I first entered individual therapy in the late 1980s, in Manhattan. Once a week for six years I strolled happily northward up Columbus Avenue from my apartment to my therapist’s office in the West 90s. Our sessions were a high point of my week. And why not? I got 50 minutes of undivided attention from a smart, empathetic professional, there to help me find out who I was and to address the old malaise that brought me to her door. “Narcissistic injury,” I learned to call it.
My therapist helped me understand how and where the early breakdown in parental “mirroring” had occurred that led to my condition. I felt I was on an important adventure with her. Like a skilled research librarian, she led me into the stacks of my past and pointed out key scrolls and papyri, helped me translate them from the primitive language of feeling into words and conscious understanding. By the time I left, I felt I’d begun to gain a modest erudition.
[For more of this story, written by David Payne, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...roup-therapy-worked/]
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