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Shrink Tank
PHOTO: RON & PATTY THOMAS / GETTY IMAGES Moreover, counsellors pop up regularly on radio and TV, appearing as characters in soap operas and films. Real-life therapists, too, are regulars on talk shows, providing quick on-air diagnoses or dishing out advice as guests spill secrets of drug abuse, family trauma or infidelity. For some years, huge audiences tuned in to watch Vulnerables, a prime-time TV show that followed young Argentines coming to grips with their problems in group sessions long before Dr. Phil and the era of confessional and reality TV in North America. Argentine practitioners delight in shimmying free from tiresome rules and restraints in this and all other walks of life. Many will make house calls for anyone too troubled or lazy to leave home. They’ll even come by boat should you live on the canal system at Tigre, where the Uruguay and Paraná rivers meet in a vast delta to form the mighty Río de la Plata. Shortly after arriving in the city, I made my own way to Villa Freud, not wanting to miss out on a vital part of the Argentine experience. By chance, my therapist’s office overlooks the city zoo. More than once, while recounting some half-forgotten childhood trauma, my words have been drowned out by the roar of a lion. I’m still working on the interpretation, but at times it seems like Nature is adding her own two cents. Each week, my session is preceded by a comical charade at the entrance to an eight-storey building stuffed with Jungians, Freudians, behaviouralists and cognitive psychologists. Clients buzz up to therapists who open the front door electronically. Yet with so many people arriving at roughly the same time, no one knows for whom the bell tolls. Each of us is aware the others have come for therapy, but no one wants to let on that we know. “Was that for you?” we ask innocently as the buzzer rings out once again. Argentines’ complexities – and complexes – are rooted, in part, in untrammelled 19th-century immigration. Descended from Spanish, Italian, Welsh, Basque, Yugoslav, German, Jewish and Arab immigrants, today’s |
