Screenworld - Page 9


The 50-minute hour is as far from "surfing the net" as it can be. Amid Screenworld's constant interruptions, where focusing is harder and harder and multitasking subverts that ability, the therapist and I have met in order to focus. Ours isn't the autohypnosis of focusing on a screen that one can control: ours is a vibrant exchange, which neither party wholly controls. We meet in a formal intimacy, in that it has a form (50 minutes), which, like the poetic forms of sonnet and haiku, imposes its own intensity, an intensity that depends on nothing but us, because it can emerge only from the therapist and myself. You can't get more Anti-Screenworld than that—not with your clothes on, anyway.

Amid Screenworld's special effects that seem to make reality malleable, the therapist asks, "What's your real world? the one that's yours?" In Screenworld, where, especially for the young, life looks like a performance, good therapy questions the construct of audience–performer, asking, in effect, "Who's your audience? your peers? your daddy? the mirror?"—asking you to rethink what you're playing to, questioning your own assumptions and Screenworld's.

In Screenworld, you're looking outward; that's the nature of its existence. In the consulting room, you're looking inward, not safely alone, but in the always unpredictable presence of another human being. Stripped of psychotherapy's often obfuscating terminology, the core of the practice is the timeless truth that nothing has more potential to shift our experience of ourselves than a frank, face-to-face encounter.

Knowing another person is the key to therapy and the exact opposite of Screenworld, where you can't be certain even of the sex of those with whom you chat.

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