The gadfly

Bullshit!

This is Hank, my panic therapist. We've collaborated for almost four weeks and in that time forged a healthy relationship based on me telling him what I believe and him responding, "bullshit." At the focus of our work is a technique called cognitive-behavioral therapy, whose guiding principle seems to be that beliefs drive behaviors (not controversial), which in turn control physiological states of arousal (also not controversial); its aim is to sever the bonds between negative or self-defeating beliefs and the behaviors, and thus the states of arousal, they promote. Easier said than done. We also supplement this technique with two others, mindfulness, which is basically zen-for-dummies, and "rational emotive behavior therapy," which I can't describe for you because I don't know what it is, except that it involves making your moods and feelings wicked smart.

You can practice these techniques with any psychologist; they're well studied and mostly clinically effective. And for the therapist, easy to administer, because they share common assumptions about human thoughts and behaviors that are 1) pretty obvious and 2) probably wrong. So if you're the pilot on spaceship mental health, everything you do makes sense to me, the passenger, because it's expected, and, with the destination entirely undefined, you can't really crash anywhere or miss the airport; there isn't one. Which is why Woody Allen has been in psychoanalysis for four decades and hasn't improved. Therapy is a box with no bottom.

Unless your therapist is Socrates. Mine, who is, calls his method ''disputational," which means that he carefully elicits my most guarded, or potent, or compelling beliefs and calls them bullshit. His exact word. "Nick, that's bullshit." Let me explain:

After talking with me for a few sessions, all the while crafting his Socratic snare, and echoing my attitude back to me, to confirm that we were in agreement about what my beliefs (which drive my behavior, which influence my states of arousal, e.g. panic) actually mean, he very gradually but persistently applied to them "the downward arrow"--a reductionist method to expose underlying assumptions that allow us to hold beliefs that contradict the facts, imperil us somehow, or otherwise don't fly. True to its advertisement, the process is Socratic disputation.

Eventually with a belief, after a lot of linguistic sparring, we reach a point where the arrow hits bedrock; here can we build. But therein lies the snare, for the purpose isn't to build on the bedrock of the belief, it's to dig around in it with your hands until you're convinced that this isn't a solid foundation on which to build anything. So you move the whole shebang to another location, where the ground is firmer, and there you build.

A lot of people can, and do, swing this kind of Nietzschean hammer. Most who have the strength and skill to wield it do so recklessly, without any kind of care for the chaos that comes with unbuilding any structure, civic or psychological; they're simply too pleased with their own prowess to notice. Others are too weak or indifferent even to try. But when Hank works so patiently to lead us down to the very bottom of my being, where all my panic and pain and loneliness justify themselves in abstruse philosophical truths and moral laws; and there we linger, appraising the environment, me uncomfortable even to be there, despite resting at the primal layer, and he horrified, like some poor Marlowe lost in the jungle of another man's madness, he lets me sit a while, looking over the landscape, feeling its poverty. Knowing its falseness. Then, when he knows I've understood, and that my faithfulness to these ruins, however much I love them and hurt for them, however long they'll enchant me, is shattered, then he speaks for us both: "it's all bullshit."

Hank is a keen observer, a quick improviser, an eager arguer. He's very well educated, soft-spoken but blunt, meticulously prepares our sessions, checks in on me in his off-hours just to monitor my progress, encourages me, strongly, to challenge myself, to mock my fears, to inhabit the person he's convinced that I am but that I, through years of self-doubt and self-pity, have convinced myself that I'm not. (I deliberately didn't write become, because, as he tells me, and as zen confirms for me, I already am that person. There's nothing, or rather nobody, to "become.") And, most impressive of all to me, he swings the hammer after I've already lifted it for him. He swings it hard, accurate, total. And when he tells me that my beliefs are bullshit--all my vitriol about nature's cruelty, about being created only to be destroyed, about loneliness as the kindest form of compassion, about pain as the noblest condition and self-destruction as the truest teacher--and my arch-belief, the loveliest and ugliest of all, that nothing is--he does so not because, in some logical sense, they are faulty, although, as I've recently come to know, they certainly are, but rather because, as he explains, "they don't let you live." If I could prove by some cryptic Anselmian device that these beliefs are, eternally and infallibly, true, I might have a legitimate counterargument to Hank's challenge. But I can't. I don't know that they're true. Because I'm bookish, passingly clever, gifted at certain styles of philosophical rumor, ethically serious, and tormented, like Orestes, by fears and furies, for years I assumed they were. They aren't; they're merely possible. (This is not a reason not to believe them.) But an unmendable gap separates the realms of human experience, which is basically moral and uncertain, from the existentially true, which is, for all human purposes, fairy dust. Hank's much appreciated, much repeated objection to all my loathsome, abjected nihilism comes not from his rational disgust for it but from his wily deduction that, with no proof of its validity, I have no reason to practice a life philosophy that rots and obscures the very life it's intended to nourish and make plain. Why not explore another one? Maybe one better suited to your goals? Your personality? To what you love?

It takes an exceptional man to tell the client who comes to him for support, who teeters on the razor's edge of a self-warring mind, who more than anything needs to be told sane, single things, that everything in this fragile mind is a lie. And hateful. And unnecessary. And it takes an even more exceptional man to take that risk out of respect for the soul that suffers. My therapist is a good man, and I mean good also in the ancient Socratic sense: complete, uncomplicated, uncorrupted. His challenge to me is a generous one, an act of kindness and sympathy, which he asks me to accept not for his sake, or even for mine, but for both our sakes; that I may become something more than a liverish Henry James mulch or the diseased hepatic in a Dostoevsky novella, and that he may be permitted to be helpful--barring the unlikely chance that a horde of Athenians arrests, condemns, and sentences him to exile or suicide, in which case, I'll be there to record his last words, like a good little Plato.