Voyeur Meets Exhibitionist

The Decider calls it “voyeurism at its finest.” In our increasingly pornified world people have mostly gone beyond fictionalized versions of therapy. Freud wrote barely fictionalized versions of his cases. Irving Yalom did the same. Recently, Lori Gottlieb wrote a book with composite patients.

But, many Americans want the real thing, unadulterated, unfiltered, raw. They could have found it on Dr. Esther Perel’s podcasts, but now Showtime has brought us right into therapists’ offices, to watch real people make real fools of themselves in front of really whiny therapists. 

It’s exhibitionism at its finest. And it amounts to little more than a marketing ploy for the therapy business. Don’t we already know that couples therapy is notoriously ineffective? Apparently we do not know it well enough.

If I had my druthers, I would see these shows as the last frontier, a peek behind the curtain at the nakedness of the therapeutic process, enacted by people who have overcome their sense of shame. It’s bad news and a bad idea. It would be like wiring the confessional and then broadcasting what happens within. Don’t we have any sense of privacy left?

Apparently not.

Dare I say that I have not seen any of these programs or even listened to the podcasts. So, before I succumb to temptation and take a glance at them, I am happy to report on the blather offered up by New York Times columnist Margaret Lyons. For her part Lyons is dazzled by the brilliant insights offered by the therapists. Evidently, she and I have different standards about what constitutes great insights, but most of it is warmed over philosophy… delivered by people who are qualified to do so because they are physicians or scientists. Seriously.

Lyons opens thusly:

I have the same dream as anyone else: For an erudite  woman with chunky jewelry to rock me to my core with casual but tremendous truths. In the new Showtime series “Couples Therapy,” my dream has come true.

What does Lyons consider to be tremendous truths?

“You have to really want the relationship and love your partner in a way that moves you to transcend yourself,” [therapist] Guralnik tells one husband and wife pair. They’re both deflated on her couch, positively wrung out by their endless routine of secret-keeping and resentment, of pushing each other away and then being hurt anew by the distance. While Guralnik delicately avoids answering the husband’s question directly — Do you think we should give up? — her response deflates them further. They both weaken before our eyes, and it’s one of the most intense, complex moments I’ve ever seen on TV, two people realizing simultaneously “I don’t think I love you enough.”

This is straight out of high school. It reminds us of the old Spice Girls song: Tell me what you want, what you really really want.

As for the notion that “love is all  you need,” which comes to us from another adolescent ditty, it’s vapid and inane. If a couple does not know how to cooperate, how to coordinate, how to negotiate, how to compromise… all the world’s tales of adolescent angst will not save them. 

For all I know, if they eventually decide to stay together, the reason is that they have so thoroughly embarrassed themselves in front of the world, made themselves look like blithering whiners, that they have a large stake in making sure that it was not all for naught. This means that clinical results, good and bad, are meaningless in this context.

As for blinding insight, consider this exchange:

Scripted shows have of course given us plenty of insightful, probing therapists and complex, resistant-to-change patients. The power here is the reality of it all, the rawness and ridiculousness of the human condition. On the first episode, one exasperated man proudly proclaims, “I am the easiest person to deal with.”

“Says you,” says his wife.

“What I want is to have zero responsibility [and] to have all the sex I want without any, any work on my part, of any kind,” he says. “Zero work, zero thinking about it, and it has to be both spectacular and enthusiastic, and genuine.” See? Easy!

Either he is a complete fool or he has not yet reached the age of adult reason. Either way, there is nothing insightful or probing about this. The only question is, why did the woman marry such a creature?

It does not speak well of Lyons that she is a fangirl of this drool. To give her full credit, allow me to quote what she considers a blindingly brilliant insight:

My favorite moment on “Couples Therapy” comes in the sixth episode, when Guralnik is talking with Dr. Virginia Goldner, her clinical adviser. Guralnik is wondering about a patient’s state of mind, and Goldner redirects her. He’s not confused, Goldner says. “He’s reporting the vicious facts of life as lived by him.”

It’s the best line I’ve heard on TV this year, and one that instantly tattooed itself on my brain forever. Don’t argue with someone about their experience; they’re reporting the vicious facts of life as lived by them.

To each his or her own favorite moment, but no one needs advanced degrees in psychiatry or psychology to mouth metaphysical banalities. This insight comes to us from phenomenology, specifically, and it veers toward a denial of fact. It matters little whether he is recounting “vicious facts.” It does matter that he is out of touch with reality, with his real life.

One thing we know for sure, therapy will want to waste his time on mind games and will never connect him with reality. As for the phrase “vicious facts” it is intellectually incoherent, a failed metaphor, a pretense to being philosophical uttered by someone who knows nothing of philosophy.

Lyons redeems her gullible self by recognizing the voyeuristic aspect of the Showtime show:

There’s tremendous beauty and power in these therapy-adjacent works, but there is of course also an almost lurid sense of voyeurism. True reality is rare on television. Candor and honesty are rare in life. And thus there are moments on “Couples Therapy” that are frankly uncomfortable because even though I know that a patient recounting her worst experiences to her therapist isn’t being done for my entertainment … it kind of is. 

To each his own beauty and power. It’s all being put on for her entertainment. Lyons is correct to understand this aspect of the show, but it means that when you go on television to expose your deepest hidden truths you are not patients working on your relationship or trying to work out the kinks in your marriage. You are the entertainment!

To her credit, Lyons closes by moving into the character of the television viewer:

Tell me all of your terrible secrets, folks, and start with the sex ones. I identify with some of the patients’ issues and sometimes with the therapists’ frustrations, but more often I’m a gossip-greedy monster gobbling down people’s sorrows.