09.04.19
today I am anxious because today, for the first time in weeks, i have "something to do," an actual appointment to make where, if i did not show up, i would be at the mercy of the world's hands to decide on an appropriate verdict regarding my punishment or guilt. today i am tasked with seeing the psychoanalyst in the wild, in her domain or terf, at her manhattan office whose steep rent she might pay directly from the fee i (or my insurance company) will pay her. my hair is burly and mangled, my eyebrows grown like the wilderness bush. but these are characteristics only made salient to me now. for some reason, such meetings always feel like awful and delicate dates with big other.
therapists come and go in my life, but Dr. H is someone i had always returned to. why? well, because he, alone, is someone who might not question it too hard if and when i foray into the world to date other therapists the way one might date other lovers. i think there is a cheaply earned sanity one acquires by virtue of seeing the psychoanalyst every week: "i have made story out of my situation. it is packaged in a way that dialogue in solipsism does not afford. big other has heard my confessions. if i am doing something wrong, it is now at the hands of b.o. to have told me, because i have implicitly invited him or made him responsible now, too"
i always try to gear myself up for disappointment before first dates with psychoanalysts, who i would be remiss to trust on good faith alone. it feels like an elaborate prank, like a loophole in society to take an easy way out, where you pass the exams and sit nicely in the classrooms, make notes of good form in residency, until you finally have a throne where you sit and charge by the minute or hour –– similar to escorts, not the more honest prostitute –– to torture the client with authority and with a free creative hand in the way of a mad scientist in her laboratory. the domain is psychoanalysts is heterogeneous the same way an untended wilderness is; of course there will be weeds or poison oak and ivy. but this free market comes at the cost of the client, who is self selected to be in pain or difficulty, whose mere one-hour $60 sliding-scale fee may come from 4 or 6 hours of labor. and i do not believe her labor is any less dignified than the passively extracted wage a therapist milks just from enduring the ticking of the clock on her wall.
these uncaffeinated notes are freeing to pass along as now burdens to others, another mating ritual with big other. hello, big other. and how are you doing today?