Woody Allen may be the most psychoanalyzed man on earth. So when he ran off with his girlfriend’s daughter in 1993, tabloid editors and comedians smelled blood. One American talk show host taunted Mr. Allen’s psychiatrist: “Good job!”
The notion of endlessly talking about personal problems on a therapist’s couch makes for easy caricature. In a recent Times Magazine article, Daphne Merkin, describing her own 45-year odyssey in analysis, compared it to an addiction.
“My abiding faith in the possibility of self-transformation,” Ms. Merkin wrote, “propelled me from one therapist to the next, ever on the lookout for something that seemed tormentingly out of reach.’’
Nevertheless, more than a century after Freud first experimented with a “talking cure,” the idea that words can change our thought patterns and behavior is gaining new weight. As Benedict Carey wrote in The Times, the cliche that psychotherapy equals selfabsorption is unfair. The goal is often to enable a patient - whether a complaining spouse or a violent criminal - to comprehend another viewpoint.
Lately, technology has been aiding the process. Researchers in Sweden have added headsets fitted with video goggles along with touch stimuli into the talk therapy equation. Thus, the subject “sees” and “feels” from an alternate point of view, tricking the brain into a separate sensory experience.
“You can see the possibilities, putting a male in a female body, young in old, black in white and vice versa,” Dr. Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm told Mr. Carey.
Another psychologist, Leslie Lothstein, sets similar goals in his work with pedophile priests in Hartford, Connecticut. While Dr. Lothstein admits that “you can’t treat pedophilia,” he told The Times that through intensive talk therapy “you make them aware of the damage. And if they don’t have a conscience, you try to give them a mentalizing function” to help them understand a victim’s experience and, hopefully, to control their urges. “The treatment is slow,” Dr. Lothstein said, but he believes that even some pedophiles can learn empathy.
Talk is also the focus of an effort by the United States government to prevent suicides of combat veterans. At the Department of Veterans Affairs suicide prevention hotline, based in Canandaigua, New York, therapists and counselors handle up to 300 calls a day. Since 2007, the hot line has prevented about 10,000 veterans from committing suicide, the counselors claim, sometimes by intervening with local police, sometimes by simply calming the troubled vets.
“The very act of picking up the phone,” Caitlin Thompson, the hotline’s clinical care coordinator, told The Times, “is an attempt to reach out one last time. It’s that ambivalence that we are trying to jump on.”
As for Mr. Allen, he defends his many decades of yammering on about love and death in therapy.
“People always tease me,” he told New York magazine in 2008. “They say, look at you, you went for so much psychoanalysis and you’re so neurotic, you wind up marrying a girl so much younger than you. You don’t like to go through tunnels. You don’t like to stand near the drain in the shower.
“But I could also say to them, I’ve had a very productive life. I’ve worked very hard, I’ve never fallen prey to depression. I’m not sure I could have done all of that without being in psychoanalysis.”
KEVIN DELANEY
