In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby, a self-made millionaire aspires to win the heart of a woman he once loved. Daisy is married and unavailable, but Gatsby has idealized her for years. He knows that she appreciates the outward signs of wealth, fame, and power—things that confer status—so he reinvents himself as a wealthy tycoon, hoping this will impress her enough to make her value him. He benefits from this quest because it focuses his energies, motivates him, and brings him the clothes and cars and cash that sometimes make life fun and exciting. Gatsby makes his money by bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, when it was illegal and therefore risky and lucrative. Alcohol has destroyed myriad lives, but in moderation it has been part of the good life in many cultures for millennia; one could argue that Gatsby’s path to success was not so antisocial as to be self-discrediting—he is no Al Capone, and no Macbeth. But such success itself poses a problem: if it all works out, and Daisy is won over by glitz and bling, how will he know she really loves him? Gatsby is a man, not a Rolls Royce or a bank account.

The book ends in tragedy, when Gatsby is killed by another character. But had he lived, one possible outcome would’ve been a temporary affair between him and Daisy, followed by some kind of disillusion. Either she would reject him and stay with her boorish husband (Tom), or Gatsby would tire of her upon realizing that she loves his status, his money, his power, more than she is capable of loving him. Such disillusion would be agonizing, but it would do him a world of good. Disillusion is the way out of illusion, and some illusions can be extremely hard to escape because their logic has a seamless continuity that conceals the exits. Of course I want to live in a giant mansion; of course more money is always better, ad infinitum; of course a higher status will enhance my success at anything I could possibly undertake in life, including finding a mate. It is because these assumptions seem so obvious that their fundamental error is so hard to detect.

Freud taught that the purpose of psychoanalysis (it applies to mental health treatment in general) was to help people to love and to work. The idea that more-is-always-better has serious drawbacks on both sides. In work, it threatens what we call “work/life balance” and risks work addiction, in pursuit of ever-more earnings, far beyond our ability to enjoy them. In love, more-is-better can mean either of two troublesome things. It can mean I am stuck in a compulsive accumulation of temporary partners, building my “body count” without checking its effect on my wellbeing. Or it can mean I am doing what Gatsby did, pursuing just one partner, but using means that are accumulation-based: if I have more status than these competitors, then I’ll win the competition for her. What gets neglected here is the way my toys and my success can upstage the merely human, unique individual I actually am. I also may fail to notice how much my attention is diverted from my “Daisy” onto the men with whom I’m busy competing, jockeying for position, comparing the size of our houses (paging Dr. Freud), etc.

If such a disillusioned Gatsby can survive the disillusioning experience, he may win the real prize, one more valuable than the solid gold toilet, or the victory over his male rivals, or even Daisy herself. The real prize is a mature freedom: freedom from the endless compulsion to accumulate ever more status and wealth, and with it, freedom from the need to woo the kind of person who remains focused on that kind of stuff. Whoever escapes from the prison-house of status-seeking gets to love and be loved by people who are also free of it.

There are plenty of good reasons for a couple to want lots of money, or for a single person to want wealth in an eventual marriage. Raising kids, running a small business, keeping a theater afloat, endowing a community’s nonprofit, all these require plenty of cash and become impossible if there isn’t enough, and the list goes on and on. What’s not so good, is chasing wealth as a substitute for self-love, and hoping that the display of this wealth will attract somebody else who has the same confusion between wealth and love.

People who are unconsciously afraid of love might not be able to tolerate getting the love they really need, but do not want. So they collude with similar people to form relatively loveless couples, held together not by deep affection, acceptance, and desire, but by the glue of status, purchasing power, and the conspicuous display of resources. Real love is associated with eventual death, because if I fall in love with one unique, mortal, individual person, I will one day lose them and it will matter to me. If I marry someone I really love who really loves me, I move forward on what Kierkegaard called “the stages on life’s way,” and this means leaving youth behind and getting closer to the end. Focusing on status and trophies can instead create the illusion that I am outside of the arc of the life cycle, that my world is one of endless youthful playdates and context-free experience, often of a dissociative, thrill-seeking kind. Diverse pleasures have their place, and there’s nothing inherently bad about thrills. But it’s worth checking: am I doing this as a defense against something else? Might I be partying quite this much because I am avoiding something?

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

The sadomasochistic contract goes like this. The sadist says, I can do whatever I want to you, because I know you won’t leave me. The masochist says, You can do whatever you want to me, as long as you don’t leave me.

In the kink world, “masochism” means getting pleasure from pain. But in the mental health world, it refers to something very different: a chronic, unconscious need for punishment, and all the things a person does to indulge that need—unconsciously motivated mistakes, losses, self-defeating behaviors, regrettable remarks, anything that will trigger an authoritarian response from within, and/or a retaliation from without.

Kink is not to be pathologized, and people who enjoy it don’t have to fear that therapy will take their kinks away. But kink should be a free choice, an informed and deliberate selection among the options for a healthy sex life. Your submissiveness or sexual masochism might be an unchosen temperament that you discover inside yourself, but the erotic exercise of it ought to be a free choice.

Masochism outside the sexual sphere—an ongoing, dynamic need for punitive suffering—generally has no redeeming value. You might suppose it serves as a spur to achievement, but that’s just compulsion, not the voluntary embrace of work for work’s own intrinsic goodness. You might use it to assuage guilt, but that reinforces the guilt without addressing its irrational roots and its basic injustice. You might use punishment to stay connected to a parent whose love was autocratic and severe in a way that felt reassuringly firm and unmistakably present, but that prevents a healthier form of love from developing in its place. The need for punishment is a relic of old defenses that have come to cost more than they’re worth.

The way out involves correctly labeling the masochism as an old solution to an old problem, reinforcing its connection to the past that explains it. That was then; this is now. So there’s a new opportunity to settle things differently, in a less moralistic way, geared to the facts at hand, not to the old situation and its more primitive world of tyranny and hierarchy. Long ago, that world taught you that a cosmic balance would only be maintained if you contributed sacrifices to it, in the form of large chunks of your personal pain. This has long since turned out not to be true, but the masochism somehow got locked-in by a hidden contract that runs on misguided loyalty to the child parts-of-self that first signed onto it. It may also be enforced by an equally unconscious hope of eventual rescue-from-outside, so that breaking the contract (giving up the need for punishment) is linked to despair about rescue and guilt about disloyalty.

The present masochism gets dissolved by reaching for the past, where the explanation lies, and the future, where the possibilities are. In the future, I will one day die—and my renewed awareness of this finitude wakes me to the fact that I might-as-well let go of the old need for suffering. Also in the future, but closer to the present, are all the nights and days I still might enjoy if I can dissolve the masochistic pact in a solvent stronger than fear, which is love. I am more loyal to my child self, not less loyal, if I dissolve the contract I signed as a little kid and replace it with loving nurturance and protection, the free gift from my adult self to this terrified inner kid. The long-awaited rescue from outside is really a rescue from inside, because it’s from a part of me—but it is from outside the child part, as its source is the grown-up self I have become in the long meantime. Therapy helps to direct resources to this loving adult self, rather than let those current resources get routinely burned-up in the service of the old masochistic machinery. The well-resourced adult self is better able to bestow those resources, as loving-kindness, onto the child parts of you that need it most.

People cheat when they feel cheated. They lie when they feel lied to, and they steal when they feel robbed. Some of that springs from a need for cosmic balance, where I pay-forward whatever I suffered that should not have been my fate. But some of it is a communication, where my behavior is meant to inscribe on the walls of the universe: this thing I do to others, is what was done to me.

Compulsive shoplifting, for example, can be a kind of broadcast to the world, silently announcing that I have been deprived of my due. Typically, the stolen good was not a material object but a form of experience, some crucial, human relational need that I now despair of ever meeting. Why the despair? Because of too many failed attempts to get hold of that primal good, and because the critical period has passed, in which the needful thing could have found its mark, by meaning just what I needed it to mean: that I am a good-enough person, in a good-enough world. If I can believe this belief, then a good-enough life-of-my-own can feel both permissible (fate will allow it) and feasible (I can manage it). If I doubt my own goodness and/or the goodness of people in general, it will be much harder for me to build an ongoing good experience of being myself. So, whence comes this necessary faith in the human good?

According to Heinz Kohut, what children need are parents who can supply two crucial developmental resources: first, a mother (figure) who mirrors our childhood grandiosity and affirms it for us, and second, a father (figure) whom we can idealize and look up to, identifying with him in an aspirational way. Kohut saw these two needs as ordered, both chronologically and in their relative importance. He also saw childhood and youth as eras that often afford us second chances to get what we need, or, if things go poorly, a new round of trauma (from deprivation or other emotional injury). A step-parent, say, can step in and make things much better, or much worse.

In the 1970’s, psychologist Urie Brofenbrenner made an observation which has often been quoted, and deserves even more notice today: “In order to develop normally, a child requires progressively more complex joint activity with one or more adults who have an irrational emotional relationship with the child. Somebody’s got to be crazy about that kid.” This Somebody need not be the original parent (biological or adoptive) or a step-parent; it can be, say, a relative, a guidance counselor, or a teacher — often an art teacher, perhaps because art is nearer to the emotions than most other subject areas taught in schools. But the changes in institutional culture of the past two decades have made it more risky and difficult for teachers to show special interest in troubled students who may need it. Among the religious, clergy can be well placed to show this kind of individualized interest, but they, too, have become understandably risk-averse as the stakes of being misunderstood have sharply risen. Librarians sometimes took on this kind of role in children’s lives, with often wonderful results, but smartphones and the internet have so fully replaced books that librarians are fading from view.

If a community is in sufficiently rough shape, an idealistic nonprofit might come along and offer a program that pairs at-risk youth with ethically ambitious adults who help them along in caring ways. But those programs don’t always appear, and not all childhood neglect or abuse happens in poorer cities and towns that are in obvious trouble. Much of American literature is about the family traumas of the middle class, and even the wealthy are often very desperate people — in part because they already have the money that everyone else assumes is the solution to every problem, yet their pain continues. “Spoiled,” remember, does not just mean “pampered.” It means a kid has been given everything except what’s most important: wholesome loving care. It is, after all, a metaphor about rancid milk — because material abundance paired with emotional scarcity can spoil a person’s capacity to believe that real love (which psychoanalytic language symbolizes as the breast milk of a loving Mother) exists anywhere.

Some kids who are deprived of one or more of Kohut’s two essential relational supplies (a mirroring mother figure and an idealizable father figure) become hyper-competent, fiercely independent adolescents. Later in life, they can have trouble coupling-up, because romance involves giving what they never received, and because the offer of love feels strange and dangerous to them. By contrast, some other deprived kids remain dependent for decades, relentlessly hoping the caregivers they need will come along, or indeed, that their own feelings and behaviors will eventually transform the attachment figures they do have into the wise and generous ones they still crave. Then there are those who combine elements of each, presenting as adults with impressive professional success while remaining lonely and emotionally entangled with their withholding parents. These people are ahead of their peers in the outside world, but behind them on the inside.

Much trouble can be avoided if several afflicted kids find each other in time to form a group, where they can do their best to raise one another. But this is hard, because independent kids are reluctant to depend on anyone, including peers; dependent kids may welcome fellowship, but their resentments can get displaced and wreck the very friendships they have loaded with meaning and value. An adolescent friend group, with its intense attachments, passions, and impulses, can work wonders or exacerbate personal trouble, depending which personality elements get validated within it, and how the larger world responds. Plenty of movies are about the various storylines that such a group can be found living through, though it’s rare that a clique of teenagers manages to learn, from a film, how to avoid the pitfalls in its path. Art might seem to promise lessons of useful prudence, but it mainly offers us a deeper understanding of those losses and mistakes we’ve already endured.

The benefits of therapy derive from insight on the one hand, and the therapeutic relationship on the other. Between the two, it’s usually the relationship that does the most good — but it’s a relationship built on a series of conversations whose main ingredients are the patient’s stories of the past and the recent past, expressions of feelings in the present, and interpretations that come from the therapist or from the patient (in other words, insight). Some of what gets illuminated and reframed is the experience of not-getting what we needed. It might seem like a waste of painful effort, to recount what you already know about old yearnings and losses. But it often turns out that the telling is itself a healing process, when someone is listening with consistently reliable respect and empathy. The teller and the listener can then reshape what the story means, shifting control of that meaning from the outside world of the past into the inner world of the present.

What do couples fight about? Well, in the great dialogue called the Euthyphro, Plato says “people disagree about the just and the unjust,” since if they merely disagreed about, say, the size of a stone, “they would simply resort to measuring.”

When couples argue, it’s usually about one person’s perception of unfair treatment from the other person. Someone feels some kind of injustice, and then takes a chance on bringing it up, hoping for a resolution of some kind (e.g., an apology). But when an argument becomes a fight – when it really goes off the rails, so that both people get caught up in rage –  it’s usually because someone felt as if their personal value as a human being has come under threat. Depending on that person’s life history, they may be more susceptible to feeling that way, even when it’s triggered by something pretty trivial.

Let’s use some inclusive, genderless names to paint an example of this. Call one partner Gamma, and the other, Theta. The conversation begins as a relatively cool-headed chat about some recent bit of behavior (say, Theta left dishes in the sink again) that doesn’t sit right with Gamma. So Gamma talks about it, and Theta acknowledges the reasoning, but feels judged and micromanaged. Theta doesn’t get upset, but doesn’t apologize either. Theta might even make the mistake of calling Gamma “too sensitive.” One way or another, Gamma gets the message that Theta won’t take the complaint seriously. This is because Theta experiences Gamma’s complaint as a bid for power and control, whereas Gamma experiences Theta’s dirty dishes as a direct insult.

At this point, things are deteriorating. What triggers the sharp decline in the quality of the conversation is this: Gamma feels undervalued as a person. It goes like this: “If my hurt feelings aren’t worth any serious attention, then I don’t matter; I’m not seen as a fully human somebody; I have no rights; we are not peers; I’m being taken for granted. If Theta can get away with slighting me this way, I am being erased from the universe. I just don’t count. And if I don’t put a stop to it right now, who knows where it will end?”

A few dishes in the sink. A loose cap from a toothpaste tube. A few minutes of lateness for a date night out. Why do these small disappointments sometimes kindle bonfires of anger and indignation? Such slights, real or perceived, can feel like a matter of life and death because for every one of us, feelings really were a matter of life and death in the beginning, when we were infants. The baby loves the mother (or primary caretaker), and if the mother doesn’t love her baby in return, the baby can actually die. Even with plenty of food and clean clothing, a baby can die of emotional starvation (“marasmus,” or “failure to thrive”).

Next, the person who feels undervalued may escalate the fight even higher by thinking, “Since my very worth as a human being is under attack, and everything is now at stake, it’s appropriate (even necessary) for me to blast my partner to smithereens, without restraint. If I don’t explode in protest, my not-exploding will mean I agree with my partner that I am indeed worth nothing. So my self-respect would be gone, too, and I’d become nothing.” That’s when the fight escalates still further, because Gamma’s emotional threat detection system is on red alert, calling all hands to battle-stations. What started out as a few dirty dishes – perhaps an act of passive-aggressive immaturity, perhaps just a thoughtless oversight – is now a mutual emotional hurricane.

How does couple’s therapy help here? It helps by coaching both members of the couple to reframe experiences of disagreement so that they do not trigger a state of emotional emergency based on perceived threat to personal value. Exploring the individual life histories of each partner may illuminate just why it is that their threat-detection systems are triggered by some things and not others.

In other words, the therapy opens up a gap between the objective issue at hand – what the fight seems to be about – and the emotional interpretation it produces in the person who feels insulted by it.

That gap is a breathing space, a pause, where the angry person has a chance to slip out of the rage and instead remain focused on the relational issue at hand. It’s a chance to respond, instead of reacting.

In terms of the brain, it’s an opportunity to keep one’s mind in the human prefrontal cortex (where we can think clearly, and even speak clearly), instead of dropping into the amygdala, an ancient reptile part of the brain that is only capable of fight-or-flight reactions to perceived threats.

In terms of personality, it’s a chance to solve the problem using your most adult self, who is experienced, well-informed, and ethically ambitious, rather than a more primitive part of self, such as an inner toddler or inner teenager who is full of gigantic, overwhelming, intensely unpleasant feelings like wrath, yearning, fear, and emotional pain.

Once a couple has learned to keep their ordinary conflicts from escalating, they are then free to collaborate in making informed choices about how to improve the relationship, or whether to end it. Whatever they choose, it will be a free choice of responses to what has happened within and between the two people. At that point, couple’s therapy moves beyond the emphasis on improving communication, and into an exploratory process of decision-making about where the two people want the relationship to go.