Can Therapy Be Hot?

In “Therapy Used to Be Hot,” a recent essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Robin Kirman makes the argument that contemporary therapy has become increasingly concerned with managing symptoms and correcting behavior while giving less attention to desire. In the essay, she describes young people who are remarkably capable of achievement and self-discipline but struggle when asked a deceptively simple question: what do you want?

And really, the question of desire is complicated in the ordinary day; it’s courted and fantasized about, subjected to puritanical banishment and closeted besides shame and joy. The subject of much exploration in poetry and literature and art, it is certainly a centerpiece of the human imagination.

In therapy, folx sometimes tend to talk about it as though it is something already inside them, a secret waiting to be identified and unlocked.

“I want to find out what I want,” some might say.

“I can’t tell what I want, another might worry.

The assumption seems to be that if one is able to strip away enough expectations, anxiety, social pressure and self-doubt, they will find the an answer waiting for them, that it is this complex cocktail of distractions which is preventing them from knowing their own desires. And perhaps sometimes it is.

But what if there was another way of imagining desire? Instead of thinking of it as something that is housed within us, waiting to be discovered consider, for a moment, that it is a thing that can be born in connection. Conceived this way, it can become something that can grow and thrive inside our relationships, whether those be with another person, a goal, an item or one’s own self. In short, desire is not something we have, but something we do.

A part of how we learn to create desire is by experimenting with generating want for something. For example, a child might want to reach for a parent or an object such as a plate or glass and in response, encounter pleasure, refusal, encouragement, ridicule, indifference, alarm. The response is information that, in a sort of unsaid pre-verbal way, about that want. Over time, certain desires might become easy to imagine or create. Others might become associated with guilt, secrecy, anxiety, or the expectation that somebody will be disappointed by even the idea of its existence.

Of course there are complexities. Someone may genuinely begin to want the prestigious career her family values and genuinely resent the personal or relational cost. Another may desire  closeness in a relationship while also wanting independence. Someone who has spent years being valued for competence may keep desiring achievement, and find themselves unable to desire rest for experience of shame. Any given person’s ability to desire is shaped so thoroughly by family expectations, cultural norms, gender, class, religion or attachment that they may do so without intention or much attention to what they might do on their own, given the chance.

That generative process is one reason therapy can be a place of exploring aspects of desire. A good therapeutic relationship offers sustained conditions for noticing what happens between self and other: the connection, the exchange, the invitations, fears, repetitions, the possibilities: love, sadness, even hurt. The relationship is not simply a container for talking about desire or to merely excavate or analyze; it is also a place to create and experience it.  

Think of it then, as the poet Jenny Johnson does, as a pedal, as something you engage as you head down that road. Or in Ibn Arabi’s words,“to become capable of every form.” Think of it as capacity to become interested, moved, attached, and animated by the world, other people, our own mind. To be attuned to yourself in a way that activates you, lets your less guarded self look past the gates of convention or decorum or caution to bring your own ideas into the world, to imagine and to create, to follow your own instincts into wanting is a project worth undertaking. Coming alive in this way is becoming yourself.

Maybe that is what makes therapy hot.

Originally published on Substack: Writing On Airplanes.