The center of Showtime's brilliant doc series "Couples Therapy," Dr. Orna Guralnik discusses therapy in a pandemic and where we go from here.
There was a bombshell dropped during the second season of Showtime’s riveting documentary series “Couples Therapy,” one that changed my view of the show’s central figure, psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Orna Guralnik, forever.
After watching the early screeners, I sent a simple, but urgent message out to relevant parties — TV professionals who are as singularly-obsessed with the series as I am: “Dr. Orna has a cat!”
Some people were shocked, others delighted, still others left wondering how we didn’t see this development coming.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
In September 2019, Showtime launched “Couples Therapy,” a revolutionary series that effectively captured the titular experience with couples seeking insight and guidance on their fractured relationships. That’s not an assessment to be taken lightly. On the surface, it seems impossible. How could two people ever reach the place of vulnerability and honesty required to enact change in their relationship while surrounded by TV cameras, knowing that everything they express had the potential to eventually be seen in the homes of their friends and family?
While there’s much to be said about the technical and practical lengths gone to by filmmakers Josh Kriegman, Elyse Steinberg, and Eli Despres who created the series, viewers will tell you that the key to the show’s success lay in the watchful eyes of Guralnik.
In the room with the show’s participants — not patients, an important distinction when sacrificing the privacy of therapy in exchange for reaching a wider audience who could also be aided by the revelations within sessions — Guralnik isn’t there to cure or chastise, she’s functions as a shepherd. Those in her flock are free to explore where they wish, as she guards against danger, while every now and then a sheep needs a little nudge in the right direction to get them where they want to go.
The brilliant thing about so much therapy is the ability to absolve yourself of having to invest in the other person. You pay for a mental tune-up and don’t have to care about the overall well-being of your psychological mechanic. It’s a service industry, and more often than not, being able to view a therapist as a blank screen on which to project your issues makes it all the easier to temporarily unload your shame and secrets to a virtual stranger.
That said, it’s not necessarily the case when a psychoanalyst is not your psychoanalyst, even more so when the psychoanalyst in question is prominently featured as the central figure in a documentary series, in which case you want to know every single thing about them. So it goes for Guralnik.
Which brings us back to the cat.
One snippet of Guralnik’s personal life that made it into the first season of “Couples Therapy” with some regularity is her dog Nico, who is often featured settled in her dog bed throughout sessions, but making sure to get welcome or goodbye scritches from patients as often as necessary. Nico was such a breakout star, in fact, that the second season opened with her boasting her own doggie cam and sharing her adventures out and about the office and on the streets of New York.
In Season 2, when the realities of COVID-19 descend and the city shut down, forcing the series to make the transition to video conferencing like so many therapy sessions around the world, the audience — and participants — get a new window into Guralnik’s world. Like seeing your grade school teacher at the grocery store or your pastor at the gym, it was a glimpse behind the curtain and it was as magical and unnerving as you’d expect.
And so we learn that Guralnik’s world includes a cat. And I learned, in a recent interview with the good doctor for IndieWire, that the cat’s name is Speedy, that there used to be another cat who could not adapt to Nico’s addition to the family, and that Speedy is trying to make things work, maintaining a good relationship with the humans while utterly despising the dog.
Getting the scoop on Speedy was exhilarating, I’m not going to lie. But Speedy is even more important as a construct in this sense, than he is as a cat. Good therapeutic relationships are about boundaries and in light of the pandemic, boundaries established with in the larger psychiatric community were suddenly forced to shift in order to meet demand for a populace in crisis.
“The boundary is more permeable between patient and analyst,” Guralnik said, regarding the shifting dynamic during the mass shutdowns. “And everyone’s at home. I’m talking to them when they’re in all sorts of unpredictable scenes, like talking to me from a closet space, from a bathroom, shirtless with a baby hanging on them, people coming in and out of the screen.”
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