Mine Son.
Here's a funny thing about therapy. When I was a little younger than you are now, I went insane.
Wait, that’s not the funny part.
I began therapy with a psychiatrist and, in what I now consider to be a miracle of God, I was cured. Completely. I went from suicidal despair to joyful inner peace. I’ve never known anyone else to whom this has happened.
My psychiatrist was what you might call a neo-Freudian. But me—I was a Freudian all the way. I read Freud's books. I believed in his theories. I even briefly went from agnosticism to atheism in his honor.
But as I moved on in life, I couldn’t help noticing there was a small flaw in Freud’s outlook. Namely, it was completely false. The Oedipal Complex, penis envy, the death instinct. These are not real things. And while people can be rendered sexually maladjusted by childhood trauma, most desires are inborn and develop naturally. Basically, Freud chatted with a handful of Victorian Viennese neurotics and made stuff up.
So then, a puzzle: if all the Freudian insights I’d gained in therapy were nonsense, what on earth had healed me?
After long thought, the answer came. Freud may have been a quack, but he was a quack of genius. His theories were wrong. His method was brilliant. He understood how dysfunctional people project the dynamics of formative relations onto others. A girl abused by her father falls for abusive men. A boy deceived by his mother suspects deceit everywhere. And so on.
A good therapist is a benign sounding board. You come to trust him, so your projections don’t stick to him. You learn to dispel them and form the sort of relationship with him you should have formed with your parents.
So I asked myself: what is that relationship, that connection that healed me? Well, it was love. He was the only mentor I ever had, God bless him, and I loved him.
From this—and from my experience of your mother and your sister and even you on your occasional good days—I began to see that not sex but love was the prime mover of human experience. And therefore not flesh but spirit was the prime mover of all the world.
Okay, here’s the funny part.
The only time I ever surprised my psychiatrist was when I visited him and told him I had been baptized. His jaw dropped. He could not see: it was he himself who had become for me—what every parent with all his flaws should strive to become to every child—a window onto the source of creation.
All the psychoanalytic theories in the world are nothing more than stories meant to convey the truth of love.
Maybe all of life is nothing more than a story meant to convey that truth.
Which, you have to admit, really would be funny.
Dad
Man is broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue. -Eugene O’Neil
Preoccupied with the self, we wither and hurt ourselves and others; turning outward toward the love of another person, we are transformed and quite possibly saved.