I had to stop therapy to finally be ready
Dr. S and I tried to resolve the conflict. For me, she knew, dependence implied obligation and control—so I wouldn’t let her, or myself, be around. I didn’t disagree, but how was I to save my desire to be held from my fear of being crushed, my desire to love from my desire to please? How was I supposed to find a way that wasn’t out? I experienced my imminent departure as a fact in my body, and any attempt to explain it further filled me with a satiating boredom. Dr. S was not a boring person, nor did I think I was, so the boredom created mutual distrust. Yet I felt loyal to my malaise, like the child who refuses every doll, game, or excursion—stubborn in the unfortunate dignity of her disinterest.
Dr. S knew better than to pressure me to stay, but she failed to fulfill my fantasy of a restorative final session. I thought I wanted her to bless my departure. Instead, she spoke wistfully of all the work we could do if I kept coming back, as if the work we had already done wasn’t enough. As I left her office, tears clouded my vision, and the clouds over Central Park looked like faces pressed against dust. I was afraid of Dr. To disappoint – and then I did. But the disappointment I sensed in her was different from the disappointment I so chronically tried to avoid in others. Together we had created a situation that I could leave without reproach in favor of my own desire, however primitive.
It must be strange for the analyst to exert so little control over her patients: after years of tenderness, we may walk out the door without looking back. And yet it is precisely this conscious renunciation of control that sets the analyst apart from the other people in our lives, potentially transformative. Once I left, life quickly flooded the space where our sessions had been. I fell in love, I became a writer. Meanwhile, I waited for a punishment that never came, and the calm dissipated the guilt and shame of failure. I finally felt the thrill of an independence that I didn’t have to justify by winning. Leaving Dr. S made it possible for us to imagine going back – both humbled and encouraged by our mutual ability to get through the divorce. To let it breathe.
I was only gone for a little over a year, and when I went back to Dr. S., we saw each other once a week. Six years have passed and our relationship is now one of the most reliable – and mysterious – of my life. I recently told her that I’m not sure what analytics is for, or how and how much it has made me better. “You’re still so ambivalent about it,” Dr. S remarked. But I don’t think that’s quite true. I’m not ambivalent about my time with her: I know I want to be there, in the hanging circle of her attention. I’m just reluctant to articulate its purpose, especially publicly, because analytics has become a haven for the ubiquitous demand that I use my time productively, or my life as a progress story for search committees, potential partners, or the pages of a magazine . In analysis I am allowed to be uncertain and without the right words. This time I haven’t decided how long it should take. I am able to live without any particular goals in mind – which I have learned is not the same as living without desire.
Lately I’ve been reading Puerto Rican feminist Luisa Capetillo, especially her 1911 manifesto on free love, where she repeated a line like a mantra:just ask.The translation I have renders it as “wanting is doing”. But I stick to other possibilities: ‘wanting is power’, or, more modestly, ‘wanting is being able’. Desire is the minimum condition for any true transformation. But desire cannot be demanded of us by others, or by the voices of others we have internalized to discipline our own minds. We all need to figure out how to get the help we need. The choices we make about how to get it matter less than how close we can feel to the power of our choice.