He’d have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he wasn’t run over by a goddam truck before he ever even got his license to practice. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, deals with this question as well, when Zooey Glass tries to explain to his mother, Bessie, that his sister Franny is going through a spiritual crisis and would probably not be well served by a typical psychiatrist: “For a psychoanalyst to be any good with Franny at all, he’d have to be a pretty peculiar type… He’d have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he’d been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place. To his more sterile and mechanized colleagues who spouted platitudes about my strong feelings, I should have asked, “Were you just listening to me?” “Holy shit” was the only reasonable response to the situation I was living through at the time trust me, you would say the same thing if I told you the story. I didn’t know what I was looking for until I found it, but once I did, the answer was obvious: I wanted a therapist who had managed not to sacrifice his own humanity in order to do his job. Would you like to come in and talk about them?” Once, when I was having some experiences that I wanted to talk over with a therapist, I spoke to several practitioners on the phone and chose the one who responded to the details of my situation by saying “Holy shit!” All the others gave me some version of the old therapeutic standby: “Well, I can see you have some strong feelings about this.
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