“I was visiting home, and my father busted out of his office, kind of freaking out about this session he had just been through with a couple,” Kriegman recalled recently. Steinberg’s father-in-law is a therapist, as are both of Kriegman’s parents. Kriegman and Steinberg both grew up in upper-middle-class Jewish families on the East Coast, a milieu that does not so much condone therapy as consider it a part of functional adult life, as routine as filing your taxes or brushing your teeth. What happens in treatment is meant to stay there.Ī few years ago, though, the documentary filmmakers Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg decided that it might be worth trying to peek under the Freudian slip. The promise of confidentiality is sacred.
Sessions happen behind firmly closed doors, the sound of patients’ voices masked by the whirr of white-noise machines. In this oversharing, overshared age, the psychotherapist’s consulting room may be one of the last purely private sanctums left. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
