When I was a young and newly minted licensed psychologist, I saw a young man in his late twenties. We met for an initial consultation and his complaints were vague: anxiety over work issues and perhaps some difficulties in interpersonal relationships. I could not tell for sure why this man was seeking treatment. Since we were both the same age at the time, I wondered if my youth and my gender had rendered it difficult for him to talk with me about what was really going on. At the end of what I thought to be an odd and confusing first visit, this man wrote me a check for my hourly fee and asked me if I would go out on a date with him.
I explained that no, I could not go out with him, as our initial meeting had indicated an important boundary in what could be our relationship: I was there to help him professionally and I could not be involved with him romantically. I never saw him again. Perhaps as a statement of his disappointment, his check was returned to me for insufficient payment.
It was during a screening of the film, A Dangerous Method that the memory of this young man came back to me. The psychotherapy encounter is intimate and intense and as Cronenberg's film suggests, can be subject to boundary violations in which patients, who genuinely feel that they have fallen in love with their therapist or analyst, can be subject to the abuse and exploitation of a person that they trust so much.
Such was the case with Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein, played brilliantly by Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley. Mistakes were made. Boundaries were violated, and of course, there was the spanking. Freud (who was recreated by Viggo Mortenson) and Jung also stopped being friends, because Freud thought it better not to sleep with patients. Freud seemed to wonder how a theory that focuses on sex can survive when analysts actually recreate with patients a fantasy they may have. Quite hazardous, indeed.
Of course, sex with therapists has had a lot of treatment from film and television. It was the subject of some of Tony Soprano's fantasy life and was enacted in The Prince of Tides and Deconstructing Harry, to name but a couple of films in which patients get to know their analysts intimately.
But unlike relatively recent portrayals of longed-for sex with analysts, A Dangerous Method reminds us that boundary violations are, in fact, dangerous. The somewhat enticing sex scenes aside, I never felt convinced during the film that Jung or Spielrein really thought they were in love with one another. Rather, it was painfully clear that the two were trying desperately to recreate a better version of Spielrein's abusive childhood. But it did not quite work. Such scenarios never do. And this is a good thing because when patients have sex with their therapist, love is not the main feeling being captured.
Often, patients fall in love with their analyst in long-term treatment. Therapists may feel love towards their patients as well. But this feeling is both real and not real. The love we have for our therapists occurs in a specific context and this context is that of a professional relationship and one in which we long for better parenting experiences than we may have had. We pay our therapists because it is a reminder that what we are doing as patients is not what we do when we have a drink with someone or flirt with a guy at a party.
What we all have to bear is that our psychoanalysts cannot ever change our actual childhoods. Love in treatment is real for some people, but it does not mean that therapists have a license to capitalize on this feeling sexually. The best kind of therapy or analysis is when the patient and therapist understand that the past cannot be undone. Love in treatment is normal, but this feeling should be used in a way that patients can understand current relationships and those in the past. As therapists, we need to urge patients to look toward the future and to figure out what it is they want and need in relationships. As far as our own feelings, it is our responsibility to deal with whatever issues we have and to use these thoughts and ideas to better understand our patients.
Sex with a therapist makes for a good film, but not for a healthy reality.
