by Rebecca Shapiro, Psy.D.

Gift-giving season: What gives in a clinical hour?

No topic exists within a therapy not constitutive of the texture of that therapy. That a distinction obtains between analytic and extra-analytic material, that some topics are suitable for inquiry and others not, misses the point. This is not so much an admission that everything in therapy is important or an assertion that excluding certain experiential categories is an abuse of therapeutic power (it likely is), as it is a suggestion that we rule nothing out. The film editor and sound designer Walter Murch (2002) comments: “If I go out to record a door-slam, I don’t think I’m recording a door-slam. I think I am recording the space in which the door-slam happens.” Therapy, similarly, “happens” in the space in which a topic unfolds. It is the perturbations to the space’s texture due to the quality of a topic’s unfolding that become climacteric for therapeutic action: A door-slam does something to the sound of the space in which it occurs and it is to the shift in space that we necessarily respond. We might say that the point of a topic is precisely its point.

But what is the point?

Barthes (1980) famously distinguishes studium—culturally accepted understanding(s) of datasets—from punctum—idiosyncratic, emotional responses to details within datasets—offering a kind of slant rhyme to psychoanalysis’ notion of manifest versus latent content, with the distinction that punctum addresses our duplicitousness (we say not what we mean) via the experience, felt to be an excess or too-muchness, of the rupture of our duplicitousness by the irruption into consciousness of irruption itself.

On said experience, Nathalie Léger (2008/2019) writes: “[P]ythons devour things, the gaze of the animal taken by surprise, being swallowed, gobbled up by the still, ferocious subject that makes you spit out whatever you thought you knew; the enormous, hidden subject, incomprehensible, powerful, more powerful than you, tenuous, a detail, an old memory, seemingly insignificant, but it grips you, inexorably you merge with it until slowly you begin to spit out disturbing visions, elusive but insistent ghosts.”

Given the range of an irruption’s intensity (pythons have 80-120 teeth), something as seemingly innocuous as a patient’s comment on the color of her therapist’s sweater can dislodge the dyad from its practice of going-on-being as together it/they list into discussion of the reproductive practices of praying mantises, the patient’s whisper now affectively supersaturated: “Female mantises decapitate their male counterparts during sex.” Sharp inhale. Silence. “[T]here are very few reactions the mantis cannot perform in a decapitated state,” observes Roger Caillois (2003), continuing, “…it is…difficult…to comprehend that the mantis, when dead, should be capable of simulating death”—a statement perhaps more consistent with a dyadic description of devourment than Léger’s one-person python permits. For Caillois’ mantis regards just this—the female insists on her too-muchness vis-à-vis her mate. In therapeutic space, what gives occurs in such excess that the coupled couple’s deathly reanimation generates new life.