Wisdom from the Couch. Jennifer Kunst
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to making a lasting and deep love relationship, to fighting an illness, to grieving the loss of a loved one, to maturing in faith, to making peace, and to growing up.
In the presence of someone who is struggling, it is a common, sympathetic response to say, “It just takes time.” That is a lovely sentiment, but it is not quite the whole truth. It does not just take time. It takes grace and truth, too. But it does take time.
So let us ask the next question. Why does growing take so much time? It is an understandable question, after all. I often ask it. My patients often ask it. We are in good company, because even physicians in Freud’s day asked him the same question. Freud tells the story of a colleague who once wrote to him, saying, “What we need is a short, convenient, outpatient treatment for obsessional neurosis.” Freud commented, “I could not supply him with it and felt ashamed; so I tried to excuse myself with the remark that specialists in internal diseases, too, would probably be very glad of a treatment for tuberculosis or carcinoma, which combined these advantages.”6 Growth in psychoanalysis mirrors growth in life; it takes more time than we expect.
But why does it take so much time? Growing takes time for two main reasons. The first is that there are many forms of resistance to growing. In the body, resistance to healing is a particularly thorny problem in treating tuberculosis and cancer. Confused, the body fights against its best interests, even against the treatment itself. The same is true of the life of the mind. We get in our own way. Mostly out of fear, we maintain the status quo and turn away from change. All of this resistance has to be worked through and, bit by bit, overcome. One of my patients once told me of a sculpture of Sisyphus, pushing his boulder up the mountain, just as the story goes. But this sculpture added a new dimension to the image. There, on the other side of the boulder, was another Sisyphus, pushing the same boulder back down the mountain. We work against ourselves.
The other reason that growth takes so much time is because that is simply how it is. That is reality. That is how we human beings are wired. This is an essential part of reality that we must make peace with, and it is a hard one. A story that illustrates this point is an episode from The Brady Bunch television show. In using it I know that I date myself, but I happily grew up on that show and, all these years later, I can see how many wonderful psychoanalytic lessons can be found in its stories. This particular episode stands out to me as a great illustration of the reality that growing takes time, even under the best of circumstances.
Poor Bobby, the youngest of the three brothers, is painfully overtaken with envy that Peter and Greg are so much bigger, taller, stronger, and smarter than he is. So he tries to take a shortcut in the process of growing. The boys have an exercise high bar over the doorway to their bedroom. Bobby grabs hold of it and hangs on, for hours, hoping that he will be able to speed the process of growing by stretching out and getting taller. This is an image we can all relate to, even though it is quite ridiculous. It is ridiculous because we all know that you cannot speed up the process of growth. It is also hilarious because, even if it worked, he wouldn’t be taller—his arms would just be longer!
Growing takes time. As someone once said to me, the only way to grow is to eat your Wheaties. All we can do is do all we can do to make the conditions optimal so that growth can take place. We need grace—the committed love and support of others. We need truth—the experience of facing ourselves and our lives, exactly as they are. And we need time—time to face all that we resist and then to let the natural process of growth unfold.
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