“I hate and have always hated the word therapist. I detest the idea that my work, if it is work at all, is therapeutic work, that I am a member of what some of my colleagues call— without irony— the helping professions. My pride has sought always to refresh itself in the bracing chill of Freud’s most merciless formulations, his statement that a cure only is a renewed acquaintance with "everyday misery,” his designation of psychoanalytic work as a “school of suffering.” I reject the claim that psychotherapeutic treatment promises peace of mind, or comfort with oneself, however much these may be the happy by- products of the treatment— the accessory consolations, if you will. Rather than seeking to enhance self- esteem or contentment, the work strives for the opposite, to strip away all illusions of self- sufficiency or autonomy. At its most successful, this school of suffering is a curriculum in awe. The true object of this awe is the sheer, impossible fact of being here at all— to have precipitated like a sudden dew from lightless and dimensionless nothing. That is the horizon of the treatment, the recognition that we appear from nowhere under inscrutable stars, at a place and time we did not choose, driven by desires we do not choose, toward a death we do not choose, a death that chose us for its own even in our mother’s womb. Maybe this is only madness to you. Why shouldn’t it be?” DeathSufferingExistencePsychologyComfortIllusionMiseryTherapyContentmentFreud Book:The Waters & The Wild Source: The Waters & The Wild
“I would return to my world, to my own city and my work. I would go back to being a doctor, an expensive New York doctor, the doctor into which I had been so expensively made. Wasn’t that what New York meant, expense? When I returned, everything would be expensive. Rent for my private office would be expensive. My hourly rate would be high. And however dizzying, the fee for my patients was only the beginning of the cost, the analytic undertaking promising neither comfort nor relief. It is instead a severe curriculum, Freud’s school of suffering: the universal conviction of shame, the pain of disclosure and of the resistance to disclosure, the awful vertigo of free association, the torment of encountering one’s hungers, hatreds, lusts, avowing them, claiming them as one’s own. I would become, anew, the minister of that suffering. In my costliness I would be a temple prostitute set apart and ceremonially dressed (in cardigan, gray flannels, polished cap- toe oxfords). My patients would pay me, not for something that they received from me, but instead for me to neutralize the account of whatever they had inserted or discharged into my person.” SufferingPsychologyComfortHatredShameHungerLustFreud Book:The Waters & The Wild Source: The Waters & The Wild