In Treatment: Week 4

The following were originally posted to Shrink Rap.

Frances

Paul rejects Frances yet again. He wouldn't run lines with her last week, and this week he won't accept tickets to her play. He suggests she bring her sick sister or her estranged daughter, but Frances isn't biting.

She talks about how her dying mother came to see her in play; they celebrated with champagne. But the trip was hard on her mother and she feels guilty for having had her mother come at all. She was no good when mom was sick-- "inept" and vomited in the hospital sink. Her sister's illness has revived all these issue around death.

Who is Frances?

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Sunil

Sunil remains kind of creepy. He sneeked into his daughter-in-law's private study and found her birth control pills---proof, he says, that she's having an affair. Is he delusional? And he had this disturbing dream where he was burying an animal, one that had fallen from a cliff, and when he awoke, he went to his son's bedroom and watched him and his wife sleep. For fifteen minutes. Reallycreepy.

We learn that Sunil's former lover broke off their relationship on the library steps and then threw herself off a bridge. He was questioned when the police investigated her death, an apparent suicide.

Paul continues to confront Sunil. The birth control pills might not be proof of an affair. Sunil wants to change the subject and Paul stops him. The relationship Sunil had with his lover is similar to his son's relationship with his wife, and this is why Sunil is so troubled by it. When the patient disagrees, Paul does not back down--- he tells Sunil how it is. Does anyone else find it insulting when a therapist insists that a patient feels something he says he doesn't? Sunil considers Paul's theory, thanks him and leaves.

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