A Thanksgiving Message

Here’s one more thing to feel thankful for. You are not doing couples therapy. 

You would think they would have gotten over it by now. To the best of my knowledge, a consensus is forming around the notion that couples therapy is largely ineffective. It is a waste of your time and energy.

Nevertheless, Showtime has a series led by psychoanalyst and couples therapist Orna Guralnik, so perhaps some people have not gotten the message.

In the world of getting over things, most people by now have gotten over their childhood infatuation with the theories of one Melanie Klein. She belonged to the first generation of psychoanalytic thinkers.

Most people have gotten over Klein, except in South America. Before they latched on to the theories of Jacques Lacan, Argentinians, for example, were seriously infatuated with Klein’s musings about good and bad breasts, not to mention her notion that human development replays infantile attachments.

Now, Guralnik is trying to explain, in an especially lame fashion, that we need to understand America’s current divisions in Kleinian terms. She wrote it for the New York Times, which should also know better. 

As for whether or not that will cure what ails us, the example of Argentina is shining forth. For years that country seems to have led the world in psychoanalysis, whether Kleinian or Lacanian. The result, a largely dysfunctional natioin.

At least, until the arrival of the new Argentinian president, Javier Milei. You will have noticed that President Milei has turned his country around and has been producing unheard of levels of economic growth. Didn’t JP Morgan bank predict that the nation’s economy would grow at 8.5% next year? 

Milei is more libertarian than not, and one suspects that his role model is the Chilean revolution, led by followers of the Chicago School of Economics, i.e. Milton Friedman and Co. 

With a few strokes of his pen Milei put an end to the vast Nanny State that was mothering the people of his country. Good-bye Melanie Klein. Good-bye infantilizing the people. Welcome, prosperity.

As for Guralnik’s lame efforts to show how people who have differing political opinions can get along, you will not be surprised to learn that after all of the mewling over Melanie Klein she arrives at the conclusion: empathy.

That’s right. The buzzword that defines today’s therapy culture is trotted out to solve all problems. Everyone but Guralnik knows that this is girl talk, that women are far more likely to deploy empathy than are men. When you tell men to feel empathy they mostly do not know what you are talking about.

As for the question of how two members of a couple can learn to get along, to the point where a difference of opinion does not threaten their connection, the answer lies in a simple fact. If they are both members of the same team; if they have defined relationships within the team; then different opinions are not threatening to group cohesion.

Take a simple example. Today is Thanksgiving, where most people enact a social bonding ritual. You belong to a family, and being a member of a family comports with certain duties. As in, showing up for Thanksgiving dinner. 

If you think that you should not show up because your Aunt Sadie voted for the wrong candidate in the last election, you are faithless. You are saying that your role as a family member is less relevant than your deeply held ideological convictions. At that point, you deserve whatever you get-- as in, dinner with Joy Reid.

Therapy tends to think that we are defined by our childhood. That means you are just a big baby. If you define yourself as a unique autonomous individual, well then, you do not need to get along with other people. In fact, other people, not to mention the duties that define membership in a family, threaten your autonomy. 

You will end up being an ideologically driven fanatic. And we note, with regret, that the same rule applies to patriotism. If you want to know why the nation’s people are divided against themselves, the reason lies in the absence of patriotic loyalty, the refusal to see oneself as a member of a community and a nation. 

When you cannot bond over a ritual you will seek to produce an ersatz connection by fostering groupthink, by judging people by whether or not they agree with your jejune political opinions. It is a losing game, a game played by losers. Better to be a good member of your family and a patriotic citizen of your nation. At that point you will be able to accept differences of opinion without imagining that they threaten your autonomy.

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