Date: Fri 10-Apr-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: SUZANN

Quick Words:

health-shrinks-Miller

Full Text:

Therapy: Overcoming Resistance In The Suburbs

(with cut)

BY SUZANNA NYBERG

Seeing a good licensed therapist is just as important as getting a regular car

tune-up or mending a hole in the roof.

Newtown residents Alan and Naomi Miller, a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist

respectively, have discovered that while people in Manhattan readily turn to

them for help, suburban residents are more reluctant to do so. The Millers

have practices in both New York and Newtown.

Alan Miller attributes the phenomenon to the cultural differences between an

urban center, one that attracts large numbers of single people who tend to

look past one another, and a community where extended families engage in

conversations that appears to make therapy unnecessary. "Therapy is not really

known here," Alan said.

Yet, the couple maintains, the problems that plague city dwellers also afflict

suburban residents and therapy can do things for the individual or family that

friends and relatives cannot.

Family members and friends are often too closely enmeshed in these patterns,

and indeed may contribute to them, to maintain a neutral stance. Someone who

marries essentially the same person three times, suggests Naomi, is on a track

from which they need to escape. The family that thrives on biting sarcasm,

said Alan, will be of little help to someone dealing with intimacy issues.

Trained to listen and trained to understand the workings of the human mind,

the therapist helps one become aware of patterns that continually seem to play

themselves out during the course of a life.

Resistance to therapy may be part of an Anglo heritage. Alan Miller remembers

his early years in England, where visiting a therapist was seen as the mark of

Cain. "Only under the duress of a schizophrenic breakdown was therapy seen as

acceptable," he said. "Otherwise one was expected to pull oneself together."

Noting the growth of psychopharmacology, the couple affirms that sophisticated

drugs can bring alleviation to patients. Nonetheless, a drug simply rids one

of symptoms; it does not induce a cure. "If you pull up a weed it will grow

back again unless you get to the root of the problem," said Naomi. "A

therapist helps someone to work through the causes of a depression; a pill

merely rids one of symptoms."

The Millers believe that many medical physicians are too quick to prescribe

drugs and that many patients are too quick to take them. "We live in a

quick-fix, instant gratification society," said Naomi.

Therapy is not an instant fix, but it can be a long-term one. Alan Miller

insists that talking can have the same physiological effect on the brain that

Prozac can. Just as Prozac changes the neurotransmitters, or the chemistry of

the brain, so talking alters these levels. "Of course, there are people who do

need medication to stabilize the brain," Alan said, "but talking can produce

emotional and physiological results."

Still, talking, the Millers readily acknowledge, is an often expensive

process, one that HMOs do not readily cover. "HMOs want the quick fix and only

offer patients ten sessions," said Naomi, noting that two and a half months is

simply not enough time to do the real work of therapy.

And therapy is work, not a coffee klatch and not a tea party. "It takes real

ego strength to go through these sessions," said Alan. People have been known

to leave them teary-eyed and distraught.

The Millers practice together. Although their training has been quite

different -- Naomi is a psychotherapist and her husband is a psychoanalyst --

they both maintain that the unconscious is the key to understanding human

behavior.

"The presence of the unconscious permeates much of our emotional life," said

Naomi. "Its very unconsciousness get us into trouble because we're not aware

of what we're doing."

Initially, Naomi's work explored the changing American family. Her doctoral

dissertation, later published under the title "Single Parents By Choice,"

explores why more people, especially women, are choosing to become single

parents. Naomi discovered that it was largely women, overeducated and

dissatisfied with their romantic attachments, who opted to conceive or adopt

on their own.

Naomi's work has moved into the area of eating disorders, a field that she has

discovered crosses gender boundaries and transcends ethnic and class lines.

"This is no more the rich or middle class white woman's disease," she said,

referring to anorexia nervosa and bulimia. As other groups become acculturated

to mainstream American society, and begin to embrace the aspirations of that

society, they also suffer from its maladies. Beauty defined as thinness is

difficult to achieve, stresses Naomi, and women, who historically have been

identified with their bodies in ways men have not, will express their

unhappiness through their bodies either by not eating or by not digesting what

they have consumed.

Freudian Techniques

As a Freudian analyst, Alan insists that certain techniques, such as lying on

the couch and not facing the analyst, are essential for the unconscious to

operate and to come to the fore through language. Only by understanding how

the patient's unconscious works can the analyst be of help.

"Free association, like the novels of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, allows

the mind to meander and move down tracks it could not in a structured

dialogue," he said, referring to the Freudian technique where one simply says

what comes to mind. Alan, in turn, has been trained to recognize that the

words someone uses and the way in which they are used have symbolic meaning

and reveal hidden patterns.

Alan grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family, one where his father and brothers

were rabbis. "A Jewish background makes one a natural for psychoanalysis," he

said, noting that nearly all the early analysts were Jews. Arguably, said

Alan, only a Jew, Freud, could have discovered the techniques of

psychoanalysis.

Judaism bears a marked similarity to psychoanalysis in that both insist on the

primacy of language to make meaning of the world. Although not the first

culture to have this insight, the early Jews, said Alan, recognized that

creation takes place through words. "Language creates reality and the world is

accessible to us only through language," Alan said.

Multiplicity Of Meanings

A literature professor, Alan brings a psychoanalytic approach to texts and

into the classroom. An admirer of the post-modern novel, he values James

Joyce's Ulysses and Dubliners for their multiplicity of meanings. The 19th

century novel lacked such multiplicity; it was linear and chronological; every

word Dickens used pointed to the thing to which he referred. But, as Alan

notes, when Joyce wrote 18 chapters in 18 different styles, he proved that

there is no single way to say anything. "A different writing style, a

different way of using language, creates an entirely different textual

experience," Alan said.

For Alan Miller the good teacher is not a lecturer. "Teaching," he said, "is

not dropping pellets of information into gaping beaks." The good teacher is

like the therapist and the classroom can become a psychotherapeutic setting.

To that end, Alan is working with what he calls mythopoetic therapy, one where

characters in a text can speak across the centuries to their readers and allow

them to work through issues.

Whether or not one enters therapy, the Millers believe that one should live

life under constant self-scrutiny. Only through learning about one's self,

which at bottom is what the therapeutic encounter is all about, can one ever

change.