The Therapist Remaking Our Love Lives on TV
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In this oversharing, overshared age, the psychotherapist’s consulting room may be one of the last purely private sanctums left. Sessions happen behind firmly closed doors, the sound of patients’ voices masked by the whirr of white-noise machines. The promise of confidentiality is sacred. What happens in treatment is meant to stay there.
A few years ago, though, the documentary filmmakers Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg decided that it might be worth trying to peek under the Freudian slip. Kriegman and Steinberg both grew up in upper-middle-class Jewish families on the East Coast, a milieu that does not so much condone therapy as consider it a part of functional adult life, as routine as filing your taxes or brushing your teeth. Steinberg’s father-in-law is a therapist, as are both of Kriegman’s parents. “I was visiting home, and my father busted out of his office, kind of freaking out about this session he had just been through with a couple,” Kriegman recalled recently. “He said that it would be not only incredibly captivating to watch but meaningful to share what it looks like for people to engage in this way—to go from speaking to each other in cold fury to rage, to tears, to ultimately ending up hugging and reconciling.”
Kriegman and Steinberg had experience getting subjects to bare uncomfortably intimate details of their personal lives on camera. Their first project together, edited and co-written by their creative partner, Eli Despres, was “Weiner” (2016), a fly-on-the-wall documentary that followed Anthony Weiner’s disastrous campaign for mayor of New York in 2013 and the simultaneous implosion of his marriage to Huma Abedin. This time, the three filmmakers had in mind something more salutary. They began to devise a concept for a television show. They would put real couples in a consulting room with a real therapist. Cameras would roll. Whatever happened would happen. The trick was finding the right person to build the show around: someone who possessed both sterling professional credentials and a magnetic, binge-worthy charisma.
They began to interview possible candidates, hundreds of them. “If I saw you on the street, I’d be, like, ‘Who’s your therapist? Do you like her?’ ” Steinberg said. Some seemed eager to embrace the limelight, but most therapists don’t go into the business dreaming of pop-culture celebrity. Among the professionals the team approached was Virginia Goldner, a widely admired psychoanalyst who has written papers with titles like “Romantic Bonds, Binds, and Ruptures” and “When Love Hurts.” “I wouldn’t do it in a million years,” Goldner said. “I was thinking, Oh, my God, who would ?”
To the Israeli American therapist Orna Guralnik, the thought didn’t sound so crazy. Her career had already taken some unusual turns. In the early two-thousands, after getting a degree in clinical psychology, she had co-founded a consulting firm, providing psychological insight for companies like Dell, Xerox, and Goldman Sachs. When she could no longer avoid the nagging sense that she was using her expertise not to improve lives but to help keep exploited workers productive, she decided to train as a psychoanalyst, a pursuit that took a decade. As an undergraduate in Tel Aviv, she had studied filmmaking; the prospect of cameras didn’t faze her. Plus, her daughter was about to go to college, and she had a feeling that she’d need something to take her mind off her semi-empty nest. She responded to an ad that the filmmakers had distributed at the N.Y.U. Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she now teaches, thinking that she might consult on the project.
The filmmakers had a different idea. “It’s kind of like when you meet your partner—you know right away,” Steinberg said. “I knew right away when I spoke to Orna.”
Guralnik is fifty-eight, with olive skin and dark hair. She has great glasses, a forearm tattoo, and the casual poise of the dancer that, as a teen-ager, she considered becoming. Since 2019, she has starred on the Showtime series “Couples Therapy,” the fruit of Kriegman, Steinberg, and Despres’s labors. Each season of the show features a handful of couples as they are given fifteen to twenty sessions’ worth of treatment, a process that unfolds over weeks and is then edited into nine half-hour episodes, creating a patchwork portrait of love in distress. The format has proved a hit; the show’s third season just premièred, and production has already begun on the next batch of episodes.
The chance to gawk at the splayed viscera of other people’s lives would surely attract viewers no matter who occupied the therapist’s chair. But Guralnik makes the show. “She’s like the Napoleon of human emotion,” Despres told me—able to rapidly discern the reasons for a couple’s stalemate and devise a plan of attack before viewers, or the patients themselves, have any read on what might be going on. Guralnik speaks in a gently accented murmur, but there’s a hint of the hawk in her gaze; with her chin tilted sharply down and her brows knitted, her eyes seem to bore into her patients’ very souls. “If you’re ever in the presence of an élite athlete, you notice that they have a physicality that’s kind of overwhelming,” Despres said. “I have that response to Orna. The focus of her attention is really quite intense.”
“Couples Therapy” has turned Guralnik into that rare thing: a famous analyst. Her closest peer in this regard is Esther Perel, the Belgian-born psychotherapist who pioneered the couples-therapy-vérité genre with her podcast “Where Should We Begin?” Perel, something of a self-marketing maven, has two best-selling books, a viral TED talk, and even a mildly erotic card game (“Where Should We Begin? A Game of Stories”) to her name. Guralnik, by contrast, has no tie-ins, no merch, no catchphrase—at least, not yet. Her popular reputation rests entirely on what “Couples Therapy” reveals of her frank, probing clinical style, which involves nudging patients to the edge of a terrifying emotional precipice, then encouraging them to jump. “One of the graceful things about Orna’s work is that she slides you into the setting in a warm and casual way,” Goldner told me. Goldner, who is also on the faculty at N.Y.U., is one of Guralnik’s closest mentors, and Guralnik eventually persuaded her to come on the show in the role of clinical adviser—the “all-knower,” Goldner joked—with whom Guralnik refines her approach to patients’ dilemmas. It was Guralnik’s idea to make supervision, as the practice is known in psychoanalysis, central to the show. Her authority rests, in part, on her willingness to admit what she doesn’t know.
In the show’s new season, Guralnik is stumped by a couple named Ping and Will. (Despite its commitment to radical exposure, “Couples Therapy” doesn’t divulge its subjects’ last names.) When they got together, seven years ago, they shared a desire for exclusive emotional commitment, but happily included other people in their sex life. Then Ping began to see a lover on her own, and Will panicked. He drew up a set of rules to govern Ping’s trysts: no long walks, no cuddling. But sex severed from flirting, from intimacy, wasn’t sexy to Ping. Soon, Will, too, started to date other people, and Ping found herself mobbed by the same anxieties that had tormented Will. “I feel fucking left out,” she tells Guralnik, at their first session.
That, Guralnik learns, is hardly the problem’s extent. Ping is mean to Will. She derides and belittles him. Will, big and boyish, cries easily, and when he says something particularly heartfelt—that nothing he does seems good enough for Ping, that she refuses the affection he proffers—Guralnik asks Ping what she hears. “Honestly,” Ping answers, “just a whole lot of whining.”
Guralnik, troubled, visits Goldner at her apartment, where, surrounded by her impressive collection of African statuary, they discuss the couple’s deadlock. There is something sadomasochistic in it, Guralnik feels. “I’m finding that my regular toolbox is not totally relevant,” she says. She wants to address the problem, but “I have to listen in as to when the timing is right.”
At their next session, Will confesses that he feels hopeless. “We’ve been to so many therapists, and it’s just going through the same thing again and again,” he says, in a choked voice.
“Where are you?” Guralnik asks Ping.
“I’m trying not to come up with a snide remark,” Ping says.
“But you have an impulse to do that?”
“I do. I feel there’s a lot of ‘he said, she said,’ right?” Ping says. “But what’s missing is—”
“Is some kind of theory that will help you understand ‘What’s the dynamic?’ ” Guralnik breaks in.
“Yeah, exactly,” Ping says.
Guralnik seizes her moment. “So one of the things we’ve talked about is you’re already deeply stuck in the groove where you’ll start with an assault,” she begins. “Now, we know already that underneath the assault there’s all sorts of feelings of hurt, vulnerability, betrayal.” She turns to Will. “And your response to that is to enter some state of helplessness, and trying to comply, trying to appease, but really you’re retreating.” Will makes a noise of assent.
“Which leaves you further abandoned,” Guralnik tells Ping. “So that’s your dance at the moment. And you’re exhausted by it. But something’s keeping you together.”
“I don’t know what!” Ping says. “This is what I keep digging for.”
Guralnik lays out the options: “You can tell me that you’re tired of it, you want to break up. We can try to understand how each of you got so deep into this particular position. I’d want to hear something about your family histories.”
“I feel like everyone always wants to talk about my family,” Will sighs. He doesn’t have a good relationship with them, but he’s made his peace with it.
Fine, Guralnik says. But “you’re too good at this role for it not to be well rehearsed.” Looking at the past might help them understand why they’re so stuck in the present. “Is that of interest to you?”
There’s a pause. Even Ping is quiet. Here is the cliff. Will they leap?
“O.K.,” Will says. “So where do we start?”
Early on a rainy morning in March, I went to visit Guralnik at her duplex apartment, which occupies the garden-level and parlor floors of a brownstone in Park Slope. The show had already given me a tantalizing glimpse inside; when the pandemic disrupted the filming of the second season, Guralnik, like therapists the world over, took to Zoom, and the cameras followed her as she conducted sessions from home, occasionally stopping to ask her preteen son, Jasper, to hush. Watching Guralnik as she peered at her laptop in front of a handsomely loaded bookcase, I had concluded that she was working from a luxurious home office, some hallowed room of her own. Projection! What I had taken for a desk was in fact one end of the dining-room table, fully exposed to the domestic elements.
“It’s complete public space,” Guralnik told me as she fired up the espresso machine. “I was shutting my son into his room. My daughter and her boyfriend were living here, so they had to go upstairs to another apartment to work.” Now the mood was calm. Guralnik shuffled around in red felt slippers. Her dog, Nico, a gregarious Klee Kai named for the Velvet Underground singer, sprawled on the floor, diligently chewing an action figure. Guralnik has lived in the apartment for sixteen years—“the longest I’ve lived anywhere”—and it has acquired the rich patina of family life. Board games were piled next to the fireplace, shoes strewn about the entryway. Propped in front of the TV was a Cubist-inflected portrait by an artist friend who’s also an analyst, showing Guralnik in a white hoodie, an enigmatic look on her angled face.
During her foray into consulting, Guralnik made the kind of money that does not generally come to mental-health professionals, even those who charge heftily by the hour. She owns the whole building; the film director Darius Marder, a friend of hers, lives on the top floor, and she rents the other two apartments to Israeli musicians, the kids of her best friends from home. “No one locks their doors,” she told me. “I have a little kibbutz in the house.”
Psychoanalysts generally keep their personal lives hidden from patients, the better to encourage transference: the phenomenon, described by Freud, in which a patient directs the intense feelings generated by a formative relationship onto the blank slate of a therapist. Even before the pandemic, Guralnik had made the surprising decision to allow cameras to follow her outside the consulting room, as she took walks with Nico, or headed into the subway, coffee in hand. Then COVID struck, and there she was, serving her kids breakfast and kissing them on the top of the head. Was there a partner in the mix? If so, such a person was kept out of sight.
When Guralnik and I first met, I asked if she would discuss her own romantic life on the record. She declined, reconsidered, then declined again. “It’s a little tedious for me, but it’s just not right for my patients,” she said, meaning not only those on the show but the ones she sees in private practice. “There’s so much that people gain from being able to not know about me, or from being able to imagine me as one way or another. Am I a conservative straight person? Am I gay? Am I queer? The moment I start talking about myself, I’m robbing them of all that.”
We moved to the living room, where Guralnik settled into a swivel chair big enough for two. I wanted to know about couples. Why do humans persist in pairing off, even though doing so often causes terrible pain? Guralnik herself has voiced skepticism on the subject. In the show’s first episode, she confessed to Goldner that she was kept up at night by the pressure to repair her patients’ relationships, when she saw all too clearly the limits of what one could deliver.
Now she talked about the species-level imperative to reproduce and protect the young, about the economic and ideological pressure from the state. The word “neoliberalism” made an appearance. Outside the consulting room, Guralnik can have a sardonic edge, a matter-of-fact briskness. “I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know the cost of it for people. If it’s not working, get out.” But that was only part of the story. For all her tart realism, Guralnik is a romantic. “Falling in love, being in love, learning how to love better and bigger with more responsibilities is an amazing thing,” she said. Those transformative possibilities give her faith that coupledom can not only restrict and derail lives but radically expand them. “I’m biased,” she said, “but I think people need me to be.”
Guralnik is a proponent of systems theory, an approach to psychology that looks both at a person’s interior world and at the way interpersonal dynamics affect behavior and identity. A couple is a system. So is a family. One member might be called upon to serve as the “identified patient,” the scapegoat for all the problems; another might become the designated therapist. Growing up, Guralnik played the second role. Her parents’ marriage was tumultuous, and she found herself mediating between them during moments of conflict. “I was developing my analytic mind very early,” she told me. “I always joke that they were my first couple to be treated.”
Guralnik was born in 1964, in Washington, D.C. Her parents worked at the Israeli Embassy while pursuing their studies—Guralnik’s mother, Nehama, in art history, and her father, Daniel, in aeronautical engineering. “They were very typical Ashkenazi Israelis of that generation,” she said. “Super secular. Idealists. They believed in a certain kind of socialistic, Zionistic struggle, and they bought into it very early.” When she was two years old, Daniel got an offer from Lockheed Martin and moved the family to Atlanta. “I was the only Jewish kid in my class,” Guralnik told me. “I remember sitting on Father Christmas’s lap, asking if it’s O.K. for Jews to get gifts.”
When Guralnik was seven, her father was recruited by the Israeli airline El Al, and the family, which now included a younger brother, relocated to Tel Aviv. The result was culture shock. Not long after they arrived, the Yom Kippur War broke out, and Daniel was called up from the reserves. “The men disappeared,” Guralnik said.
Other, more mundane changes were equally startling. The Zionist collectivist ethic, defined partly in opposition to the temptations of the individualist West, still held sway in early-seventies Israel, and the conveniences of the American suburbs were nonexistent. Israeli TV had one channel. Horse-drawn carts tootled around Guralnik’s neighborhood, selling watermelons and ice. “You had to wait seven years until you got a phone line,” Guralnik recalled. In Atlanta, she had attended a private school, “very cushy.” Now she was tossed into a classroom with forty kids, all running wild. “I became acquainted with the Israeli way of being,” she said. “You’re with a gang of kids, all afternoon long, while the parents are at work. In a way, we were raising ourselves. It was very communal living.”
As Guralnik got older, she began to notice a shift within her parents’ relationship. Nehama had a major career as a curator at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, but Daniel was accustomed to taking priority. The family had one car; he drove it to work. Nehama started to push back. “I really watched them go through a rearrangement of a very patriarchal understanding of their marriage to a more feminist one, which was not easy,” Guralnik said. “I didn’t have the language for it yet. But I could see it.”
Guralnik, too, began to rebel against the established order at home. When she was sixteen, her parents negotiated a truce: they would give her some space if she agreed to see a therapist. Guralnik was wary. “I didn’t trust any grownup on earth,” she said. But the therapist her parents found rapidly won her over. She was cool, rolling cigarette after cigarette as her black cat wandered in and out of the consulting room. She was also an activist, “the first person to make me think about my automatic assumptions about Arabs, about Palestinians, about authority.” And she treated Guralnik as an equal, a person worthy of respect. “People are so afraid of teen-agers, of girl teen-agers,” Guralnik said. “She was just: ‘Interesting!’ ” Guralnik started to immerse herself in psychoanalytic writing: Freud, Winnicott, R. D. Laing.
Still, it took time for her to realize that she might have a similar talent. She had begun to study dance with the choreographer Rina Schenfeld, and was serious enough to think of pursuing it. But she soon embarked on her obligatory two-year Army service—she was assigned to intelligence work, and hated every minute of it—and by the time she was done her commitment had waned. She went travelling, the twentysomething Israeli’s rite of passage, then enrolled in film school, where “it turned out that I couldn’t write a fiction script for the life of me.” Adrift, Guralnik found her thoughts turning to her former therapist. In 1990, she moved to New York with a group of friends and enrolled in the clinical-psych program at the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, at Yeshiva University.
In the two decades since she’d left Atlanta, Guralnik had lost her grasp of the nuances of American life. “We would end up every evening coming back home and discussing American culture, trying to crack the code,” she said. “If they say, ‘Let’s meet for lunch,’ what do they mean? If you start a sentence with ‘No,’ the way every Israeli starts a sentence, why do they get offended?” In graduate school, Guralnik was working with patients suffering from severe mental illness, and learning to recognize the specific social forces that helped shape pathologies—“the way that poverty and race play here, which is so different from Israel.”
After her consulting stint, Guralnik entered the postdoc program at N.Y.U. There, she gravitated to an influential group of faculty known as the “gang of four”: Goldner, Adrienne Harris, Jessica Benjamin, and Muriel Dimen, women who had been instrumental in applying feminist theory to psychoanalysis. “People who do psychoanalysis, they’re not just interested in change,” Guralnik told me. “They’re interested in meaning, and making meaning. You’re always trying to listen to what hasn’t been said.” For years, the unsaid thing, in the field itself, had been the influence that culture has on the psyche. Particularly in postwar America, psychoanalysis had been hermetically focussed on the private, the interior—but wasn’t the interior indelibly marked by the exterior world? Members of the Frankfurt School had thought so, and so did Guralnik. Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Frantz Fanon, and Judith Butler became as important to her thinking as Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion.
In 2001, Guralnik met Stephen Hartman, who edits the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues, at a conference in Miami, where he was presenting a paper on psychoanalysis and social class. Hartman was a fellow Dimen acolyte, and Guralnik was thrilled to find someone whose interests rhymed with hers. Over time, they joined up with other like-minded peers to form their own gang of six, an intellectual family who now vacation together and discuss their writing in biweekly Zoom sessions, and who have become part of the psychoanalytical establishment. Some of them even appear on the show’s new season, as part of a diverse group of analysts who advise Guralnik, giving viewers a sense of psychoanalysis as a field that looks and sounds like the world it interprets. “Orna’s work has been really important for people who want to bring an awareness of the political world into the consulting room,” Hartman told me.
For Guralnik, that awareness begins, necessarily, with herself. In a striking 2014 paper, “The Dead Baby,” she writes about treating a woman whose grandparents were Nazis, and the “burnt landscape” that stretched between German patient and Jewish analyst. On the show, Guralnik interrogates what it means, as a white analyst, to treat patients of color, and to be thrown into an entirely different relation to history and power. That Guralnik’s own sense of herself can change in response to who enters the room is, to her, one of the excitements of her work. “You have to account for where you’re speaking from,” she told me.
Guralnik’s “Couples Therapy” office is the Platonic ideal of a therapist’s consulting room: big and airy, filled with books, stylish baubles, and Moroccan-inspired textiles. Nico snoozes in a dog bed tucked underneath built-in shelves. The walls are upholstered with an expensive-looking ecru fabric. When Guralnik is ready to start a session, she turns over an hourglass and ceremonially slides open the frosted-glass door to the waiting room, where her patients have been marinating in front of an abstract painting that bears a notable resemblance to a Rorschach blot.
On a recent evening, I met Kriegman and Steinberg in Greenpoint, at the building where the show is produced. In the office, Guralnik greeted us, grinning. “When I first arrived here, I was, like, ‘Holy shit! They did it!’ ” she said. The show’s set designers had drawn inspiration from her actual office—even the distance between her chair and the patients’ couch is the same—and from mood-board images that she had compiled (a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright). But where were the cameras? In the light fixtures? Hidden in a potted plant?
“No one ever guesses accurately,” Kriegman said. “We went through a whole bunch of different ideas for how to conceal them, and ultimately settled on kind of the oldest trick in the book.” He turned to Steinberg. “Outside first?”
We passed through a door placed unobtrusively at the room’s far end. It took me a second to realize that what I had believed to be an ordinary office in a normal building was, in fact, a set, constructed within a vast warehouse. Kriegman introduced me to a man dressed in black pants, a black hoodie, black gloves, and a black mask: a camera operator, stationed outside what I had believed to be a solid wall. Now I could see that it had a wide rectangular window cut along its length. Through a contrivance of angled mirrors and canny lighting, the gap is undetectable from inside the room. This brain-bending optical illusion is what gives “Couples Therapy” its sumptuous look, with its eyeline shots and closeups that seem to capture patients’ every passing thought. Dressed like ninjas, the camera operators, working mere feet away from their subjects, must act like ninjas, too: no coughing, no sneezing, no vibrating phones.
Guralnik’s seven-fifteen session was about to start. The light filtering through the windows dimmed. (“Night mode,” another illusion.) I followed Kriegman and Steinberg upstairs, where the rest of the show’s crew was assembled, and we put on headphones and sat in front of four monitors. On one, the couple entered the waiting room. On another, Guralnik shuffled papers on her desk, took a deep breath, and moved to open the door.
An hour and twenty minutes later, the three of us trooped back into the office to debrief. The session had run long, but the couple wouldn’t be on the hook for the extra time; all participants are treated gratis.
“How are you feeling?” Kriegman asked.
“Very moved,” Guralnik said. The couple, who will appear on future episodes of the show, had hit upon a major breakthrough when their time was almost up. Something had come undammed; the momentum of the session had surged. “I love their emotional honesty. It’s just—wow.”
Kriegman asked me what I had thought. I had been moved as well, and also a little unnerved by my “Truman Show” vantage point up in the rafters. A number of former participants told me that, in the force field of Guralnik’s presence, the sense of being observed simply vanished. But I had got the impression, more than once, that the couple we had just seen were speaking not just to Guralnik but beyond her, to a broader audience of friends and even family members who they imagined—whether anxiously or eagerly—might watch the show.
The relationship between the patients and the viewing public is undeniably charged. Hannah Zeavin, a historian and the author of “The Distance Cure,” a recent study of teletherapy, told me that she sees Guralnik as “running and convening a kind of broadcast clinic.” Stationed on our own couches in our own homes, we tune in to gain insight into our own conflicts—or to project our frustrations and fantasies onto the figures exposing themselves to us. Some of the show’s couples, like Elaine and DeSean, fan favorites from the first season, take heart at the prospect of such an exchange. “Aside from us being able to save our marriage, the highlight would be if we could help someone,” Elaine told me. Elaine is Latina, and DeSean is Black; their exploration of their respective notions of racial identity constituted a revelatory thread in their treatment. “A lot of Latinos and Black people, they don’t believe in therapy,” Elaine said. “So it was, like, Let me show you that it can help you.”
The producers of “Couples Therapy” insist that what they have made is pure documentary, not a reality show. “It’s the ‘Star Trek’ prime directive: Do not interfere,” Despres told me. “We just happen to have set our duck blind in a place that’s rich with conflict and deep human emotion.” Of course, they have handpicked the ducks, selecting for diversity of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, as well as for the je ne sais quoi of watchability.
For the most part, viewers have responded to the show’s participants with good will. But anyone who appears as himself on a television show, even one as sensitively produced as “Couples Therapy,” runs the risk of being flattened into a character. During one of our conversations, I asked Guralnik about Mau, the show’s closest thing to a villain. When he appeared on the first season with his wife, Annie, Mau struck viewers as arrogant, noxious, and tyrannical. (He was also charismatic and soap-opera handsome, perfectly cast as a rogue.) He insisted that his needs were not merely straightforward but rational, normative. He considered sex to be a daily necessity. He had been displeased with a birthday orgy that Annie had planned for him and, after Annie said that he disrespected her, responded with sophistic, “I’m sorry if you feel that way” reasoning, resisting Guralnik’s interventions at every turn.
“I actually enjoyed working with him a lot, even though he wouldn’t enter my field,” Guralnik said. “I really respected him. People became kind of obsessed with ragging on him. It was a little upsetting, actually.”
Annie and Mau left after only eleven sessions, but the show’s viewers hadn’t finished with Mau—or he with them. He popped up on a Reddit thread called “Somebody smack Mau please” to confront the haters. “I was told that the purpose of the show was to demystify and destigmatize therapy,” he wrote. “To that end the seemingly purposeful editing, omissions and cuts reflect at least to me, the desire to push a narrative.” (He has since deleted his posts.) He had been trying, he went on, “to express complex and interconnected dynamics,” looking for underlying causes rather than for superficial symptoms. “The underlying cause is you’re a dick,” one Redditor responded. Another diagnosed him as having narcissistic personality disorder. It was upsetting. Whatever Mau’s sins, people seemed to have forgotten that this was a real person, with real troubles. The audience had demanded vulnerability, growth, and a satisfying finale. When it got intransigence, out came the pitchforks.
Guralnik’s actual office is in a converted factory building in Tribeca, in a suite shared with a trio of friends, Hartman among them. In April, I met her there, after her last patient of the day had left. She had just got screeners for the new season, and would soon be heading home to watch—only a few episodes for now, though her trust in the show’s producers is absolute. “How do they take what’s inside my brain—the movie that’s going on in there—and put it on the screen?” she marvelled.
Toward the end of the season, Guralnik tells Goldner that many of her patients are showing symptoms of “transference cure.” Knowing that their time with her is nearly up, they subconsciously try to prove to themselves, and to Guralnik, that they are “all better”; like the viewers, they crave the resolution of a well-plotted story. Still, the pressure applied by the show’s artificial constraints can produce real transformations, remarkable to witness. Couples who had begun by complaining of a sexual impasse, or wrestled with feelings of resentment and rage, or dealt with histories of infidelity and addiction ended up turning toward each other in relief, tenderness, even playfulness and joy. “Now that the treatment is ending, I notice myself feeling a mixture of sad and worried about letting them all go,” Guralnik tells Goldner. The best she can do is hope that the foundation they have built together holds.
Then, there were Ping and Will. After weeks of effort, Guralnik had at last managed to pierce Ping’s caustic veneer, revealing a person more sad and disappointed than furious—the neglected child hidden within. “She became so much softer over time,” Guralnik told me. And yet, released from the vortex of Ping’s spite, Will only receded further into himself. Their dance had come to an end, but they were struggling to find new steps. Concluding a relationship entails its own kind of transformation. If that was where Ping and Will were heading, Guralnik would have to find a way to shepherd them there.
Guralnik told me that she thinks of documentary and therapy as two sides of the same coin. “These are traditions that are after the same thing,” she said. “Everyone’s trying to grasp, What’s the actual story here? What’s the truth? What’s going on?” The answer, if there is one, implicates not just her patients but herself. “It’s made me accountable for my work,” she said. “You can’t hide behind jargon. You can’t refer to other people’s theories. You just have to say what you mean.” ♦
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