INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
A social worker confronts the costs and exclusions of psychoanalytic practice
BY MIKE LANGLOIS
Illustration by Austin Hughes
I steal my first book on psychoanalytic theory when I am fourteen. It is Karen Horney’s The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, and I steal it from a bookstore in Worcester. I steal it because I can’t pay for it and because in its index it has an entry, “Bisexuality, discussion of, 132 ff.” (I have never seen me in print that way before. It is so amazing to finally see me in print that way!) I may never see a book like this again, so I steal it. I still have that book. Like most of my books I have from my teens and twenties it has my name on the first page, and page 77. Each book has two signatures, because one of the first things you learn from stealing books is to rip off the first page where the previous owner signed it. But no one looks on page 77.
Freshman year I read Horney, Freud, and others in high school study hall. We don’t have psychology classes; I have gotten a scholarship to a prep school that describes its curriculum as “no frills.” It is an expensive school and it’s going to get me into college and my parents are paying good money to have me go there. When I get caught stealing books I can’t say much, especially about bisexuality, so I get a job as a dishwasher for $3.50 an hour because if I need to read so much, my parents tell me, I am going to have to earn some money.
I bus tables and scrape dried egg yolk off plates, which is why I can tell you we hate it when you stack your plates because although you think you are being helpful it means the bottom ring of the plate gets yolk on it from the plate underneath and we have to scrape twice as much. I become a nursing attendant my junior year. Washing people pays more than washing dishes. I get to talk to them too, and I like that.
I am growing up in a small French-Canadian mill town. I never hear of “processing” experiences or emotions. So I don’t process the seventy-year-old man who punches me in the face when I walk in his room. I don’t process putting restraints on a crying woman who looks like my grandmother. That was just in one day’s work, but I am making seven dollars an hour now. I am reading Freud about bisexuality and getting punched in the face and I am in high school. I am sixteen.
“I’m crying because all you capital-P psychoanalysts are always going to think of me as a clumsy thief who needs more education and help getting dressed up.”
I start working the 11-7 shift on weekends. No one hits you on the night shift because they’re asleep. I do my homework overnight. My sleep will never return to normal.
I get into college with a partial scholarship. I can take out a loan for the rest, they reassure me. I can go to college! I don’t give another thought about the loan and enroll in a psychology course first semester. I get a job writing for the school press office, another one as a tutor, then a third one working at a local pet store on the weekends. Now I can afford a laptop—an IBM that weighs a ton.
My scholarship is donated in the name of a wealthy alum who died. The college makes me write a letter to her parents each semester telling them I’m grateful to be at college and describing how hard I am working. They never write back. Sophomore year I’m asked to come back early for student orientation. They put me on the Minority Panel to tell the incoming class what it is like to be a student on “financial assistance.” I don’t tell them I’ve stolen books to learn about psychology or bisexuality. I don’t tell them about signing on page 77 either–I’m sure I’m the only one who has stolen things here.
I meet with a psychology professor about grad school. I ask her what the quickest course of study is so that I can become a therapist. I can’t afford five years of clinical psychology, I tell her. I hadn’t known that it would take so long. She tells me I can get a social work degree in twenty-seven months! So I go to Smith.
Smith is confusing. The first day I am on campus I stand gratefully at the main iron gate and almost throw up. It is fancy and they have receptions where other White people talk about racial justice. When they do, my Black classmates are quiet and look uncomfortable. I’m popping antacids now, but we are finally talking about psychoanalytic theory. I know people want to be in private practice but they won’t talk about it in class. We are supposed to go into agency work, case management, or macro, one classmate from a place called the Upper West Side tells me. But that doesn’t pay much, I tell her, you can make good money in private practice, can’t you? She stares at me and I realize that I am now supposed to be ashamed about wanting to make money.
I’m already in more debt than anyone in my family has made in a year. I know better than to be difficult when my loan check doesn’t arrive on time, even if my credit card is maxed out. It is always maxed out. I am on my third car, a twenty-year-old truck I have to start each morning by popping the hood and pulling on an ignition chain. I’m often late to internship that winter.
I volunteer at a food pantry. They let me bring home a bag of groceries each week. One week I run out. A friend of mine who is also in grad school comes to visit me and shares her food stamps with me so we can buy groceries. We are in master’s programs. We are using food stamps. I am not supposed to want to make good money.
Second year I will be working with adults, so I need to wear dress clothes at my agency. I don’t know what to do, I tell one of my classmates. She’s a fifty-year-old radical lesbian former lawyer from Connecticut who has talked about labor in a few of our classes, so I think she’ll be OK with me. Can I wear turtlenecks? Will that be OK? That weekend she drives down to Connecticut where she has friends who are still lawyers. She comes back to campus on Monday and presents me with two bags on the steps of our dormitory. Dress clothes. They bought them. For me. I start to feel ashamed but these women are smart. They have anticipated this. They tell me I can pay it forward someday. I promise. In graduate school I learn that gratitude is always accompanied by nausea.
I apply for jobs. I ask about salaries and no one will tell me an amount. Where I come from everyone knows what the minimum wage is. Everyone knows what the going rate is. I’m the first member of my family to get a graduate degree but I have $60,000 in debt. How can I know if I can afford to take your job? I can’t pay things forward if I don’t make good money. I end up in a new mill town working with people who make sense to me. I can wear sneakers to work because I am going to the projects. My dress clothes still fit. I open a part-time practice because I have learned that part-time practices are OK if you have a real job. I can afford to shop at Whole Foods. I develop a taste for expensive stinky cheeses.
One day I am at the cheese aisle in Whole Foods, and I see a woman who looks familiar. We start talking about cheeses. Turns out her name is Goldie and she’s a Smith alum. She be- comes a friend. I’m sorry Goldie, I never told you until now that I’m a thief and stole books but I couldn’t bear it. She gets me a gig supervising at Harvard Medical School. I don’t ask if they pay at the interview. I am eating stinky cheese and supervising people at Harvard Medical School.
I start working with video games in therapy. I am using Nintendo 64 games to help motivate kids in special education. Goldie and other people say I should go get a doctorate. I am now $90,000 in debt. I have ideas and I work for Harvard Medical School for free and I am $90,000 in debt. I cannot afford to go for a PhD. If I attend a psychoanalytic institute I won’t be able to work for Harvard Medical School for free. But I can afford to do some courses. I buy books now, and a website and a blog.
I start blogging twice a week about gaming, technology, and therapy. Sometimes I even dare to talk about class, ask why the “tech guy” is always in the basement room without windows. Someone asks me to present at a conference, and then another. They do not pay me. I take my blog posts and edit them. Here, I say, I liked thinking and talking about gaming and psychoanalysis so much that I wrote a book about it. I do not have a doctorate but I have some ideas. I publish the book on Amazon.
I spend $200 on these postcards when I am presenting at a Harvard Medical School conference. This is where I meet you, my psychoanalytic colleague, stationing a table selling books. I come over and tell you that I have an e-book and ask since I am presenting today if I could leave a stack of these postcards with my book info next to the other presenters’ books. You say, unfortunately you can’t. For the next several presentations, for the next decade, you say I can’t put my postcards there. I keep them in a bag in my basement.
I’m reminded of this at a psychoanalytic conference in New York City. My supervisor has encouraged me to attend. I pay good money to work with her and she is worth every cent. I sit next to her during a session on race, class, and fees. Something comes up in the session about debt. My heart is beating. I take the hotel pen and scribble $126,000 on my notepad and show it to her. I immediately regret that I did. The next day we go out for lunch. I tell her I think I need to talk to her about my class history at our next appointment, but of course not now.
But then we are talking about the postcards. And I am crying and realizing, shit, I am “processing” things. I’m in Le Pain Quotidien in Midtown Manhattan and I’m processing things. I’m probably going to write about it, and then this woman who supports my writing, read my book, she’s going to read this and then she is going to know that I’m a thief who stole books. And I’m crying because all you capital-P psychoanalysts are always going to think of me as a clumsy thief who needs more education and help getting dressed up.
Which always brings me back to this book table and to you, browsing colleagues. I paid to join your psychoanalytic association. I keep seeing you year after year, and I still have these postcards. I can’t get rid of them. I paid good money for them.
I have paid for many of these ideas, stolen others, but some of them are mine. I think they are worth something—to me, to you, to us. Yes, I was a book thief, but I wrote one to pay you back. Can we get less certain about who owns things and who belongs where? I’m not sure I’m grateful any more, but I know I’m not nauseous. Are you certain there is no room for me there? Are you sure?
Mike Langlois, MSW, has over 30 years of experience practicing psychotherapy with adults and families and is slowly getting better at it. He is the author of Reset: Video Games & Psychotherapy and a teaching associate in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Published in issue 58.1, Spring 2024.