In Treatment, Season 4, Episodes 3 and 4

Episode 3, Laila, and Episode 4, Brooke and Rita, aired four days ago. Usually I like to post about each episode within a day of its airing but this time I have just had a hard time finding what stood out for me. So read this with my ambivalence in mind.

Laila —

Laila is brought to her first session by her grandmother who seems to think that 2 or 3 sessions should be enough. Laila, she says, is “choosing to be gay” and grandmother wants her prepared for what she faces in college.

I confess it has been years since I worked with a teenager — once my own kids were teens, I just didn’t want to deal with more teen issues. And I confess that Laila reminds me why. She is defensive, provocative, sarcastic, often hostile. Brooke manages all of this pretty well, even though none of her efforts gets Laila to speak of herself other than with labels. She gets Laila to move out of the usual physical set up of sitting opposite each other and move to a table where they eat Easter candy. But Laila stays guarded.

We don’t learn a whole lot about Laila in this episode. We know she says she is gay. She claims to be a sex addict. She’s the only child of what she describes as a workaholic. Her grandmother has taken the place of her mother — but what happened to her?

Brooke’s effort to reach Laila and her recognition that she has to earn her trust are spot on but it remains to be seen if Laila will really engage in therapy. It is the relationship between therapist and patient which is the vehicle for the work of therapy and Laila is pretty armored.

Brooke and Rita

Rita is Brooke’s friend who shows up after  having been away for a while. We learn that Brooke’s still mourning her recently deceased father, and her toxic ex Adam  is slowly but surely easing his way back into her life. And that Rita is apparently her AA sponsor of many years. So here is the dual relationship again — the friend who is also her sponsor.

This was difficult for me. I was critical of Paul in the first seasons for having a dual relationship with Gina, for the blurring of lines between friendship and supervision. But there was at least a nod given to the need for a professional component in that relationship, a component that is missing this season. All of us therapists have issues in our own lives. Part of our task is to stay on top of them and not use work with patients to deal with them. Supervision and personal therapy are the best checks on what we call countertransference. Given Brooke’s loss of her father and what seems to be complications in her relationship with her boyfriend, to say nothing of the stresses and strains she, like everyone, is subject to during the last year of COVID restrictions. 

Rita does ask Brooke some pointed questions, but the fact remains they are friends and that is the relationship, not a therapeutic one. Which is not to say that friends cannot be immensely helpful but to me, this is a case where it would help a lot if Brooke availed herself of supervision and/or therapy.

So we’ll see how this unfolds. 

In Treatment, Season 4, Colin 1

Brooke’s second patient, Colin, is a court referral, referred for four sessions of mandated therapy. He was a tech executive who fell afoul of the law and went to prison for financial crimes. The woman with him, a parole officer I suspect, tells Brooke he must attend the sessions and that the basis for the referral is his anger issues. Brooke sees Colin face to face in her home office.

Charming at first, there’s a definite darkness underneath. He complains about the burden of being a privileged white man, knowingly provoking Brooke. Colin tells Brooke he has been therapy before, is glad to be there and glad to be out of prison. He says he “fucked up” his life. His accounting of himself is liberally laced with swearing, which he checks to see if she minds. He denies any history of violence, says he is a pacifist raised by hippies.

Colin looks around a lot and evades Brooke’s questions. He asks about her husband getting her to say she is not married. She says he is her first pro bono patient. He says he wants to talk about her, get to know her. Brooke tells him she grew up in the neighborhood they are in, that her father designed some of the houses in the area.

There is throughout an underlying tension. Colin seems used to being able to charm his way into getting what he wants. Brooke asks questions he does not want to answer. He tells her had a bad day in prison and reached his breaking point — she reminds him that in fact he was put into seclusion. He says he ruined his life.

At every turn, Colin resists giving details about himself and his history. He tried to provoke her but she resists. She confronts his downplaying and evasion. Colin is impressed and says, “You’re good. I hadn’t anticipated that.” But he is angry at her confrontations and is defensive. He claims he gets “pummeled” every time he opens up. “You want me to be safe”, he says, “but I am not safe.” This leads to mini-debate about words and a brief outburst by Colin. Clearly his charm is not working as he expected.

Brooke asks how it has been since he got out of prison. He tells her it’s okay but that people don’t want to be around him. Then he says “I fucked a lot of therapists. How about you? Have you fucked a patient?” and shits on his former therapists. Brooke wonders if he is up to the work of therapy. He apologizes and attributes his behavior to stress. Lots and lots of words but not much meaning.

Colin leaves. Brooke gets up and gets herself a drink.

 Colin is a tough patient. I wonder why Brooke is willing to take him on under the four sessions mandate because it is very doubtful that anything meaningful can be accomplished in that time. No doubt there is a lot to mine in Colin’s history and it likely would take a fairly long time to get him to settle down and actually engage with Brooke in their shared work.

Colin masks his rage and hostility beneath a thin veneer of charm. He talks a lot but much of what he says seems aimed at getting a rise out of Brooke. She skillfully parries his attempts to goad her. My guess is that it is a bit of an exhausting hour — witness her need for a drink after he leaves. And what is that about? Why alcohol? 

What do you think about Colin? About Brooke’s response to him? Does anything surprise you?

In Treatment, Season 4, Eladio 1

And so we begin Season 4 of In Treatment. This is a show which does a reasonably good job portraying psychotherapy. Each session is condensed into 30 minutes, shorter than actual sessions but manages to convey something close to what actual therapy is like, as close, probably, as television can come without turning to a reality show format.

Let’s start with what is different from the get-go in this season. The show is set now in Los Angeles rather than Brooklyn. The colors of Brooke Taylor’s home office reflect a brighter California palette rather than the more somber browns and leather of Paul’s Brooklyn office. Like Paul, Brooke has her office in her home. For the past nearly 15 months nearly all therapists have been working with patients from their homes via video connection or telephone. In the first session, we see Brooke work as most of us have been, in the virtual space of video connection. This season we see in both therapist and patients a heightened sense of the need for diversity, which is a change from the first 3 seasons. We see from Brooke’s email box and photos that she has some kind of relationship, perhaps as a protege, with Paul Weston, the therapist from the earlier iteration of the show.

Our Sunday patients are Eladio and Colin. We learn from Episode 1 that Eladio is a home health aide employed by a wealthy family to care for their son; the empolyer is paying for Eladio to see Brooke. The season opens with Brooke receiving a phone call late at night. She declines the call but the caller immediately calls again and we see it is Eladio. He tells her he didn’t expect her to answer then tells her a dream. 

Next we see Eladio is video session with Brooke. Brooke apologizes for answering the phone the previous night. In what follows we learn that Eladio has not spoken with his mother for 4 or 5 months, that she had COVID and that she refused his help. And we learn he is an only child though his mother told him there was a stillbirth before he was born.

Brooke tells him he can call her in emergencies. Eladio reacts to this, telling her not to do that, to do what feels to him like rapping on the knuckles—this suggests his desire for unlimited access to Brooke. She tells him it is up to her to set boundaries. He rather quickly tells her he wants a referral for medication because he isn’t sleeping. She says she needs to know him better before she can feel comfortable making such a referral and she quotes Jung —“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” She lets him know she is not casual about meds, that this work is not fast and that hers is not a results oriented practice.

Eladio then tells her he was diagnosed Bipolar I in college and is on lithium which he takes when he can afford to buy it. His employer does not know about his diagnosis. That he used to work with old people that he would become attached to then they would die. — that is when his sleep problems began, he says. That he fell in love with an addict who abruptly cut him off. Brooke tells him it sounds like he is haunted. Then Eladio asks her if she is going to take care of him, be his family. The session ends abruptly when his charge needs assistance.

So what do I notice?

First, like Gabriel Byrne, Uzo Aduba is riveting in the part. She is beautifully dressed in bright colors very like the furnishings in her home office. My sense though is that the orange chairs in the office are not especially comfortable and she shifts about in her seat as if that were the case. The chairs look great, but for a day’s worth of work? Maybe not so good.

Setting boundaries with Eladio right from the beginning is important. That after having seen her only twice he calls her late at night is an indicator for her that he needs boundaries. A friend of mine and I spoke recently about late night calls and that we have rarely if ever had any while in private practice. So Eladio’s call is at least unusual. And we see as the session progresses that he is hungry for a mother, being somewhat estranged from his own and having experienced so many losses. Brooke’s observation that Eladio is haunted — by the deaths of his never known sister and the patients he cared for and the disappearance of his addict lover — stands out and leads Eladio to express his need for family and care. 

What do we learn about Brooke from this first session? Her father recently died, so we know she is grieving. It looks like she lives alone. So we know that she, like most of us, is dealing with her own pain and issues as she works with her patients. Surely Eladio’s losses bring her own to her mind, as happens again and again in depth psychotherapy.

Now a quibble. In looking for the whole of the Jung quote, I learned that Jung never said: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” 

What he said in two separate and unrelated statements was:

“Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain”. ~Carl Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology

and 

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

With that small correction, still I am delighted that Jung is mentioned. And this sets Brooke within the field of depth psychotherapy and explains her statement to Eladio that hers is not a “results oriented practice.” It doesn’t mean that patients do not change but that particular results are not the goal.

What are your thoughts? Comments? Impressions?

Later today, our second patient, Colin.

Attention Fans of In Treatment!

Ten years ago, HBO’s In Treatment ended its third season with no prospects in sight for renewal. I had blogged every one of the episodes as they were broadcast, a big undertaking for what was then a relatively new blog. I loved the series and see it as the best fictional representation of therapy that I have seen. The liberties taken for the sake of drama and the way the pace of therapy was made to fit the show did not bother me for it was the issues it raised and the interactions between therapist and patient it showed that struck me. And it was a good opportunity to discuss ways the the therapist, as portrayed by Gabriel Byrne, deviated from and/or stayed with the boundaries of therapy. So when it ended, I was very disappointed. I had not only written a lot about the show, but had also used it to teach three courses in my local Senior College.

Imagine my delight when HBO announced a little while ago that it was bringing one of my all time favorite shows back for a new season. And now the debut of Season 4 is almost upon us – starting tomorrow, Sunday May 23.

We will see a new therapist, played by Uzo Aduba, a black woman. And it is set in Los Angeles rather than New York. For an overview of the coming season, check out this article from the NY Times. And I will be posting my comments on each episode starting Monday morning.