our assumption, our fantasy, in psychoanalysis has been that we’re going to process, we’re going to grow, and we’re going to level things out so that we don’t have these very strong, disturbing emotions and events.
this is an enormous assumption in our culture now, that anger, rage, and heartbreak are supposed to be processed. A word I hate, by the way—processed psyche, like processed food. Another kind of processing is really hard. This is the stuff of art. Rainer Maria Rilke said about therapy, “I don’t want the demons taken away because they’re going to take my angels too.”
Wounds and scars are the stuff of character.
“How does therapy really work?”: insight, understanding, recollection, owning your part of it, how you brought it about, seeing patterns, abreacting, means “getting it out”—I’m not sure that any of these working-through modes, which are supposed to be the modes of psychological processing, really do it. What I think does it is the six months, or six years, of grief. The mourning. The long ritual of therapy
Talking is not processing. Because you’re not taking it and purifying it and making it into something else. You’re not transforming. Processing implies, “I can take this ore and make it into a plow. I can make it into a tool by which I can live more efficiently.” And it implies that somehow, magically, if I do that then the ore isn’t there anymore. What happens, you either try to get rid of it or make it useful. So it’s exploitative.