LAWRENCE RUBIN: I’m here today with Dr. Galit Atlas, a clinician, clinical supervisor, international lecturer, and author in Manhattan. Thank you so much for joining me today, Galit.
GALIT ATLAS: Hi Lawrence. I’m really happy to be here.
A Glimpse into Relational Psychoanalysis
LR: Do you identify as a psychoanalyst, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, or something different?
GA: Relational psychoanalysis is a contemporary framework that we like to call an evolution, not a revolution. Many of us, including myself, were raised on more traditional classical psychoanalysis, but then developed a way of thinking about psychoanalytic ideas by thinking about relationships and the therapeutic relationship.
In the more classical view, the analyst was the authority, an observer, sometimes who was seen as the healthy one, so to speak. The patient’s mind was on the couch. Relational psychoanalysis breaks that binary. It’s much more humanistic as it meets the patient where they are, and the analysis is more of a collaboration. The analyst and the patient are engaging in a dialogue that has two subjectivities; they are two humans with different roles and responsibilities. We break some binaries and power dynamics by bringing the human into the room.
LR: So, in the traditional psychoanalytic model, the therapist is the authority who focuses exclusively on one subjectivity, which is the patient’s intrapsychic world. What do you mean when you say that the relational psychoanalyst is working with two subjectivities?
GA: I mean that not only the patient, but also the analyst’s subjectivity (physical, psychological, or spiritual being) and the patient’s perception of the therapist, always emerge in the here-and-now setting of the treatment. The dialogue between the two is the focus of the psychotherapy. Relational psychoanalysis developed in the 80s (primarily at the NYU postdoctoral program) and was a synthesis of object relations theory and interpersonal psychoanalysis. It is a psychoanalytic theory that emphasizes the here-and-now as well as feminist, queer, gender, and other social, cross-cultural, and attachment theories. This was an evolution from the more fantasy-based, intrapsychic focus.
LR: Irvin Yalom talks about working in the here-and-now; the patient’s experience in the therapeutic moment being the ‘here,’ and their intersubjectivity being the ‘now.’ He uses this microcosm as a template or learning space for healing their relational functioning outside of therapy. Is this similar to what happens in relational psychoanalysis?
GA: To some degree. Yalom is an amazing example of someone who uses these ideas of how we sit with the patient and think about the here-and-now, and about what happens between the patient and the analyst.
I don’t know that I would use the words teach or learn, because what we do is much more experiential. I think one of the ways that contemporary psychoanalysis has changed, for example, is that we work with what we call ‘enactments.’ In 2016, Lewis Aron and I wrote a book called Dramatic Dialogues, focused on enactments and generative enactment, as a form of therapeutic action (the thing that promotes change). Traditionally, analysts thought about enactment as something that undermines the therapy and damages the relationship between patient and therapist.
Now, we think of it as something that is far more generative, something we don’t just resolve but can sit with and really understand and get something out of. This is similar to the way that we used to think about countertransference as an interruption to therapy, but now understand it as part of the therapeutic relationship that we can actually use and grow and learn from. In this context, enactments, to some degree, are inevitable and they are interpersonal in the sense that within them, two people participate.
LR: In family or couples therapy, enactment happens when the client demonstrates or plays out their interpersonal and intrapsychic dynamics right in the room. Is this the same or similar to the enactment that you’re referring to?
GA: I don’t know that I can differentiate between the two. I think that we are talking about the way that we live relationally, the way we co-create our shared experiences. It’s not only that therapy is a laboratory for the patient to learn their relational patterns. Whenever there are two people in the room, there is a co-creation that both are bringing into the dynamic.
So, part of it is learning about the patient’s relational dynamic, and part of it is analyzing what’s going on with this specific patient, and how that’s similar or different from other relationships in their life. One of the metaphors I like to use for therapy is ‘cooking together’ which is what I write about in Come Closer. Cooking together is about me, as the therapist, bringing ingredients and you, as the patient, bringing ingredients, rather than the therapist acting as the chef supplying the ingredients and telling you how to cook, or cooking for you.
LR: Is the primary presumption or hope that as a result of this interpersonal dynamic, the client will grow in their relationships outside of therapy?
GA: Yes, relationally and also as a person.
Long Term Therapy in a Short-Term World
LR: In this era of quick fixes and formulaic therapies, why is it important to do longer term work with some of your patients?
GA: First of all, I think that there is no doubt that long-term work is a privilege, not just for financial reasons, but because it’s slower and doesn’t always provide urgent help. On the other hand, it’s a different kind of work, especially now, when the world is so fast, when we rarely take a moment to pause, and so many people feel so alone, long term relationships and long term work are more important than ever. And the truth is that a long treatment goes deeper and deeper over time. We uncover layer after layer.
Long term does not necessarily mean that I have people with me for many, many, many years. Some people take breaks and come back. I become a person in their lives. I become a person who knows them very, very well, who follows their life. That’s the main reason why, by the way, when younger therapists ask, “Okay, after two years of ending analysis, could I become the patient’s friend? To me, that’s the biggest loss anyone can experience as a patient; they lose their therapist forever. Long-term therapy is the work I like most because it allows me to be really close to people and to dive very, very deep, which is the water I love the most—the deep water.
LR: When I think of privilege, I think financial, which comes with certain freedoms not available to all people. If this is indeed the way you’re referring to privilege, does it come with specific baggage, or unique psychological issues?
GA: I don’t actually talk only about financial privilege. I think that to be healthy is a privilege, to not be in crisis. And these days, that’s for sure a huge privilege. If you are in crisis, you need immediate help, and long-term analysis is usually not the quick answer. I sometimes think about it like going to the gym. If you have health issues, you need something really specific, not just the everyday long-term strength exercise. When you feel better, you have the privilege to dive deep, examine yourself, ask difficult questions. Some people go to the gym all their lives, the gym of therapy.
Come Closer, Go Deeper
LR: Your latest book, Come Closer, centers around your work with six adult clients, each of whom struggles in the face of persistent childhood wounds. What inspired you to tell the stories?
GA: After I published Emotional Inheritance, I was surprised by how many people were interested in what happens in therapy and in the therapy room. What I wanted was to tell more detailed stories about the work by communicating the nuances of how I think and of the therapeutic relationship.
I think what I really wanted to do was to take people even deeper into the therapeutic process, to the messiness of it, to the nuances of it, to the hope, to the resistance. There is much more resistance in this book, and rough moments, around the trust issues that could happen between analyst and therapist, and the way that people can activate us or bring our own history to the surface. So, I really wanted to take people into the truth of this process.
LR: You talked about the beauty and power of long-term therapy which allows you to take a deeper dive into the work, into people, and how that compelled you to write a book about the process. And because this book also takes a deeper dive into you because of your frequent self-disclosure, we learn almost as much about you as we do about some of the clients. The therapist in me wonders what was changing or evolving in you as a person that compelled you to take a deeper dive and then put it out there in a book?
GA: You know, maybe it’s simple. I think I was more brave. Emotional Inheritance was my first book for the public, and I was much more frightened and much more ambivalent. Maybe I was concerned about going out into the bigger world, beyond the analysts, and talking to people who are not analysts. I had previously written three books for analysts, so it was very different going out and talking to a broader group of people.
Since then, I have had hundreds of conversations all around the world. Emotional Inheritance was translated into 28 languages and I’ve spoken with people from almost every country where it was published. This time, I felt a little more brave to say, “You know what, let me show you more of this work, more of the messiness of this work, and more of myself.
LR: What is it about this expression of your bravery that other people in your life have noticed? How do you think your bravery manifests in the eyes of the people who know you well and love you outside of the room?
GA: It’s a really good question, because I thought you were going to ask me how it impacted the people in the room. I think that the people in my life knew what I was doing, especially my children, who read the book. I have three children; my oldest are 20-year-old twins and my youngest is 15. When my son read it, he said, “You know, I really love this book, but I need to make believe it’s not you who wrote it—not because of the self-disclosure— because of the intimacy and intensity of the stories.” The self-disclosure was not new to them. I am a self-disclosing parent.
LR: The idea of the bravery and self-expansion really strikes me. Did writing this book change you?
GA: No doubt. It was really difficult to write this book. It was really difficult, and it evolved me because I did something that was so difficult for me. Each chapter on each child that I was writing about made me take a real dive into myself. I had dreams about it at night. I had fantasies during the day. I really immersed myself in it and reprocessed things about my own history. An interesting fact is that while I obviously disguised the patients by fictionalizing elements of their stories, I later realized that often, without awareness, I disguised them with pieces of my own history.
After I sent it to my sister to read, she said, “Wow, you wrote about our childhood!” I thought, “Oh, how interesting, she’s right.” Everything was spiced with pieces of my life.
LR: Was writing the book a therapeutic journey for you?
GA: Definitely! It was, in a few ways, because writing is a form of free association. I don’t think about what I write as I’m doing it. Then comes the therapist in me that analyzes the text as I edit it. In some ways, it’s so parallel to psychoanalysis. The patient/writer is on the couch, free associating and I analyze that process. I’m making things that were unconscious in my writing more conscious and with more explicit connections and explanations for the reader, the way I do in analysis with a patient.
LR: You said that in writing and then sharing the book, your bravery quotient increased.
GA: Yes, in two different ways: in writing it and then sharing it. When I write, I don’t actually think about the reader because it would paralyze me. And then when I delivered it to my publisher, I thought to myself, “Oh no, what was I thinking? They’re actually going to publish it. Are you sure it’s okay?”
LR: I’ll be presumptuous here by asking you, what unspoken question do you think you might have really been asking your publisher when you said, “is it really okay?”
GA: It means, are people going to love me? To be honest with you, it’s like getting out of the house without looking in the mirror, but at the same time, feeling like this is what I want to do. And then looking at a person that I don’t know, or at a friend or a partner, and asking, “Are you sure it’s okay…how do I look?”
LR: Like Sally Field winning the Oscar, and saying, “You like me, I can’t deny the fact, you like me!”
GA: It’s feeling like a child who shows their parent something they did or that walks in the world asking people, “Do you, do you love me?” That’s a little bit embarrassing to admit, but you asked the question and I hope that is okay to say. So, I guess, going back to your question about bravery, I didn’t think about what other people might think about me when I wrote it.
I think that to some degree, it would be a lie to say I don’t need validation. If you won’t validate me, I’ll be okay, but deep inside, I hope you will. I wrote a book, and I am really curious what people think about it. Really, I mean, there are only a few people so far who have read it. You’re one of them, right? And I really have no idea what people would think or feel. And that is a frightening and tender moment.
LR: If the sales are flat and the interviews go away, would it have still been a wonderful experience for you? Will you still stand bravely behind the work and say, ‘This was good, I am good enough.’
GA: Probably. I’m just going to keep doing my next thing, you know, that’s the truth. It’s not that I would sit and tell myself, ‘I am good,’ because to some degree I feel like life is a process, and I am not somebody who is usually really stuck on things. If people don’t love it, it’s going to hurt, but I will keep going.
LR: You said a little bit ago that in a way, your experience was like a child seeking validation. Do you identify with any one of the particular childhood types that you talk about in your book?
GA: I would say I identify with all of them; some of them more and some of them less. The one that I identify with the least is probably the ‘chosen child.’ But so many of my patients are the chosen child and many readers will probably identify with that child. I think that most people will find themselves in at least one, but maybe more, because there is never only one child inside us.
Privilege Honoring My Parents
LR: A Narrative Therapy-type question comes to mind here. Can you think of someone in your life who would not have been surprised to know of your journey to adulthood, to a successful career as an author and analyst?
GA: Tell me more about this question.
LR: It’s related to the Narrative technique of re-membering where you’re connecting the client with some of the formative, powerful, positive voices in their lives that they carry with them as they build the story of their life.
GA: I write a lot about my father in this book. I wouldn’t think that he predicted it, because we come from a family in which my parents were both immigrants. They wouldn’t have predicted something like that. My father graduated from only sixth grade. He doesn’t speak English. He doesn’t read English. In our family, people were supposed to make a living and be good people and not complain too much.
LR: Just live! Don’t spend too much time thinking about it. You, in contrast, have built your career on thinking about living.
GA: That’s where the word privilege comes back again, because I’m privileged to have the ability to sit and think about these things, because my parents could not.
LR: In a way, your success validates them. Because don’t parents want the best for their children; more than they had or could accomplish in their own lifetimes? I don’t imagine from what you’re saying that your parents would describe themselves as privileged.
GA: Absolutely not. They don’t even now. In some ways, I am looking at them and thinking about everything they were able to give me, including education that allowed me to do something they did not. And it’s funny, you know, my parents are not ‘book people.’ They’re definitely not ‘therapy people.’ When my mom went to a store or the airport when my book, Emotional Inheritance, came out, she would say to the salesperson, “This is my daughter, you know.” and she would text me and say, “The person liked the book.”
LR: In a sense, you honor your parents and that’s a beautiful thing. Maybe their privilege was in giving their life over to raising children and getting the work done. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the ethos here where doing is valued over being.
GA: My dad always wanted to be able to study more. He did feel like he could do more. And he did a lot in his life because he survived a lot of big things, including immigration from Iran. But like my parents, a lot of immigrant parents want their children to do more than they did.
It’s funny you were saying that I honored my parents? I’ll tell you something interesting. When I started writing about psychoanalysis, most of my writing was focused on sexuality, and I was teaching the class on sexuality. Part of what allowed me to do that is that my parents don’t read English, so there was no way they knew what I was doing. When I wrote Emotional Inheritance, I didn’t know that it would be translated, and when I heard that my parents would be able to read it, especially my mom, who I mentioned a lot in that book, I called her. I said, “Listen, I need to tell you something!” I felt a little guilty because I don’t only talk about the good things about my parents. I also talked about how embarrassed I used to be by them and how hard it was for me to have a dad who was very, very different from the other dads. And I write in the book exactly what used to embarrass me about him. So, when you said ‘honored,’ I’m glad you feel that way.
From Couch to World Stage
LR: Some readers might wonder about the empirical basis for the typology of childhood wounds?
GA: My empirical ground is my practice. I’m a clinician. I sit with patients, and I lean on psychoanalytic theory. This book is about the unconscious. It’s about the main wounds that I see in therapy. And, you know, you could look at neglect, abuse, humiliation, loss, the way child can be used to take care of their parents’ needs. You would see that these wounds overlap with each other and they each have elements of the other wounds in them.
These six types are not like the map of your life or astrology, but I’m using analytic theory, both classical and contemporary to think about these experiences and their impact on our adult love life. I think my most theoretical chapter is the one on the guilty child. Like this sneaky chef who cooks for kids and sneaks vegetables into their meals, I sneaked the theory into an intense story about infidelity. I put there a lot of Freudian theory about guilt and punishment, about how we sit with ancient guilt and how guilt serves as a defense.
LR: In reading the book, I was struck by the relationship between the very private, intimate work of therapy and the very public work of sharing it, and the bravery on your part of stepping out of the very private and sacrosanct space of analysis.
GA: The analytic police is a very, very serious police. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them. I had to not feel like the guilty child by allowing people to really look at what I was doing. I actually think about Freud’s concept of ‘wild analysis,’ where he warned people not to use psychoanalytic ideas outside of the analytic setting, which is exactly what I do.
In retrospect, of course, his was a self-serving warning, a warning that said the general public, the layperson, should not use psychoanalysis outside of the therapy room. Psychoanalytic knowledge belonged to the doctors back then. There were (are) those who know and there are those who do not. Coming from Feminist Theory, I’m thinking, fuck that! I’m going to break that binary. I’m going to break that rule. I am going to bring psychoanalytic knowledge to the public, do exactly what Freud warned us against.
LR: This makes me wonder if there’s just a tad bit of subversiveness in you, a little bit of a rebellious child?
GA: I’m absolutely the rebellious child. I should have added that to say. But I’m also the invisible child. The invisible child in the book is the rebellious.
LR: No longer are you invisible, Galit. Is your book for novice therapists, experienced therapists, master therapists, and what do you want people to take from it?
GA: I just read Adam Phillips’ new book, The Life You Want, where he said, referring to Winnicott, that patients will take whatever they need from the chaos we give them. I love that because as therapists we have such an intense need to give our patients, and to be valued, “because I give you something valuable, so you should be grateful to me,” which of course I say with a sarcastic tone. In fact, what we find in therapy is that people take whatever they want or need. Sometimes, that which we don’t think is important is valuable to them. And what you think is really important means nothing to them. It’s humbling. I’m thinking, ‘Here, I give you this, and you do whatever you want with it.’
LR: I think that will be a perfect place to stop with the hope that our readers will take a lot from our conversation. Thank you so much, Galit.
GA: Thank you very much, Lawrence.
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