Jesse has shown up to his final session with Roberto, who looks nothing like how I imagined him. My fantasy Roberto was a taciturn young De Niro type who would go perfectly with Jesse's young DiCaprio vibe. Now that I've met the real Roberto and seen his uncanny resemblance to proto-reality celebrity Joey Buttafuoco, I'm not so sure his influence on Jesse is going to be a great one. Roberto is a pleasant enough guy whom Jesse seems kind of scared of and who gets through life with an easy going "us and them" mentality. He has choice words about Karen, Jesse's wealthy birth mother, for "sticking her nose job" into Jesse's life. 

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As a commenter pointed out yesterday, it's weird that a birth mother would contact a 16-year-old adoptee on a cell phone. I've been resisting the possibility that Jesse is making this whole birth parent story up. But she's right. It is weird. How would his birth mother get that number?  It's also weird that married birth parents would go to the trouble of contacting their son only to later dump him by e-mail. Jesse has become cynical about therapy. He doesn't see the point of it. He doesn't understand what it's supposed to do for him. If it turns out he's lying, then yeah, he's in a rut, because the point of therapy is, if nothing else, is to become more honest with yourself.

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She informs him that she's ending Sunil's treatment. It's obviously not working, and she thinks it would just be better for Arun, the osteopath, to subdue him with something stronger than Effexor. Obviously she is unaware of what this might do to the plant Sunil's been dumping it in. She gives Paul a check for this session, and an extra one as courtesy pay. Paul tries to talk her out of this decision, but when he refuses to tell her what Sunil's been saying about her, she gets angry. When he offers to give her a referral so that she can deal with her "issues" she leaves, accusing him of being under Sunil's "spell." Interesting. Are there other people under "his spell?" Like, Julia? Before she leaves, she mention something about him being "an attractive man." She wonders why he hasn't moved on. Uh, maybe because you're keeping him on a $25 allowance? 

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Granted, Jesse's going through a traumatic crisis. Almost as impulsively, he decided to visit his birth parents in Westchester on the same day. Because he showed up, unseen, outside their house a few hours before the agreed on time, he learns (unknown to Kevin and Karen) that they have at least one other child, a boy in a wheelchair. Devastated, he decides to go off and "get a milkshake," which turns out, after further elaboration, to mean get stoned. By the time he returns, Kevin and Karen have clearly worked to disguise all evidence of children. 

As Jesse suspected last week, they are "kinda assholes." Although this may be somewhat genetic, since Jesse then proceeds to offer them blood, or organs, or whatever it is he suspects they might want for their "sickly child," in exchange for tuition to art school. This is when, according to Jesse, they "kicked him out."

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Sunil is in the waiting room fiddling with a radio, trying to get BBC International for news about a monsoon that has been raging for days in the village where his parents were raised. He complains to Paul about the impossibility of getting news in basketball-obsessed New York. It amazes me that a fiftyish math professor from Calcutta would not know about this thing called the Internet, but the show seems set on creating this very ambiguous, anachronistic character with vaguely rural roots who is obviously deeply depressed, suffering from culture shock, and genuine despair over a terrible disaster that may be killing aunts, uncles and cousins -- but may also be plotting, by implication, some kind of honor killing.

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Poor Jesse. He's been working so steadily on getting everyone to abandon him and now he's practically drowning in love. Roberto's been helping him with his math homework (like Paul helped Max earlier in the week). Marissa's gone into a depression at the possibility of losing him to Karen. Kevin, Jesse's birth father, has written him a letter explaining the circumstances of his adoption. His birth parents were teenagers when they gave him up, but eventually they married. He is not working in Africa. She is not a crack addict. It looks like Jesse has a brand-new set of middle-class parents hoping for nothing more than to reenter his life.

Even Paul wants him. At first Jesse plans to reject Kevin and Karen out of loyalty to Roberto and Marissa who have put up all these years with what he sees as his unlovabilty. "Would you want me as a son?" Jesse says, intending this as a rhetorical question. But Paul says yes.

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If only Paul could get Sunil to see the simple genius of Freud. Sunil is a math professor. Maybe Paul would have more success explaining it in Pythagorean terms? Like, when three adults live in a house and two of them are lovers, the third person's jealousy is always the sum of their passion multiplied by how directly they are related by blood.

There's an obvious germ of truth to Paul's repeated assertion that Sunil is jealous of Arun and Julia, but I must admit I find the clash between Paul's textbook psychology and Sunil's repressed cultural programming increasingly tedious. Finally in this episode, theory and story crash hard enough to allow a more nuanced and interesting narrative to emerge.

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This is a bad slip for a couple of reasons. First and foremost he's virtually given Jesse, also artistic, permission to bond with Max and potentially use him in the ongoing emotional terrorist campaign he's engaged in against the people who are trying to help him. Second, it's a lame comparison. The distance between an educated, cultured therapist and his artistic son is pretty small compared to the distance between working class Italian Catholics and their gay adoptive son. Besides, Max is just being himself. Jesse's done everything he can to make this distance as large as possible, relentlessly and openly engaging in high risk behavior, and going as far as including pictures of two guys he picked up on the beach in a school "family tree" project a few years ago.

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I find this quite an amusing metaphor for the dance of almost honest, practically honest, hardly ever really honest emotion we watch every week on "In Treatment." But that's probably not why Paul is working so hard to keep a straight face. There's something about the tone that Sunil uses to describe these women and later, his daughter-in-law Julia's "desperate" exercise workout, that sounds like the horror/excitement of a 3-year-old out on his first Halloween.

As Sunil starts to theorize, however, that Julia may be having an affair, his tone starts to turn a little ominous. Last Thursday she should have been staying home to help Arun celebrate Sunil and Kamala's wedding anniversary. But she left instead in her short skirt and perfume for one of those uninhibited celebration of vice run amok, the New York City book launch. Obviously Julia is about to bring great shame on her family and will no doubt have to be "punished" for neglecting her domestic duties to serve the needs of her client, the far-too-attractive-to-really-be-a-writer Ethan Barr. 

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One thing that hit me at the end of Tuesday night, is how incredibly lonely Paul must be. He's still grieving his father. His unsatisfying transitional relationship seems to be coming to a close. As Gina pointed out when he decided to leave therapy, he has no friends. This makes him incredibly vulnerable to unhealthy attachments to his patients. And that makes it harder to set the boundaries that need to be set. So far Paul has not made any serious mistakes as a therapist, but something tells me that this season we're going to see this loneliness lead him into some genuinely dangerous situations.

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The first two seasons of "In Treatment" dealt with this challenge by avoiding it. Some patients (Laura and Mia) were already well into therapy and so are more easily able to tap into honest emotions. Some were brought in by a highly dramatic crisis that overshadowed the personal narrative reeking of denial. (Alex bombed a kindergarten of Iraqi children; April has just discovered she has cancer; Amy wants to abort the child she and Jake have worked so hard to conceive; and Walter’s company has killed children with tainted formula.) The rest of Paul's patients have been children (Sophie and Oliver) who haven't really lived long enough to get their speeches down pat.

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"Audrina is going to [expletive] rise. She's got class," said the elder Patridge, "You know why? She's a Polish, Catholic, [expletive] full-on Italian."

At this point, reports claim she took a dainty sip from her club soda and lemon before continuing.

"I've had it. I've been a celebrity mom eight years through this Hills bullshit, but Audrina's going to the next level, baby. [Expletive] "Hills" girls -- "Hills" tramps! My baby's a star!"

Clearly moved, the reporters -- in a rare act of respect and deference -- placed their cameras on the ground and gave Lynn a round of applause that escalated to a crescendo as she closed out her remarks by graciously acknowledging her daughter's co-stars.

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For the first time in the history of the show Paul has actually said to a patient "don't speak to me like that." This to Jesse, a gay, adopted 16 year old he has been seeing for a while. It happened after Jesse (Dane Dehaan) told Paul to "put his dick back in his pants" after he expressed concern about Jesse's relationship with two older men. A lean, skittish, slutty provocateur, Jesse seems to be fueled by a diet of Adderall and negative attention. He's recently been selling his Adderall, so he's now coming off a bad behavior binge. By the end of the episode we will discover the trigger. Earlier this week Jesse received a phone message from his birth mother.

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When Paul told a patient ("April: Week 7") that she didn't have to apologize for calling him an "asshole" because he didn't want her to be "taking care of my feelings," she summed up the potential rut. "What's the point of therapy then? Teaching people to be self-obsessed? Do you really think I need more help in that department?" 

 The time has come to dial things down, and this has been done brilliantly in the first episode of Season 3, in a script co-written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Jhumpa Lahiri. 



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Back then, everyone pathologized themselves and each other. We pointed our fingers at each other and proclaimed, "narcissist," "borderline," "bipolar," "passive-aggressive," "sex addict," then unloaded our anxiety over the demons flying around our heads in our allotted 50-minute sessions. Why were the people who weren't paying $150 an hour to be showered in unconditional positive regard so damn confused?

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No, of course it doesn't matter that no one in the world openly and honestly addresses all those things. The whole point of therapy is to be way too hard on yourself so that you'll finally recognize what a total wreck you are, which will, in turn, allow you to forgive yourself for being so damn hard on yourself all the time!

What do you mean, that doesn't make any sense? Obviously your defense mechanisms are protecting you from the uncomfortable realization that I'm totally right about you. The fact that I possess such an uncanny insight into your very soul is just too threatening to your ego to bear.

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"Do you feel like a therapist right now?" I ask, taking a seat in a chair across from him.

"No, thank goodness, I don't," he says. Of course, he has that lovely soft Irish accent, so it sounds like "tank."

Byrne has just wrapped the second season of "In Treatment," the compulsively watchable HBO series in which he plays Dr. Paul Weston, a therapist in as much turmoil as his patients. It's a show that takes the same mundane setting in which we find ourselves now -- a couch and a chair, two people in a room -- and makes it the backdrop for a tense 30-minute mystery, as suspenseful as any detective show, though more intimate and contained. Last season, audiences watched as Paul grappled with his patients -- from a young and manipulative beauty in love with him to a bitter couple who seemed to loathe him, themselves and each other. Meanwhile, he fought professional exhaustion and the dissolution of his marriage, all of which he wrestled with in sessions with his own therapist, played by the incomparable Dianne Wiest. The show is based on the Israeli blockbuster, "Be' Tipul," and though it was not the crashing ratings success of, say, "The Sopranos," "In Treatment" was praised by critics and Byrne won a Golden Globe for his portrayal. Indeed, it is a triumph of understatement -- what he does not say is as magnetic as what he does.

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When Jack Bauer snaps at his bosses on "24," then not only ignores their wishes, but also breaks a few laws and tortures an innocent civilian along the way, we're temporarily emancipated from the team-player make-believe bubbles we're forced to live in, nodding in agreement with our bosses while our minds quietly calculate how long we could live on food stamps if we quit tomorrow.

And they wonder why Americans watch quite so much TV? Mavericks from "The Wire's" McNulty to "The Shield's" Vic Mackey swagger through the world, breaking rules, scoffing openly at management and making no secret of their feelings of superiority, exactly the sorts of behaviors that will get you demoted and shamed and fired and written off as a troublemaker in the real world.

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Well, I appreciate your concerns. But let me assure you, I'm doing vital and important work here. Not only is TV the defining medium of our modern culture, but it's absolutely rich with the relevant themes and shared concerns and values of all of the world's peoples. Each week, I don't simply sit through tedious, vapid televised entertainments, as you might imagine. No! I explore complex perspectives on the role of individual liberty in society, I navigate the destructive impulses of human beings in the face of our inherently temporary existence on Earth, and I uncover profound and lasting insights into the human condition!

In so doing, I bring together a vast collection of readers hungry for wisdom, self-knowledge and a burgeoning understanding of the interrelated nature of all living creatures on the earth. Together, we can touch the very soul of the universe!

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