I've just started Season 3 where Paul meets Adele, his new therapist. It's been a long time since I watched Season 1, so can someone remind me what Paul and Gina's falling out years ago was about? How did they resolve it when he started treatment again?
She's as nervous as a very small nun on a penguin shoot
From what I remember, Paul essentially felt that Gina had done wrong by him by denying him a promotion (back when she was his supervisor). He felt she thought he was a bad therapist.
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I don't know, Butchie, instead.
There was also something about her involvement with a patient. I remember it being something vague, but I think she had an affair with a patient. But I also remember Paul comparing Laura's attraction and her situation with a patient. And Gina made sure to tell him that they situations were completely different. I think the writers left a lot of their falling out vague on purpose.
shareI think Gina also published a novel in which Paul thought that one of the main characters resembled him, and this character was pretty unlikeable to say the least.
I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior.
That was an interesting threat that I thought was going to be explored more.
If it was projection on Paul's part, or Gina wrote the book to get a message to Paul.
It is clear Paul has a lot of problems and not really as good a therapist as Adele, that
was clear early on when he showed himself to be so blind to his actions, or not in
control of them. To be fair, he catches up later, but he is invested in not seeing
reality for some reason, and Adele was really helping him.
Then he throws a fit and drops therapy with Adele because she won't knuckle under
and become his girlfriend … God, what a schmuck I was thinking.
But Paul cannot help himself, he honestly cannot see because he has 50 years invested
in not seeing, he is stuck and stuck hard, and cannot get out of that on his own even
if his own God complex and ego tell him he must and can.
What an interesting and complex show this is … how could they cancel it?
I just watched that episode. I don't think that's why he dropped therapy with Adele, even though she "rejected" him. What I saw and heard was that he was unbelievably disillusioned with the whole idea of therapy. He was using therapy--both his own and his patients'--as a way to avoid engaging emotionally outside of therapy, and with Adele, he couldn't separate what were the real feelings and what was just transference (which happens routinely, as he pointed out). I don't blame him for wanting a break--I almost wonder if getting out of therapy would be the best thing for him (in the imaginary future of this character), at least for a while.
"Listen very carefully. I shall say this only once."
I wonder if or how much this parallels the Israeli program, and what happened with it. I'd love to be able to watch that somewhere.
It seems to me that Paul was just like his patients, in fact in some ways even more so since he knew the tricks he had to find ways to camoflage his problems and put him as the hero of his life.
Since Adele has proven to him that she sees him better than he sees himself, his quitting therapy was an act of misplaced pride, misplaced in the sense that it is the opposite of what he would tell his own patient. Paul seems to not be able to see himself as a patient.
This show is so brutally honest in its look at therapy and psychologists. I also wonder what that whole arc was about with Gina then since it does not get rehashed and new information is not really revealed. Is it Gina that has some problem with Paul all these years, or Paul with Gina, If there is some deep rooted problem with Paul that Paul and Gina both cannot get at, then one has to wonder what is the point of therapy except to babysit in some way, handhold, or some kind of psychological dumping, almost like prostitution.
It seems to me that one should not have to pay people to be their friend, and that when they do, at least some of them might think that whatever comes out of it is unreal.
Paul cannot seem to deal with the problems in his own life. All he has is his job, his family and friends seems to have evaporated. Are their really people like this. After all some of the new books on neuroscience show that the human mind gets tired and then lazy in the same way muscles do. They call it ego depletion. Paul puts so much into his work that there is nothing left for his own life.
~~~~~It seems to me that Paul was just like his patients~~~~~
That's why his therapy sessions always ring false. They strike me as sops to the audience, that he (and therapists) are as full of sh.i.te as them, only better at dissimulating.
Marlon, Claudia and Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007 and 2010.
The thing is with therapy, and I don't see any evidence of this in this program, but therapy is like trying to buy a friend ... you cannot do it. It might work but only if one is very lucky to get someone who might actually have some insight into their problems, or someone who can facilitate the patients to some to their own insights. People's self-defense mechancism are just like Paul's, which is why he seems to have such problems getting through to his patients, and a lot of the patients seem to have their own reasons for therapy, it is like a game to many of them.
I think think this is an excellent show though.
I meant his sessions with Gina. The ones with his clients rang far truer.
PS it's as thought the scriptwriters are unreliable narrators.
Marlon, Claudia and Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007 and 2010.
Paul mentions an ex-patient, who like Laura, Gina suggested she take on. This is the one Paul mentions as being in love with Gina. He suggests the feelings were returned and that Gina had screwed the patients life by taking over his therapy and dealing with the transference(i.e patient falling in love with Gina) in this way. It comes up when she is questioning his dealing with Laura after Laura admits she is in love with Paul.
They also mention the novel, which is in earlier posts in this thread, and how these cumulative disagreements lead Paul not to attend Gina's husband's funeral. It sounds like a lot of mistrust and anger and broken communication from what I can recall.
Despite the argument, I have to say: Gina is a very confident and secure person to allow Paul to reenter her life and project all of his toxicity onto her. Since the reunion, it has always been about what Paul feels, and how she feels is completely disregarded.
share