Something new is happening in bedrooms, kitchens and spare rooms all over the world.
What is this new phenomenon? It is a completely new form of speaking and listening, which until a couple of months ago had only ever taken place in private consulting rooms, or in health centres or hospitals.
Therapists and analysts, like their clients and patients, are locked down at home, and the conversations which previously happened in a neutral space are now happening in the most intimate of spaces.
We might be tempted (to paraphrase Madonna) to see this as the great equaliser: any power dynamics are dissolved through the therapist’s humiliation of having one’s terrible taste in curtains exposed for the world to see. (Incidentally, how each person positions their laptop for a Zoom session to get the most desirable backdrop – a picture on the wall, a case full of books, an extraordinary clock – deserves a blogpost in its own right…)
The client no longer has to travel, knock on the therapist’s door, wait to be let in, perhaps sit in a waiting room; and the therapist is no longer the host. Perhaps we both feel relieved – we are, after all, two people, two equals in conversation. Maybe we can speak a little more easily now.
All of this makes me consider what we are doing when we speak. Speech has many functions, of course. When I speak, I want to share something, I want my audience to hear me, to love me, to understand me. But it is difficult to make oneself understood. What happens when you can’t understand what I am saying? What happens when I can’t understand what you are saying? Perhaps I try to step into your shoes, try to empathise with you, see things from your point of view. In a sense, what I am trying to do here is to be a bit more like you, in order to see where you’re coming from.
And this being-a-bit-more-like-you has its pitfalls. The risk is that by trying too hard to understand you, I reduce you to somebody who thinks and feels a bit like I do – and when I do that, I deprive you of your individuality.
This is difficult. In order for us to communicate, we have to identify with each other up to a point. If we didn’t, we would sit there with our own monologues, never connecting, never meeting. But if we communicate too fluently, we gamble away our subjectivity, our very being.
So my idea here is that we must let communication fail somewhat, and we must pay attentions to those failures – our misrecognitions, slips of memory, slips of the tongue, our cack-handedness. It is in our failures that we find ourselves.
Let’s not get too seduced by the idea that because when we speak, you’re lying on your bed and I’m lying on mine, we dream in the same way. We are fundamentally different, and it’s my hunch that we reach out to a therapist as a stranger, not as a friend – as someone who will not only hear me, not only understand me, but also translate me.