "actual identification of feeling" step.
Although her specific problem may also be that there's no actual thinking occurring between the feeling and the resultant action.
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