TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

(Pause): [0:00:00 – 0:02:13]

CLIENT: So, let’s see – I had a bit of a creative breakthrough with the project. So that was – that’s nice.

THERAPIST: That’s great.

CLIENT: That’s a relief. It’s kind of making more sense to me now. Three hours a day to work is going to be a challenge especially when my mother leaves, but I think by the time she goes I’ll have made a good start.

THERAPIST: How long is she here?

CLIENT: She’s here until the 15th. And then my mother-in-law will come down as soon as her – she had a rotator cuff surgery so when that is more or less healed, she’ll come down, so that’s probably three weeks that we won’t have coverage. It’s not optimal, but we’ll make it work. And then after April 1, Jennie’s parents are coming. I think the plan is that they’ll come through the end of the school year. So we’ll have some opportunity I think, at least (unclear) to write these things. I don’t know if it will be enough. And it always feels good pushing against the door and the door opens. It’s a relief. [0:03:38]

(Pause): [0:03:58 – 0:04:15]

CLIENT: Oddly, I more or less remembered what we talked about on Friday but last Tuesday is a blank so I don’t – the only thing that I remember is feeling very frustrated and then stuck, just in general. I think I said, ‘it’s just very hard to be stuck.’ I remember being unusually irritated at the end of the 45 minutes. So other than that I can’t remember anything that came before that. I said something to you and I think that was the last thing I said to you was it’s really not very much fun to be stuck like this. It’s funny that you don’t remember it. (Unclear).

(Pause): [0:05:24 – 0:05:34]

THERAPIST: Yeah, I remember the tenor of the session being different from that. I’m not disagreeing obviously, with what you remember but –

(Pause): [0:05:45 – 0:07:41]

CLIENT: Are you (unclear)?

THERAPIST: Well, I’m remembering a bit more about Tuesday and I’m thinking about how much of a blockage I think it creates for you here in a way having trouble remembering. I’m not saying dealing with that isn’t in a way, the process that we’re dealing with, but I think it poses some (unclear) of hardship to what you find with your work. [0:08:39]

CLIENT: True.

(Pause): [0:08:44 – 0:09:14]

CLIENT: (inaudible).

(Pause): [0:09:14 – 0:09:21]

CLIENT: And your sense is that we’re not talking enough about an organic memory deficit, we’re talking about some repressed impression.

THERAPIST: Yeah. And one thing that makes that strikingly clear today is that on Tuesday you absolutely could not remember Friday. And today you can remember Friday but not Tuesday.

CLIENT: Okay.

(Pause): [0:09:44 – 0:09:50]

CLIENT: And we have a sense that it’s related to connectedness and attachment or something but not, that there’s something that we don’t understand about it.

(Pause): [0:10:05 – 0:10:30]

CLIENT: And I guess the follow on is – so for two and a half years we’ve been dealing with this, right?

THERAPIST: Probably.

CLIENT: And over the course of this time we’ve become more and more sophisticated and articulate in understanding how it happens and where it comes from but it’s still happening. So in theory the next step would be to make its (unclear) up since it is a real problem. I mean it’s a real genuine difficulty. I don’t understand why it’s still operative. I mean even if the kind of the – I don’t think therapeutic model, but the sense of the model trajectory is that in talking about these things and hashing through it and figuring them out and interacting about them, you know, slowly, organically, they begin to dissolve. In theory, we should have begun to make some progress and yet this tendency toward repressing memories of something, I have no recollection of what might be the cause of my repressing, if that’s the right jargon we’re using here –

THERAPIST: Sure.

CLIENT: My memory of our discussion on Tuesday, but why should I still be doing it? And if we understand why that may might be the case, then by all means then for the sake of making this process more effective, we ought to intervene. I’m being a little provocative.

THERAPIST: Well. Maybe a little. I mean, but also I think you’re really frustrated because when you can’t remember like this, I think you really feel quite disconnected from the work we’ve done on it. You sort of know abstractly that it’s out there but there’s the – but in the moment you feel, I think, pretty helpless and frustrated.

CLIENT: Yeah. I just feel, I mean, frustrated, helpless, sure. I’m not denying it. But more specifically, I feel sick of it. You know? It feels like Groundhog Day.

THERAPIST: What tends to happen here is that I say something like this.

(Pause): [0:13:47 – 0:14:11]

THERAPIST: And actually what is the same is that you come back to this place where you know the fact I don’t remember and every time you feel like we haven’t really done anything with this, which is actually not something you feel at other times but you don’t remember that either.

CLIENT: I feel, at other times I feel as if – as I do now as I said a moment ago – our analysis has gotten progressively more specific and more, I think, fine-tuned, and I appreciate that that is important and takes a lot of work. I have no impulse to deny that so no, I disagree. So what I do feel is that it’s still happening and that’s kind of undeniable. It’s still happening, the principle, kind of proximal cause of many of the things that are most difficult and disruptive for me I think we’re agreed on this disconnectedness which manifests itself frequently as a kind of lost memory function and here it is, still there. Like not only there to be seen by us in our interaction but actually interfering with our capacity to work well to counteract this. So it’s not remembering that we do work. I don’t feel disconnected from our accomplishments as a dyad.

THERAPIST: But I think you do.

CLIENT: Actually, I think you do.

THERAPIST: And here’s why I think so.

CLIENT: Okay. Lay it on me, brother.

THERAPIST: (Laughs) Okay. Because, for example, on Tuesday by the end of the hour I think you remembered quite a bit from Friday.

CLIENT: That’s true. I remember remembering it. That’s the only thing that I remember about Tuesday is that I remembered Friday.

THERAPIST: Right. And so within the span of the 45 minutes that we met you remembered and kind of got back in touch with where we were at and how we had been thinking together about things with the idea that I would say, with me and that clearly is not where you want to be at the end of the day but it’s quite a different place from where you were both in terms of the content which is more where you’re pointing to of how we’re understanding things, but I would also add with the sort of, in a way, the severity of the symptom. You know, it’s not just that you forget, it’s like how thick is the repression? How long does it take to reconnect with what’s lost? How much work does it take? How much sort of charge and emotion is there to it? And you know, you’re pretty much back there within the 45 minutes and without a whole lot of heavy lifting.

CLIENT: What would heavy lifting be? Like crying?

THERAPIST: You know, like getting to something that feels sort of rare and hard to get to, things like that, you know. Like I mean I bet if – and in a way this is what we did on Tuesday, I think in part, we sort of jogged each other’s memory about Friday. Probably, me – I think what happened is you came in with no idea about what happened on Friday. We talked a little more. I said something like, maybe that reminds me of Friday and I elaborated a little more about what went on on Friday. That helped you. You could say that helped put you more in touch with it, but I think more directly and I think I said this at the time, I said, I think actually there’s something about my doing that that makes you feel like I’m kind of here, I was there then, I’m kind of – it like helps you have more confidence in me, or makes you feel more connected to me and that I think then contributes to kind of bringing you around in a way. By then I think you remember more clearly, you sort of get back into where we were and so forth. For example, I think at the end, my recollection was – about your comment about being stuck and being really frustrated about it – that that was half of it. That we actually identified more about where the stuck feeling came from in terms, I think, of like Friday – I may be confused – was it Tuesday we were talking about infidelity?

CLIENT: I think – no, it must have Tuesday because my mother had this dream, right?

THERAPIST: Right. And how in different times you find yourself in different roles there. And sometimes in the role of kind of your vulnerable mother who was being betrayed.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: And at other times as a kind of self-interested –

CLIENT: I think that was Friday. I think that was the moment where you said, oh, you were kind of ahead of me. I remember. It doesn’t matter.

THERAPIST: That could be. Your mother – I think you’re right though about your mother’s dream.

CLIENT: I think we had this conversation about my taking on both roles on Friday when we had the conversation about infidelity. I guess in that general context on Tuesday. It doesn’t matter though, you’re right. Okay.

(Pause): [0:20:21 – 0:20:39]

THERAPIST: One question I have though – it sounds like actually you do remember some stuff from Tuesday, you sort of put it into Friday.

CLIENT: No.

THERAPIST: No. You didn’t remember the stuff about affairs, infidelity.

CLIENT: I didn’t remember that. I do now. I remember my mother’s dream. I remember her telling me that. I remember her being kind of shocked at the persistence of these very old wounds.

THERAPIST: Right. Which I think is part of what landed you towards the end of the hour in being so frustrated was because we started with her wounds and their persistence and ended with yours and their persistence.

CLIENT: Right. True.

THERAPIST: And I guess my sense was that there was a way in which, of course that’s frustrating and overwhelming and at the same time, at least it was my sense at the time, although perhaps I was misreading you that there was also reassuring about being able to put more precisely or get our heads around like, in a way, what you’re really upset about.

CLIENT: What I’m really upset about in what sphere?

THERAPIST: To identify the old wounds that are persisting.

CLIENT: (Heavy sigh)

(Pause): [0:22:07 – 0:22:31]

CLIENT: Is that really a project at this point? Identify the old wounds that are persisting? I mean it seems to me that we are not talking about old wounds. We’re talking about you know, a kind of personality and reflex responses that are kind of maladaptive.

THERAPIST: The old ones felt very – that the whole reason you were frustrated at the end on Tuesday was because that seemed the result of those old wounds that are persisting. I mean, what struck you was the extent to which those remained present and very active.

CLIENT: Yeah. Yeah.

THERAPIST: I mean now I get that that may be of historical interest but not sort of (cross talk).

CLIENT: Well, you know, I’m the last person to say that historical interest is not interesting, but –

THERAPIST: Well, but you’re, I think that (unclear) doesn’t feel immediate. [0:23:35]

CLIENT: Well, I just, whatever. We’re talking in metaphors necessarily and that’s fine. I don’t know if it’s really that important to differentiate between the metaphor of the wound and the metaphor of scar tissue or something. But I think to the extent that it is meaningful, what is likely to be frustrating to me on Tuesday, and you’re right – to the extent that I can recall now, I agree with your narrative, your synopsis, here. To the extent that it’s frustrating that this is what was frustrating, it’s more that they still organize things. In fact, they still organize my thoughts. They still organize my mother’s dreams. They still organize – it’s not like there’s some damage that they’ve caused that’s still open. It’s healed over. The problem is that we’re all walking with a limp.

THERAPIST: The reason, the thing that – I thought I remembered you saying with a word expressing the frustration, is how, I mean, when we got to – I think I said something like – ‘this is what happens with your work.’

CLIENT: Yeah. Well, that’s certainly true. There’s no question about it.

THERAPIST: And you said, ‘yeah.’ And I guess in that sense it would seem to me that it hasn’t healed.

CLIENT: It hasn’t healed.

THERAPIST: Okay. So you may be able to articulate better how it applies to your work but what I have in mind is something like a conflict for you in getting to work both because you felt like what you were doing in some way wasn’t for the family, it was just for you, so it was leaving, or betrayal. And then at other times, the feeling on the other end of it like Jennie was focused on her stuff.

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: You could feel betrayed and upset.

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: And I don’t remember how that fed back into your work. I guess it was more than the first one.

CLIENT: I see, so this betrayal has made me acutely sensitive to the possibility of betrayal meaning that the wound is still open, is still sensitive. I see. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I think that’s right. I think there’s true to that. I think that – and I see what you’re saying now about that implying a kind of distillation of my mother’s viewpoint in the matter since she was principally the one who was – at least most proximally the one who was betrayed. Yes.

THERAPIST: Although – and I think this is another thing that we – I said on Tuesday is that’s complicated because there were also moments at which he treated you that way, too. Not just –

CLIENT: Oh. Yeah. I mean, you know, my dad (heavy sigh). You know what’s a shame, Marshall? What’s shitty is that my dad was a great guy. What’s shitty is that my dad was a great guy and I – he was a really creative, loving person and he was just so fucked up in these ways that I don’t have any contact with that feeling anymore. When I remember my father, what I think of is a user – you know, somebody who just made the wrong choices, who was delusive and grandiose and really fucked his family in a serious way. You know, left an incredible mess to deal with. I just don’t have any touch with it. And weirdly when I realize this and try and get in touch with the things that were wonderful about my dad I can’t think of – it’s not the interactions between me and him that I think of because those feel tainted, it’s the interactions between me and my sis – in between him and my sister whose relationship I think was much more complicated. I’m just so – my memories of him are just so tainted by you know, both first hand and probably a referred sense of betrayal that I can’t remember him without uncomplicated affection.

(Pause): [0:29:04 – 0:29:12]

CLIENT: And yet, bizarrely, as some level my professional failures, I somehow think of them as the other side of the coin. I see his professional failures. In other words, they’re not even my own failures.

THERAPIST: Like he kind of carries them for you.

CLIENT: I think it’s the analog or flip side of this phenomenon we noticed of me feeling betrayed through my mother’s eyes. I feel my failures through my father’s eyes.

(Pause): [0:29:50 – 0:30:00]

CLIENT: I’m enlisted in both of their something. You know, both of them used me in their particular kind of way.

THERAPIST: It did seem a couple of minutes ago when you said, ‘Look, you know the thing is, Marshall, my father’s a great guy,’ that there was a – in remembering him that way or in explaining that to me, like to me there was a flicker of –

CLIENT: I’m aware of it but I’m not in touch with it at this point. At least at this moment.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: I know this to be true. I know that people loved him but for very specific reasons. I know that he was lovable. But I don’t, for years now I have just not been able to access them. But I know, it’s like the most contact I have with him as something other than an object lesson, is in my sense of judgment about my own failure to succeed. It feels like just a continuation of his.

THERAPIST: Well, as you know, I tend to think of these sorts of things that get played out in the transference between you and me and I have a specific idea of how this one does. Yeah, I had been thinking before you said this about him, which is in keeping with what you were saying, kind of a revelation for me. I mean it’s not that I thought he was all bad but I’ve never heard you speak about him that way before. So it really struck me. But my point is, before even you said that – I had this thought like, okay, so Aaron and I are doing that thing that we do when he doesn’t remember and he’s frustrated and feels like in a way the most important thing isn’t happening here. And what happens is like I kind of help him remember, I talk about what happened, I put this in like a broader context. And the feeling that I had that I didn’t know what to do with feels to me a little like I kind of have to be nice and show that I’m being supportive and I’m here and I remember.

CLIENT: When you would prefer to be mean and cruel.

THERAPIST: (Laughs) Of course! (Laughs)

CLIENT: Traumatizing.

THERAPIST: Well, you know. Gotta have a goal. But the feeling in a way is like I’m kind of half intentionally showing, like demonstrating, that I am going to be nice and helpful.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: And what came to my mind as you were talking about your father and really what you’re talking about are these two kind of split or just two versions of him really.

CLIENT: No. I mean, I don’t know.

THERAPIST: I guess the way that I mean that is –

CLIENT: That implies I think a more barouche psychodynamic is necessary. You know, some kind of split in my memory of my father. I think a less complicated way of saying it, a less kind of symbolizing way of saying it is, you know, I’m just angry and feel betrayed and kind of fucked over and in those circumstances it’s hard to get in touch with the good things, which doesn’t have to be two completely different models and memories of (unclear). [0:34:42]

THERAPIST: Okay.

CLIENT: Right? The difference there seems to be –

THERAPIST: Okay. I’m willing to go with that.

CLIENT: Okay. Fine.

THERAPIST: Where I was going or will go with that though is to say that, yeah, I feel like there is an echo of that in our interactions around your forgetting where you express some frustration and maybe a little provocation and I show that I’m sensitive to it and nice and I’m going to help and then you sort of warm up a little bit and remember and kind of get back into things. Am I clear the way I mean like it’s an echo of it because it’s like you come in frustrated and really saying that this hasn’t helped you with the most important thing you wanted help with in the way you wanted help with it. And I think that it’s certainly in parallel in the kind of anger and disappointment you have towards him.

CLIENT: Okay. Finish the thought. I don’t want to –

THERAPIST: And then you know, once I respond in a way that sort of demonstrates in a sense that I am here to help with whatever you are right in the moment expressing frustration about which is remembering. You don’t have to be angry and we can be like more partners in this rather than sort of opposite sides or different sides of it.

CLIENT: So there are two things – two propositions you have here. One of them is to reframe the frustration as a kind of interpersonal frustration rather than frustration with a phenomenon or some kind of psychic event like forgetting.

THERAPIST: Yes.

CLIENT: In other words, my forgetting is not forgetting per se. It’s something do to with the two of us. And number two is to identify what that interference between our interaction as the product of some kind of transference in which you’re standing in for my frustration and anger and sense of betrayal from my father to give me what I need.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: Well, that sounds like a very shrink thing to say.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: Both of them.

THERAPIST: I could really (unclear) about the last.

(Laughter)

CLIENT: Okay. (Laughs) (Unclear). (Laughing)

THERAPIST: Yeah, I mean, like as far as the first one – that happens all the time. When has your forgetting or your coming back with something ever not had to do with your feeling betrayed by somebody? Ever. I mean, in work – all the time. At home with Jennie. I mean this is what we’ve been talking about the last two sessions. You don’t get frustrated when you’re working someplace with forgetting. You get –

CLIENT: (Still laughing) That’s my (unclear). Now, explain transference. (Laughing) [0:38:55]

THERAPIST: Well didn’t somebody in this room say that he was amazed how these issues were persisting and affecting the interactions in his present day life? To this day.

CLIENT: Well, I think what I was struck by was my mother’s dream. I mean it wasn’t that –

THERAPIST: You were struck at the end of the hour by how it played out for you as work.

CLIENT: It’s true. It’s true. It’s true. It’s true, it’s true, it’s true.

(Pause): [0:39:20 – 0:39:29]

CLIENT: I think I told you once that I have three shrinks, right? The first one was about my dad’s age, the second one was about my mom’s age when all of this was going on in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s and the third is you and for, I don’t know, the purposes of amusement at the very least, I kind of identified the first one as the dad-shrink, the second one as the mom-shrink and the third is the me-shrink.

THERAPIST: (Laughs)

CLIENT: I have no idea whether that’s anything more than entertaining but it is very difficult for me to (Pause) – it’s hard for me to get my head around that particular substitution. For the reason that you just pointed out that it recrudesces in every relationship that I have, I think there is a very useful opportunity for transference because it’s kind of secondhand or like it’s analogical. It’s not –

THERAPIST: I don’t feel to you like your father.

CLIENT: No. Not in any sense. And I have no idea whether that’s important, whether it’s worth dwelling on, whether it matters. Maybe it’s completely irrelevant but in no way, shape or form do you feel like my father and I think one of the reasons that our you know, I feel whatever I may be frustrated with, I feel very good at the kind of rapport we’ve been able to establish and one reason for that is I feel kind of a connection to and a kind of empathy for you on a kind of peer/collegial level. So I don’t know how that interacts with the second proposition that you made and maybe it’s better that way. Maybe that’s a better, kind of more therapeutically useful kind of formulation of transference. But that’s kind of how I imagine the transference between you and my interject rather than between you and my father.

THERAPIST: Yep, that’s right. Yeah, the transference operates not between me and your actual father but between me and the interject you have of your father.

CLIENT: I’m aware that it’s mine. I’m not so psychotic that like I imagine the interject – well my father as something other than some figment of my personality.

THERAPIST: I don’t think at all that it makes you psychotic but I think that in some moments you (unclear) like you are. When you come in and you’re kind of distant and frustrated and feeling like it and I in some sense aren’t there for you in the way that you want me and it to be, although clearly at other moments – at most moments you feel quite differently from that. You are living it out.

CLIENT: So I guess what you’re saying is that everybody is an interject of my father. That the reason why these things keep recrudescing in all these different settings is that – and I guess and it’s not just my dad. I feel a – I also feel a sense of betrayal and anger and you know it’s different with my mother. You know, there are all of these primary relationships that I feel rightly or wrongly – I feel some of it is just like a four-year old’s peak that never got processed developmentally, but I feel as if I didn’t get what I needed.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: And somehow in all of these relationships that’s recrudescing and causing this blockage which manifests itself partly as a blockage of memory. I think we’re coming to the end of the hour.

THERAPIST: Yeah, we have to end.

CLIENT: Okay. So. Today is Thursday. That means Tuesday. See you then.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

END TRANSCRIPT