it’s my job to take care of you. It has been since you first came
out of my body.”The sessions with Dr. Judy help Rachel feel better during the few
months they last. At least someone listens to her side of the story. But when
the sessions are over, very little has changed. Rachel still feels depressed,
and her mother is still as manipulative and immature as ever, in spite of
all the time Rachel and Dr. Judy spent talking about her.
For some reason, both clients and therapists seem to believe that talk-
ing about parents is the stuff of therapy. We all have unresolved issues with
our parents, and it feels good to talk about them with someone who lis-
tens, but there’s little evidence that this cures anything. We continue to
do it because psychotherapy still has some unresolved issues with its own
family of origin.
Today’s therapies are the children of Freud. Though psychoanalysis
has been out of fashion for almost 40 years, it still influences everything
we think. Everybody knows that analysis involved “working through issues
with parents,” so we still do it, regardless of whether it ever accomplished
anything.
The psychoanalytic reason for talking about parents was to develop
insightinto the irrational sources of present day perceptions. The real
issues to be worked through were in the patient’s fantasies about their par-
ents, not with actual parents in the real world.
Analysts examined dreams, early memories, and slips of the tongue,
believing that full understanding of where symptoms came from was suf-
ficient to cure them. Sometimes it worked. Psychoanalytic therapy was art.
Along with a few masters, there were many who just painted by the num-
bers. Freud talked about parents, so they did too.
Some patients were cured by psychoanalysis, but many spent years
analyzing dreams and talking about how their parents hurt them, lost in
the fantasy that they were doing something productive.
Art eventually fell to science. Psychoanalysis was overthrown by cog-
nitive/ behavioral approaches; the pursuit of insight was replaced by the
teaching of practical techniques for solving real life problems.
In the shifting of paradigms, however, the baby was thrown out, but
somehow the bathwater remained. Therapists still talk about the damage
38 ❧Emotional Explosions