Category: Uncategorized

A Review of Couples Therapy on BBC2

Hit documentary Couples Therapy offers an illuminating insight into the world of couples counselling and the complexity of relationships
Psychotherapist Ajay Khandelwal explores why we find it such engaging viewing
We have couples therapists available to support you here

I was at engagement party in Central London recently, and a guest approached me and said: “Have you seen Couples Therapy?”

“Yes” I replied, even though my attention was distracted by the nibbles that had just been placed on the table next to me, tantalisingly out of reach.

She continued, “I think it’s actually worse than pornography. It made me feel queasy. All those people talking about their relationships.”

Momentarily I felt guilty. I had rather enjoyed watching the first few episodes. Was I secretly enjoying the opulence of the penthouse style therapy room? Or did I like the fact that an aspect of my hidden world of seeing couples was in full-view, thanks to Orna Guralnik and her crew?

Still, I did feel rather disturbed by the programme. After all who would be willing go on TV to talk about the intimate details of their relationship? Grisly and unedifying are thoughts that come to mind. The opposite of the sweet feel-good First Dates. So, there is something going on that these couples willingly took part. Did they believe that the crew was their surrogate ‘good’ family? Did they hope the TV audience would adjudicate; understand them; heal them; know them? Was it voyeurism, or a brave development in our culture?

Back to the party. I still hadn’t got to the nibbles. Nevertheless, the chilled Albarino wine was flowing freely. Clearly the newly engaged couple had unleashed something into the air. Another guest approached me. “You seem to be getting on really well with my husband. Could you see him for therapy?”

I politely declined.

“I’d happily meet him for a cup of tea. But I can’t see him professionally, because I know you, even if it’s only been for five minutes. In any case why are you trying to find therapy for your husband? I guess it might be more interesting for you to think what drew you to him and explore that.”

At that point I managed to get myself to the delicious nibbles before they were gone.

We spend our lives hoping to find the magical ‘other’, believing this will change everything. Then we find them, and the magic wears off, and then we start our next quest to change them. If only they were different, then everything would be OK.

Orna, the therapist at the heart of the series, is onto this. She listens intently for her couples to get out their score cards, and to decide who is at fault where, and how many times. She is frigid and controlling, and he is lazy and deceitful, and so the usual relationship tropes are thrown around. But, like any good couples therapist, her patient is the couple. Something must have brought them together, consciously and unconsciously. To one seemingly hen-pecked man, who can’t seem to get a word in, yet is smirking, she offers, “so you enjoy getting attacked and humiliated?” noticing the pattern in the relationship. He is not a pure disinterested bystander. His indifference is part of what precipitates his wife’s anger.

Orna’s psychoanalytical and systemic orientation means she is alert to the unconscious patterns constellated by the couple, and how much they may be invested in them. It takes two to tango. There is no magical other.

Orna has a dual identity. She has a prior degree in film. We can see this production as a confluence of her interests. She has become a film maker and analyst and her patients have become her cast. Is this her unconscious at work, or theirs? Has she achieved a creative synthesis, or has the series watered down her craft?

Personally, I choose never to write about my patients. It’s private! Some analysts write about their patients, with their consent, in heavily disguised form to further clinical knowledge. Exceptionally, I know of analysts who have co-written books with patients. Both analysts and patients write personal memoirs. It’s a complex area, and reams of papers and books have been written on the impact on the analytic relationship.

Orna is a pioneer, and the co-production with her patients is a serious undertaking. She looks at the couple as a system. She often implores them, “let me do some work,” in order to dismantle the system that the couple are perpetuating. She notices her own biases, as she discusses the couple with her supervisor. She notices when she is taking sides, or when a member of couple is about to run out the door and stop the process in its tracks. She is attuned to the complex dance of the couple, without rushing into answers. She notices when the past of the couple is projected into the present moment. It seems like a valuable experiment. For individuals and couples watching it is illuminating. It allows room to allow for the fact that the couple has large areas driven by the unconscious.

A therapist colleague once told me a story. A patient approached a revered couples therapist at a train station, with the intention of thanking her for her writings and musings. It had helped him save his relationship! She replied, “Fuck off! Can’t you see I’m having an argument with my husband!”

What does this story make you think? Do you think, well that shows that the couples therapist is a charlatan, a fake, a hypocrite? Surely, a couples therapist wouldn’t shout in public at train stations? Surely, they wouldn’t lose control like that? At least they’d find a private room to do their shouting in! Perhaps she needs to see an anger specialist? Or maybe she needs to move on! Maybe they don’t have enough sex? Maybe they have too much sex?

Maybe. But most of us we would see this moment in time as part of the normal fabric of a long-term relationship. There are relationships that are calm, and there are relationships that are volatile. Is the calm relationship avoiding some difficult aspect of reality, whereas the volatile one in a process of harder growth and development, wrestling with bigger things? It’s hard to say which is better. However, if you chose the path of a long-term relationship, it will put you in touch with a particular type of hell.

You will be known, and know another unlike any other relationship. Sexually (even if you don’t have sex); biologically (your breathing, digestion, functioning); psychologically (what’s really under the bonnet and what you don’t even know is there). And there will be things you encounter in your partner, which you never thought you would ever have to face, or may have even spent your whole life avoiding.

For some people this type of encounter holds a special value. What is your material, what is their material, what is joint material? What do you have to sacrifice to be in the relationship? What suffering does it put you in touch with? Long-term relationships can be a particular type of torture, but one that may come with certain hard earned satisfactions and ecstasies. In our extroverted culture, which measures things by outer symbols of success, perhaps only each couple knows the precise value of such a private and particular type of experience.

Ajay Khandelwal is a psychotherapist in London and online

Breakdown or Breakthrough?

Break-point 20/10/22

I recently decided to take up playing tennis as I thought it was a fairly safe sport. I enjoyed its creative and competitive nature. I was enjoying a game against a friend in the October sun. The trees were rustling. The air was languid. I felt relaxed. There were no clouds in the sky. A young woman appeared to blow away the autumn leaves with a noisy contraption.
My tennis partner suggested we move court to enable her to finish her job. I took a position deep behind the baseline. I was playing looping top spin forehand. My right arm was stretched fully. I was on my toes. My body was twisting through the air. I made sweet contact with the ball.
At that moment I felt the most excruciating pain I had ever experienced. I fell to the ground. I screamed in pain. This was a totally new experience. My mind searched furiously for antecedents. What could this be? What did this mean? I imagined I had snapped a tendon. I recalled many years ago reading an article in a Sunday paper about what snapping a tendon felt like. I tried to feel myself through the lens of words to diagnose my injury. I wondered if the pulsating throbbing sensation in my arm right arm was due to the tendons trying to reattach themselves to my bone. Is this what an octopus feels like when it loses a tentacle I wondered?
Understandably the ambulance service algorithms placed me at the lowest priority. The call handler told me I should make my own way to A and E. Well if I could I would! But I was unable to move. Those around me wanted to lift me up and move me to a car. But any attempt to move would leave me screaming. I settled in for a four hour wait. Other tennis players brought me tea blankets and pain killers.
I felt totally helpless. A club official came to take my name and put it down in the injury register. I found this rather annoying but complied. In my mind I felt like I was on a Netflix drama stuck in a crevice on Mount Everest waiting for a rescue team. Sure it was a balmy 19 degrees rather than minus 40 and yet I had the strange feeling of being in no man’s land. I knew something was terribly wrong and yet I could not communicate it in words or experience. I was in an unknown area as were the group around me.
Fortunately the ambulance service were experiencing a quiet time on that Monday afternoon. I was very lucky. After an hour I was attended to by a paramedic and a trainee paramedic I was given a pain relieving gas miraculously I could walk to the to the ambulance. The paramedic was a climber in his spare time, which allowed me to cling onto the idea I was felled by a mountaineering tragedy rather than a fluffy yellow ball. Morphine provided me with further sustenance. The involuntary gasp of the X-ray department team of a local A&E hospital illuminated me further. I had fractured my humerus. Snapped it in two.
Yes I am writing this piece by voice recognition software…
From a psycho analytical perspective the research on fractures is fascinating. Various studies show that there is not a great deal of difference between surgical intervention and the body’s own natural healing process. In 80% of cases the arm heals itself. In 48 hours blood flows to the affected area. Overtime a soft Jelly forms. Eventually the bone begins to harden and heal itself. Even with a fair bit of inner deformity the arm is able to regain most of its function. Of course surgical intervention may speed up the healing process. It also leads to slightly higher rates of bone union. So how does one decide between the natural healing properties of gravity and rest versus a knife and metal?
How does therapy work? Should the therapist simply provide the equivalent of a humeral brace which provides a container for the healing arm. The humeral brace exerts a gentle and continuous pressure around the broken bone; The body does the rest. Is this similar to the therapists consulting room? Does the therapist provide a field which facilitates healing? Or is therapy more like surgery? do the therapists interpretations act like surgical incisions? Is the therapist responsible for introducing psychic metal work to stitch together a profound wound? Should the therapist get the patient back on the tennis court of life as soon as possible?
As part of further investigations into my arm I had an MRI. This was an uncanny experience. It was claustrophobic, regressive and terrifying and at moments poetic and sublime. The experience of actually feeling my arm resonating at various moments over the one hour long MRI was a profound feeling. The MRI is clearly a very expensive an advanced piece of machinery. It allows deeper investigation into the nature of bone and muscle. It is more forensic than the data that can be produced by an X-ray. It allows us to examine pathologies that are hidden from even the best trained eye.
Psychotherapy uses an ordinary piece of kit. Well both ordinary and extraordinary. The human mind. The analyst and the patient are constantly scanning each other both consciously and unconsciously. At moments it may be true to say there is a form of magnetic resonance between the two. Uncanny things happen. Suddenly there are moments of depth and infinity. In my experience the unconscious can be a more powerful machine then both an X-ray and an MRI.
In the rich western world MRI scanner sales people are enjoying boom times. Everyone loves the idea of a machine that can see deep into you and tell you what is wrong with you. Perhaps it’s also something to do with the fact that the machine does all the work? And yet there is still a place for the low tech kit of the human mind.
Perhaps a really good therapist has a mind like an MRI scanner that can really see into us? But of course the patient can also see into the mind of the therapist. Perhaps a less good therapist has a mind like an X-ray which can only pick out major breaks and traumas. But of course therapy involves the meeting of two subjectivities. it involves it involves two minds and two bodies. Nowadays of course we also assume that the patient has a mind with X-ray or MRI like qualities. Both the patient and the therapists minds are constantly interacting and resonating in the therapeutic field. It is this interaction which perhaps makes the therapy most efficacious. The MRI report from a psychotherapy session is the joint production of two parties.
As I came out of my MRI appointment I chanced upon an article about the famous tennis player Boris Becker. He is currently serving time in a category C prison for tax evasion. According to newspaper reports he has lost seven kilogrammes and he is helping many other prisoners with their physical and psychological regimes. Rather than completely breakdown it appears that his experience in prison very unusually has enabled him to find something deep within himself. At the same time as undergoing some form of self -repair he is finding that he is able to help others. Blessed with superhuman athletic abilities he also has the ability to implode. Yet at least for now his guilt and remorse seem genuine. Rather than evading his predicament he appears to be fully embracing his situation. As I think about Boris Becker dancing at the net, his ability to be highly creative, to transgress, and to come back from the brink, I feel hopeful about the ability of the human body and mind to bounce back. We all face break points in our lives. We may lose. We may breakdown in body or in mind. And yet we may also regenerate and find a way to get back onto our feet. I have a feeling we haven’t seen the end of Boris Becker quite yet.

I am part of the long running number 42 group practice.

Please feel free to call me, or email me. I can be contacted on 07925709696 or emailed at ajaytherapy@gmail.com

Well, for cycling fans, that was a thrilling finish to the 2020 Tour de France. A 21-year-old Slovenian rider, Tadej Pogačar, unexpectedly storming to victory on the penultimate day, after an awesome super-human time trial finish on a climb!

As I watched, I hazily remembered my experience of riding a 175km stage of the Tour de France many years ago, secretly fantasising that I had the potency and legs of Pogačar.

In truth, rather than the explosive power of Pogačar I remember going into a trance-like state as I climbed the Aubisque, a 2000-metre wild monster in the Hautes Pyrénées, which went on for 17km, hanging on for dear life. I can remember being surrounded by an eerie pin-drop silence as riders went deep into themselves, simply spinning the pedals as the mountains kicked up. I remember hallucinating as the climb went on. Many cyclists have lost their minds on this climb. Octave Lapize famously said of the organisers when they introduced this mountain stage, “Vous êtes assasins!”.

Memorably, Van Est, otherwise known as The Locomotive and Executioner crashed descending the Aubisque in 1951. His life had already been punctuated by poverty and tragedy, being the second youngest of 16 children. He had served jail time for smuggling tobacco to support his family. Before riding the Aubisque he had never even seen a mountain. He fell 70 metres into a ravine and was pulled out by his team metres who created a rope by tying together 40 inner tubes together. Van Est was inexperienced and reckless on the mountains. He recalled:

“I wanted to go left, but the bike went straight on. Nowadays there is a wall (on the same corner) but not in 1951. I was lucky because I unwound the pedal straps just before I started to descend. When I fell, I kicked away my pedal straps, and held my head in my hands. In a few seconds I saw my whole life flash in front of me. My fall was broken by some young trees, and caught onto one of those trees.”

He landed on a slim ledge, with a 600 metre drop on each side. Afterwards, he become famous for cashing in on his near-death experience, by advertising a watch – “Seventy metres deep I dropped, my heart stood still but my Pontiac never stopped.”

Where the Tour de France and psychotherapy meet
Van Est, the Locomotive, the Executioner, appeals to us, because he lived out, in the most dramatic style, some of the forces we all contend with in psychotherapy and life, and he lived to tell the tale. Van Est was always on the edge, wrestling for survival. In psychotherapy we often experience creative and destructive forces; the life instinct and the death instinct. As Van Est hurtled off his bike, he was defenceless, yet, miraculously, he was able to protect his head, and grab on to the young tree to break his fall. He did not break any bones. Van Est flirted with death and destruction, but the life force within him saved him. Perhaps this is the why the Tour de France has such a hold on some of us? Just like life, we never know what is going to happen next.

Another way of thinking of it is as the Tour de Psyche. It’s not simply a geographical odyssey, but one of the group and individual mind and its workings. The structure of the Tour allows each rider to go on an inner journey into their mind, finding new places and experiences, unknown flaws and hidden reserves; and to find new ways of being in the group of their team, and the bigger group of the peloton. All this is infinitely complex; just like living in a family and being part of wider society.

The sight of a top team riding in perfect formation, moving through and off, as if one living organism, creating a web of power and energy, is the representation of a well-oiled psyche, with each part working with another. However, such moments are short-lived in both the human psyche and the Tour. More often than not, there is a far bit of jostling, in-fighting, scheming, and aggression in both the Tour and the human psyche and wider society. In the Tour riders are going smoothly one minute, and then touch wheels and crash the next. Human consciousness and turning the pedals both require huge amounts of effort.

The Tour is a curious mix of love and hate, supreme aggression and selfless co-operation. One minute riders are working together in unison, giving each other shelter and support, and the next they go on a ruthless attack. This volatility reflects the human experience, where nothing either good or bad, but a mixture of both.

The Tour witnessed the top rider of the top team, Egan Bernal, race favourite from team Ineos, “crack”. He has the world’s resources and technology behind him, but the mountains crushed him, pitilessly. What collapsed inside his mind and body? The test of reality, the TDF, humbled his ambitions and his grand team. Like all of us, life crashes into our dreams, illusions, and pretensions, and sometimes we just have to keep turning the pedals, wishing away the probing cameras, and wishing the earth would swallow us up.

Reality is a brutal teacher. So often in life, our ego, the “race leader”, gets a battering. We no longer get to wear the yellow jersey. But life carries on, inexorably. Something comes in to fill the void. In the case of the Bernal, another rider from his team may be crowned as the new king, another team will take the limelight, everything will be reshuffled. The psyche adapts to reality, to the wounding caused by reality. In the TDF Mr Bernal doesn’t die a literal death, but a symbolic death of his podium dreams, which we can all relate to.

What does the Tour de France capture about life?
The Jungian analyst, Edward Whitmont, argued in his book The Symbolic Quest, that much of human life is really not about concrete things, but their meaning. We are symbolic creatures, using language and image to make sense of the world around us. The TDF represents just this impulse, albeit in a particular, modern, largely Western, highly masculine idiom. A group of men leave home (the grand depart) and we know that not all of them will make it back home. Just like life, we don’t know who will puncture, crash, fall sick or even die, as they leave the start line. What we do know, however, is that the journey will not be smooth, not like the well-laid French tarmac, for very long.

Symbolically the TDF is interesting because just like life, bad things happen due to the riders own failings, and then bad things happen through no fault of their own. Life doesn’t distinguish between inner and out causes, we still have to get back on our bikes, however unfair. For instance, a rider may come down due to other riders riding dangerously, or through a catastrophic bike failure. But there is no remedy for this, it is left to the rider to decide how to respond; do they continue with the race, or do they withdraw? The clock keeps ticking. Unless the are unable to continue due to serious injury, the riders almost always elect to continue, and simply absorb the “bad luck” they experience as part of their fate as Tour riders.

Every now and then riders may see extreme danger ahead, such a wet mountain top descent, and boycott the stage, in order to avoid catastrophe. However, such moments are rare and Tour riders are a stoic group. The personal and collective pressures they must experience to ride on must be huge. In life, we may find ourselves in a similar predicament, and we may need to make a choice whether we continue to turn the pedals or dismount and hang up our cleats.

The Tour will be full of hazards, rough pave, and sheer mountain drops. There will be few if any days without painful and unavoidable crashes. There will be broken collar bones aplenty. Blood oozing from road rash, when riders lose their skin as they hit the ground. Concussions as riders are shovelled back onto their bikes after a fall. There will be humans and animals wandering obliviously into the line of racing cyclists. There will be unseen traffic bollards, manhole covers, and road furniture. There will be accusations of doping, cheating, and lies. There will fines, penalties, and tantrums. The Hautes Pyrénées, with their unending gradients, at a lung-busting 10 percent, going on as far as the eye can see, is perhaps the ultimate, humbling, and humiliating reality that will sort out the race winner from the rest of the peloton.

But the race is highly symbolic. There is a point in the race a week in, where the adrenaline wears off, and the riders are tired, and realise how far they still have to go. They ask each other, where are we now? “I don’t know, maybe Angers”….which is a way of saying we are in non-descript part in the middle of France. Rather like mid-life, the riders realise they are past half-way, they are past their peak physically, they are bored, missing home, and yet they know they have to dig deep to summon their innermost reserves, even though everything is expended, in order to get through the mountains, and to complete the second half of life/ the race. The sirens are wailing, the temptation to drink a jug of EPO, or spend the day under a duvet, escaping the interminable race, becomes ever harder to resist. In the second half, the riders seek meaning.

There are acts of honour and kindness. The race leader is respected and protected, and if he loses his chain, or has a mechanical mishap, his competitors will not attack him. They do not wish to anger the cycling gods! The race leader becomes more and more dependent and connected to those around him. He realises more than ever he is not a self-made man. He needs his self-sacrificing super domestiques to protect him from the wind, the mountain, his own arrogance, and the unrelenting prodding and attacking from other teams. He is surrounded, by specialists, the grimpeurs, the rouleurs, the sprinters, but they are all in service to him, and ultimately, the race itself, the grand spectacle, which transcends them all.

On the penultimate day, they drink champagne on their bikes, as they prepare for their home coming to the Champs Elysées. The riders are at a literal homecoming, but they are also coming home to themselves, with a deeper understanding of their own psyches, and those of the riders who have traveled alongside them. That is why their is such a close bond between riders when they are out of the competitive situation – they have had the courage to share and endure a profound challenge together – and they are enlivened by the inner experiences and memories.

HOSTILES, a great film, puts arch enemies together for a harsh trip across America. It’s a riff on the emotional nature of long term relationships

I recommend this powerful and tense film. I promise not to give away the story. But I will share the premise. An American captain finds himself cornered into a situation where he has to protect a feared and hated enemy on an arduous and dangerous journey. It’s my view that it’s an important aspect of what a long-term relationship is really like. Once the initial projections wear off, and you have face things that you have been blind to, but have been there along.

In our culture we are generally shown images of people getting along well on TV, in rom-coms, in adverts, in Sunday supplements. Isn’t that model of e-harmony, a dating website that is supposed to match you with another person, just like you, based on a secret algorithm? Just answer the questions correctly, pay the fee, and in fifteen minutes you will be matched with your potential true love, or your money back. A life time of foot massages, bubble baths and “love you” notes awaits you.

But hang on a minute. In our heart of hearts we know this is an illusion. Lies, deceit, infidelity, incompatibility, irritation, boredom, hatred, contempt, despair, low level of warfare, aren’t these actually a better description of major stretches in long term relationships? If only your partner would change, or die, or shut-up, or apologise, everything would be ok! Not that there isn’t a great pleasure too, but it seems to be mixed in with the other stuff: the pensions, the laundry, the rota, the in-laws, the children, the extension, the gum disease!

Why stick with this. Why not leave. Or freeze them out. Or just have the most minimal contact on a need to know basis? Why not create impregnable defence systems? In the case of the American captain travelling with his sworn enemy, maybe he should shoot him and be done with it, and create an alibi? There would be no witnesses, or he could get them all to go along with his story.

The analyst Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig reckoned that is worth sticking with it during these demoralising periods in relationship in the name of profound development. His thinking was that a genuine encounter with the things we find hard to bear in ourselves or others was a path to growth for the individual and the couple. Faithfulness and fidelity would make the experience of the encounter more painful, as there is no escape, but it would also be potentially more bountiful on the other side. The concern would be that if you just left or had an affair, you would be likely to repeat the same pattern with the new person, in a different form; the opportunity for development would be missed. It doesn’t mean you have to just put up with things. The famous quarrels of Zeus and Hera, in a long term relationship, still result in lightning! But even sticking in there, and arguing your point, has a value. According to this viewpoint, what is in the hostility, where will it lead to, these are the questions.

In modern life, we don’t need to travel across country in dangerous convey for week and weeks. Yet, we do still need to travel psychologically, for even longer periods, as we live much longer than they did in 1892. We would do well to respect the difficulty of this journey, and draw on all the resources we can to survive and develop through it. This is where an analyst can be of great help. The analyst can help you pore over these intricate and seemingly insurmountable difficulties with a view to thinking about what is in you, what is in them, what has been created by you as a couple. Anyone can get along with sameness, but facing the opposite in yourself, or in your partner, opens the door to something deeper, something more.

The Undoing, a new drama on Sky Atlantic, features the seemingly perfect couple, played by Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. They ooze the Upper East Side version of the American dream, even though the husband (played by nowadays sinister Hugh Grant) has a jokey-posh English twang.

No it’s not the latest John Lewis Christmas advert, but a whodunnit/murder mystery.

But hang on a minute. Isn’t this all rather familiar? Isn’t Hugh Grant revisiting old territory? In 1995 he was dating model Elizabeth Hurley, when he was arrested for having sex with prostitute Divine Brown (Estella Marie Thompson) on Sunset Boulevard. His relationship with Hurley ended, but he was able to resurrect his career.

It seems twenty-five years later, as an actor, he is still mining some of these recurring themes of sex, transgression, regret and reparation, but with better lighting effects, costumes, and being handsomely rewarded for this efforts! Freud would have called this “repetition compulsion”, where we are drawn back to recreating the same situations, again and again, in order to somehow finally get a grip on them.

A million dollar kitchen in Manhattan
Their kitchen is so spacious and well-thought-out for such a prime piece of real estate, but not too obscene! The breakfast scenes look more like a soft-focus medieval painting rather than a snap shot of a busy two parent working family in the middle of Manhattan.

Psychologically speaking, this might represent the first phase of a relationship, where everything is surface, veneer, polish and projection. There are no shadows. The kitchen cupboards haven’t been chipped. The worktops haven’t degraded by lemon juice and turmeric. It is the marriage of two egos; the conscious, visible, and obvious. Health abounds. There is no sickness in sight. The murderous, rageful and deceptive aspects of any character or couple are hidden from sight.

Where did she get that ruffle green double breasted coat with hood?
They have it all. They radiate charm, beauty and wit. They are intelligent and emotionally-attuned! They have socially approved professions. No hedge fund managers or property developers here. Jonathan (Hugh Grant) is a loveable healer of children, through his work as a paediatric oncologist. Grace Fraser, (Nicole Kidman) is an astute adult therapist, providing valuable insights to neurotic divorcees and same sex couples.

Perhaps they are on first name terms with “healer” and President elect, Joe Biden?

Grace’s dream-like red lustrous wavy hair speaks volumes, bouncing through the frames, signifying her high status, her dynamic living and being. She wears a boutique double breasted chameleon ruffle textured green coat, designed by Danish costume designer, Signe Sigmund. It has a hood, but it’s not a hoodie! However, beneath the pristine surface, chaos reigns.

The dark feminine
A mysterious working class, ethnic, possibly Latina woman, Elena (Matilda De Angelis) enters their rarefied life. Elena’s son gets a place for her son to the elite Reardon school, because of a scholarship place. Elena joins the fundraising committee, and the other mothers notice something “passive aggressive” about her breastfeeding during their meeting.

She doesn’t say very much in the opening scenes, although she does speak through her body, striking a strident pose, in front of Grace, fully naked, when she bumps into her at the gym.

Elena, enters their marriage like a tempest, wreaking havoc.

How can Grace, with her charmed life, and her training as a therapist, rich father, active sex life, great kitchen and coats, have been so totally deceived? How did she not know that her husband was having an affair for several months, and that he had lost his job and money?

How could it be that he even had sex with Elena and her on the same night, without her noticing? She is supposed to be sane. But is she crazy? Does she know who she is? Does she know who her husband is? Does she know her own father and her own parent’s marriage?

The shadow marriage
As a long-term relationship progresses, we may become aware of the destructive, even murderous thoughts and wishes within ourselves and our partners. The Undoing is about whether we choose to stay engaged with what we find within ourselves and our partner.

This psychological process is as grisly as stumbling upon the crime scene in The Undoing.

Grace is good at noticing the patterns in her clients struggling relationships and infidelities. Indeed she sees infidelity as a form of communication.

She is gifted at seeing things out there, but catastrophically unable to register what is going on closer to home.

During the same therapy session, she breaks out of the therapeutic frame when her phone buzzes mid-session. This is rather unusual. It’s a call from the school. No therapist would pick up their phone mid-session.

However, maybe we can see this call as communication from her unconscious. The very issue the client has brought has revealed a fault-line in her own life.

She is no longer sitting assuredly in her expensive consulting room, offering life changing insights.

Is her husband the murderer? Is she the murderer? Is she aiding and abetting a murderer? Is it Elena’s partner? Is it an unknown “other”? We all have our theories and hunches.

Perhaps, rather like good therapy, we just don’t know. We just have to tune in every week, and see what happens.