Week 2: Sunil - Frances - Jesse/Adele
Meet Edgar. He's Roy's dog. My best bet is that Edgar secretly watches In Treatment.
Paul asks his girlfriend if he has 'happiness deficit.' She hasn't seemed to notice what a miserable creature he is.
Frances is a hurricane of stories about her mother, her daughter, and her sister. The sister, you'll recall, was once a patient of Paul's and the entire session is a play of who is having a relationship with whom and of competing jealousies. Mom liked sister more, even from infancy, and now daughter likes her dying sister more. Frances is always on the outside, always the one abandoned by everyone else, and on cue, Paul recalls how the patient used to put lipstick on her dying mother until the very end. Oops, Paul got the wrong patient, it's a story that the sister had told him 18 years ago! One more jealousy. And Frances wants Paul to help rehearse her lines, like her ex-husband used to do. He refuses and she storms out. Somehow, he feels more like the patient in this episode as he fumbles to apologize and cover his mistakes. Ah, the episode started that way when he fell asleep and the patient's knocking woke him--and he lied to conceal that he'd been asleep.
Usually, I find it easy to criticize Paul as a therapist. In this episode, however, I felt like I could relate to his mistakes. We all have moments where we slip--forget the name of a patient's spouse, confuse a story with one another patient told...he's put on the spot, and somehow I know how he feels. Yes, Clink, I know, it's just a TV show and they're not real.
do you know any shrinks with cats or is it a requirement to have a dog in order to maintain your license? every shrink i know has a dog.
ReplyDeletehmm? i thought they were cat people
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