circa 1930: Hollywood film star, Dorothy Sebastian (1903 - 1957) undergoing treatment for bronchial congestion with a sun-ray lamp at MGM studios. (Photo by General Photographic Agency/Getty Images)

Diagnosis #1. MELANCHOLY

Before Daylight Savings Time ends on Nov. 6, and we wake up to a pitch-black morning in our narrow, airshaft view apartment, we’re picking up a FeelBright Light (sadlight.com). The miniature sun lamp (proven to alleviate the symptoms of Season Affective Disorder) can be attached to the underside of a hat brim for sunshine all day.

For talk therapy, we may try the Treatment Center (247 East 82nd Street) of the New York Psychoanalysis Institute. Their specialty is low-cost analysis for footloose and insurance-free single women “struggling with relationship issues and to find themselves as independent adults with a modification of their relationships to their mothers”—a demographic usually priced out of regular therapy. (Alvy Singer had to pony up for Annie Hall’s analysis, and that was ’77, when it was still chic.)

No one’s talked about St. John’s wort (supplementwarehouse.com), a.k.a. hypericum, since around the time Prozac Nation came out, but it still works roughly as well as Elizabeth Wurtzel’s panacea, according to some clinicians. (And unlike analysis, it still costs much less.) Another from the herb garden, lavender, reduced depression scores in residents of college dorms and hospice centers alike. There’s a lavender massage at Aura Wellness Spa (49 West 33rd Street) and D.I.Y. supplies at Enfleurage (321 Bleecker Street).

Exercise (though the mere suggestion makes us blue) relieves the symptoms of clinical depression so reliably some doctors are thinking of prescribing it. We’re no shrink, but we couldn’t help but notice Alec Baldwin, who confessed severe depression in his 2009 memoir, A Promise to Ourselves, is much sunnier since taking up with the beautiful young yogini Hilaria Thomas. She teaches at Yoga Vida (99 University Place), for reference.

Pharmaceutical stalwarts can catch a lecture from Dr. Ivan K. Goldberg, “the wizard of psychopharmacology,” hosted by the Mood Disorders Support Group (Bernstein Pavilion, Beth Israel Hospital, 15th Street between First and Second avenues). The organization also hosts rap sessions for unipolar depression and bipolar disorder, including a special one for 20-somethings, the most common age of onset.

Next: NARCISSISM

Diagnosis #2. NARCISSISM

First, there’s nothing wrong with us—clinically speaking. Last year Narcissistic Personality Disorder was removed from the D.S.M. because too many are afflicted. Especially here in New York, narcissists are more likely to emerge as leaders in any given field.

Consider Mayor Bloomberg, New York’s leader in terms served and net worth, and the subject of the New Yorker’s Valentine’s Day cover, in which he gazed dreamily at himself in a heart-shape mirror with a box of chocolates, “To: Me.”

“I thought it was cute, looking in the mirror,” Mayor Bloomberg said of the illustration.

Why get help if we’re so great?

“Narcissists end up being lonely,” said Wendy Behary, author of Disarming the Narcissist. “They end up losing contact with their children, losing partners, and sometimes they lose their job.”

So we don’t die alone, she recommends Schema Therapy (Cognitive Therapy Center of New York, 130 West 42nd Street), in which the therapists go deep, using empathetic confrontation to “feed back the experience of being in this one-to-one relationship with them.”

That seems ripe for transference. We may try simply limiting our Facebook time. Excessive social networking can exacerbate narcissistic tendencies, according to Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology and Cal State Dominguez Hills, plus, defriending will free up more time for achievement.

For that, we recommend Self Control (visitsteve.com), the Mac OSX application that blocks Twitter and Facebook, available for free download courtesy of Steve Lambert—as long as you don’t call him a coder.

“I am an artist with a broad set of skills,” Mr. Lambert writes on his website.

If that doesn’t sublimate our libido, we’ll go join the chorus of the human microphone at a general assembly at Occupy Wall Street (Zuccotti Park, Broadway and Liberty Street). We’ll try to reach a consensus: are we narcissists or are we the 99 percent?

Next: SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION

Diagnosis: #3. SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION

When OkCupid ranked the country’s most promiscuous cities in August (based on the number of users in the area looking for casual hookups), we didn’t even crack the top 10. New York, maybe it’s time to talk about it.

For malformations and mechanical issues, Dr. John Mulhall (Memorial Sloan Kettering, 1275 York Avenue) specializes in—here we go—erectile dysfunction, Peyronie’s disease, premature ejaculation, anhedonia, sperm extraction, penile implants and penile reconstructive surgery. And he wrote the book the on sex after prostate cancer. For female troubles, try the Medical Center for Female Sexuality (110 East 40^th Street); Clinical director Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus wrote her dissertation on vibrators.

Speaking of which: tasteful sex shop Babeland (94 Rivington Street) regularly hosts a free G-spot clinic. The next one is Nov. 10, at 8 p.m. In case we end up with a flashback-inducing case of the sex ed sweats, we’re liable to lubricate at Apotheke (9 Doyers Street) first. It’s a quick stroll down the Bowery, and the mix of beautiful people, bartenders in white coats and overpriced cocktails with purported aphrodisiac effects will set the mood of pseudo-medical humiliation.

Sometimes emotional or intimacy issues are the root of the sexual dysfunction, according to sex health experts and one of our ex-boyfriends. If we need a clean break without having to say, “You broke my junk,” we can count on the mercenaries at iDump4U (idump4u.com) to make the call or send the email, at the indecently low price of $10. (They charge more to call off engagements and serve divorce papers.)

To regain some dignity, we may scour n + Personals (npluspersonals.tumblr.com), the personals site of n+1 magazine, for a nice new lover who, if not a sex god, has at least read The History of Sexuality.

Next: ANGER

Diagnosis #4. ANGER

The tricky thing about anger is that it’s just part of the range of human emotions until we throw a punch in the iPhone 4S line at the Apple Store and find ourselves down at 100 Centre Street with a court order to take an anger management course.

If it comes to that, we’ll have Siri schedule a session with Dr. J. Ryan Fuller (New York Behavioral Health, 230 Park Avenue); he specializes in and enjoys working with hot heads.

“A lot of clinicians don’t like treating angry people,” he said, explaining that they’re unlikely to be receptive to treatment, since they’ve often been coerced into it by a judge or a spouse (see: Chris Brown, Sean Penn, Naomi Campbell).

Dr. Fuller and his cohort use cognitive-behavioral therapy to defuse dysfunctional thoughts, complementing it with relaxation therapies like breathing techniques and progressive muscle relaxation, though we figure we may as well learn the latter on the cheap with some New Agey guided relaxation CDs (Amazon.com, $13).

Something as simple as laughter does a lot to alleviate anger, according to Dr. Fuller. None of our funny friends call us back anymore, but the New York Comedy Festival (various, nycomedyfestival.com) with Kathy Griffin, Louis C.K., Tracy Morgan and others, kicks off Nov. 9.

We may stay out of trouble altogether by avoiding the triggers of aggression. Crowding and bad smells increase the likelihood of a violent outburst, so no C train. And since the city bike-share program doesn’t start until next summer, we may pick up a commuter bicycle at Toga Bike Shop (110 West End Avenue at 64th Street) and hope we can stay out of rows with taxi drivers.

Next: INSOMNIA

Diagnosis #5. INSOMNIA

The number one rule for insomniacs is: Don’t go to bed unless you’re sleepy (or getting lucky). Which is to say, don’t bring work and its attendant agita into your R.E.M. temple.

In fact, leave the Blackberry far away. That phantom buzz we feel when it’s lodged in our back pocket is a Pavlovian testament to its grip on our mental health. Arianna Huffington, who recently gave a TED talk declaring a good night’s sleep a “feminist issue,” leaves both of hers in the bathroom at night.

“Even if it’s not going off, it’s a stimulus that represents stress,” said Dr. Fuller. Get a real alarm clock, and turn it facing away from you.

For the high-powered, Blackberry-prone types, there’s Dr. Benjamin Fialkoff’s Center for Peak Performance (Ridgewood, N.J.). His cognitive therapy involves hypnotic deep relaxation tailored to high-powered executives and others who have a big morning just about every night.

To keep the rest of the still-churning city out of the bedroom, make an appointment with Mason Wyatt at City Soundproofing (360 West 34th Street), who counts silence-lovers like the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and NASA among his clients.

Here we might suggest an oatmeal raisin cookie and a glass of milk (Insomnia Cookies, 50 West Eighth Street) for the tryptophan, but we would only be fooling the occasionally sleepless. The true insomniac knows it’s hopeless. Likewise, melatonin stops working for you and the sleeping pills make you stop working.

But at least you’re in New York. It’s safe here now, and the subways run all night. Enjoy the emptiness of washing machines (Lucky 999, 55 Second Avenue) and elliptical machines (24 Hour Fitness, 136 Crosby Street), and manicurist’s chairs (Hair Party 24 Hours, 76 Madison Avenue), with no one but the ghost of fellow tosser-and-turner W.H. Auden.

Or comfort yourself with the words of that charming auntie Margaret Thatcher, another insomniac, who once said, “Sleep is for wimps!”

Next: ANXIETY

Diagnosis #6. ANXIETY

Swarthmore psychology professor and former Times op-ed columnist Barry Schwartz might have been onto something with his The Paradox of Choice. The modern array of consumer choices has not made us freer but paralyzed us with doubt and dissatisfaction.

We can’t even choose which anti-anxiety drug we need to calm us down long enough to decide what we want for lunch. Klonopin? Xanax? Ativan? And then there are the handful of hippie alternatives, like GABA (vitaminshoppe.com), a neurotransmitter similar to that produced by barbiturates; or Inositol Hexanicotinate (vrp.com), a form of Vitamin B sometimes prescribed for Xanax withdrawal; or Kava Kava (konakavafarm.com), a Polynesian root that teenagers hoard like salvia. The F.D.A. is cagey on Kava because it can wreck your liver—though no faster than the glass of wine we need before even entering a party.

Speaking of parties, eternal wallflowers may want to take a free online diagnostic survey at the Columbia Social Anxiety Research Clinic (columbia-socialanxiety.org). If you score awkward enough, you could qualify to participate in one of their studies, which means a 50 percent chance of free drugs (Sorry, control group!) and a 100 percent chance of surveys.

Or you could try the fashionable, Buddhist-inflected school of mindfulness meditation with the Mindfulness Meditation New York Collaborative (Makom Center JCC, 76th Street and Amsterdam Avenue), promoted by Goldie Hawn and Oprah Winfrey.

Then again, perhaps anxiety is not entirely a contemporary affliction. In The Concept of Anxiety, Søren Kierkegaard argued that anxiety is as much a part of life as free will, an aspect of existence since Adam ate the apple (Sorry, Siri). In fact, the Kierkegaard Society is based right uptown at Fordham University’s Philosophy Department (441 East Fordham Road). If we get in now they may invite us to December’s conference, “Kierkegaard and the Cognitive Sciences.”

As the gloomy Dane once wrote, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.”

Illustration by Fred Harper

In 1909, after a six-day journey from Vienna with his associates Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, Sigmund Freud arrived in New York Harbor and spent a week sightseeing in the city. He had traveled to America to give a series of lectures on his “talking cure” at Clark University in Massachusetts. Before heading north, he spent time walking in Central Park and visiting the tenements of the Lower East Side. He saw the amusement rides on Coney Island and marveled at the antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum. Though his physical presence in the city was short-lived, New York has become Freud’s cultural home in the U.S. One hundred years later, the archetype of the neurotic, upper-middle-class Upper West Sider lying on the couch—perpetuated by everyone from Philip Roth to Woody Allen—is still how much of the public thinks of psychoanalysis. (“Tell me about your relationship with your mother…”) Several generations have been raised on the notion of psychoanalysis as New Yorker cartoon.

This is something that analytic institutions like the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute must reckon with.
Inside NYPSI’s headquarters on the Upper East Side, the cream-colored walls and dark brown carpet give off a sterile, medical feel, like a photograph of a hospital lobby from decades past. Posters and busts of Freud adorn the space. NYPSI, the oldest analytic institution in the country, celebrated its 100th anniversary this year. The faculty here have a reputation among fellow analysts as the most Freudian of Freudians, but they are nevertheless trying to keep up with changing times.

Sitting in an upstairs office was Maxine Gann, a Ph.D. who trained at the institute in the ’90s and was in the first class that was entirely female, and Roger Rahtz, M.D., the president of the board, who enrolled at the Institute in 1973.

The NYPSI, first known as the New York Psychoanalytic Society, was founded in 1911 by Dr. A.A. Brill, at the time Freud’s biggest champion in the States and the person responsible for bringing the good doctor to America. It was here that Freud’s disciples like Ernst Kris, Charles Brenner and Margaret Mahler began developing Freud’s theory in the United States.

“It’s not just about doing psychoanalysis anymore,” said Dr. Gann, speaking of the practice today. “Nobody so far as I know would raise an eyebrow if an analyst prescribed an antidepressant for a patient who was really in a bad way.”

“Among some,” Dr. Rahtz clarified.

“Well, at this instant.”

“To some degree,” he conceded.

“There’s a much broader, more open mind-set,” Dr. Gann said. “I’ll tell people to lay down on the couch and ‘tell me more’ if I think that’s the best treatment for my patient. But I know people who say, ‘I wish my analyst would shut up.’”

Indeed, among analysts there is little consensus on how to keep Freud relevant, and like the rest of the field, the NYPSI is trying to expand and make room for methods other than classical Freudian analysis. Even so, they still have a reputation among the analytic community of being dogmatic. One analyst, a social worker with a Ph.D. in psychology who did an externship at the NYPSI a few years ago, described a class syllabus that had been reprinted since 1980, the date crossed out and a more current one put in its place.

Further adding to the difficulty of negotiating such a balance is that the discourse is taking place in a cultural milieu in which the figure of Freud is at best a looming historical presence, and at worst a punch line.

By the time the man who invented the “talking cure” was dying from cancer of the mouth, he was a public celebrity and revered in his field, though his controversial reputation, which persists today, was already in place. An unsigned editorial published in The New York Times two days after his passing at age 83 in 1939 questioned his clinical validity in the same breath that it championed him as a great thinker: “Whether he was a true scientist or not, Freud’s place is secure if for no other reason than that he broke down ancient taboos and cleared the way for a new approach to the mind.” The literary scholar Harold Bloom, writing in The Times in 1986, the centennial of Freud’s establishment of his private practice in Vienna, called Freud “The Greatest Modern Writer” (in his headline, no less) while dismissing psychoanalysis as a kind of living fossil that “still survives among us, as an isolated and disputable therapy.” A 2008 report published in The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association said psychoanalytic theory thrived in English departments and in the arts—from film to television to theater—but was treated as “desiccated and dead” by psychology programs in universities. As Freud’s stature as a historical figure grows, analysts must treat him as something more than pop culture fodder; he is also their field’s founder and its seminal thinker.

This task is increasingly important; today, Freud is more of a pop icon than ever. A recent nonfiction book about Freud’s cocaine use was a best-seller at the end of the summer. A star-studded blockbuster film directed by David Cronenberg and starring Viggo Mortensen as Freud recasts the father of analysis’s relationship with Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his patient—herself a future analyst—Sabina Spielrein (played by Keira Knightly) as a sexed-up psychological thriller. It recently became a critical smash at its debut during the New York Film Festival. The success of Freud’s Last Session—a modest but thrilling one-act play now in its second year of sold-out shows off Broadway—should come as no surprise. To much of the public at large, Freud and his theories are dated oddities, stigmatized as disproved, even as they help sell innumerable books and movie tickets. Ask an analyst, however, and they’ll tell you Freudian analysis is alive and well—even if its form is unrecognizable to those familiar with the cliché of the couch-bound patient being asked by an old man to “hear more about that.”

In the office of Lewis Aron, a Ph.D. and director of the N.Y.U. Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, there were two leather chairs, a long couch and a wispy line drawing of Freud hanging behind the reclining chair where he sat slouching as he spoke to The Observer. We entered the room and inspected the furniture and he told us to take a seat—not to lie down, mind you—on the couch.

“The mistake most people make is that the way they are defining analysis is how it was in the 1950s, in its heyday, which is really when it was first being defined. If they then look out in the world and wonder, ‘Is analysis alive or dying?’ … My feeling is that if you see psychoanalysis as something that’s alive and changing and growing,” he trailed off, the portrait of Freud frowning heavily over his shoulder.

“Maybe it’s not going to look like I expected it to look,” he added, “but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

One of the country’s preeminent programs in analysis, N.Y.U. postdoc was established in 1961 by Bernard Kalinkowitz; it was the first university program to give non-M.D. psychologists a way of formally training in psychoanalysis. It is known for using a progressive curriculum, incorporating—like many other institutions these days—various methods of psychology into the general spectrum of analysis. But Freud is still a complicated influence. Some students discussed an anxiety of being branded “too Freudian.” Last year, the program renamed the “Freudian” track the “contemporary Freudian” track.

In his office on the Upper West Side, Dr. Aron hosts reading groups that speak to this assimilation of various theoretical models into classical Freudian practice (his forthcoming book is called Towards a Progressive Psychoanalysis). A few weeks ago a group of five women joined Mr. Aron to discuss Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris, a book about Jean-Martin Charcot, with whom Freud studied hypnosis. The conversation turned to the issue of countertransference, or how much an analyst’s own individual take on the treatment should be brought into a session with a patient. It is a topic debated by everyone from classical analysts to relational psychologists to contemporary Freudians and more progressive analysts like Professor Aron.

“Freud defines psychoanalysis in contrast to suggestion,” he said. There was a brief silence and the conversation continued about Ms. Hustvedt’s book. Later one of the students in the class interrupted.

“You say we’re not supposed to be influencing our patients,” the student said. “Just by sitting and having an expression on our face we do have influence.”

“I was being ironic,” Dr. Aron said.

Another student chimed in: “If we were so influential, wouldn’t we see dramatic improvements in our patients immediately? We’re not influential. We’re not.”

This line of conversation doesn’t have an end. The level of an analyst’s presence in a session has been a question since the beginning of psychoanalysis. Though Freud insisted that he be seated out of his patient’s view, he would go on walks with them. He would even feed them (admittedly, exceptions and not the rule). The persistence of the debate speaks to the difficulties of reconciling the Great Man’s ideas with what modern therapy has become.

Dr. Aron defines Freudian analysis in broad terms with many subsets—a belief in the unconscious (or, as another professor put it, “Anyone who is middle class and has gone to college is a Freudian”).

“As an educator,” Professor Aron said, “to call yourself an analyst or call yourself a psychologist in 2011 and not have a pretty good familiarity with Freud is just to be uneducated. It seems to me that it’s part of anybody’s good education. That doesn’t mean that people are identified as working in a Freudian tradition. Our Freudians are adapting Freud to modern life. Nobody’s practicing the way he practiced in Vienna. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Most Americans, in 2011, do not want to hear a theory—even a highly metaphorical one—that deep down they desire to kill their one parent in order to make love to the other. As Steven Ellman, of the contemporary Freudian faculty at N.Y.U. postdoc, put it, Americans have a “very narrow view of Freud,” one that is grounded predominantly in the Oedipus complex. Many of his writings, however, moved away from that.

“Narcissism,” Dr. Ellman said, “something that shouldn’t be unknown in New York society, was a major aspect of his theory.”
No matter. Was Freud a coke addict? Did he have a love affair with his sister-in-law? And besides the torrid details of his biography, there is the much-documented misogyny, his often laughable treatment of homosexuality in his writing and his inability to say when he is wrong. Arnold Rothstein, director of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training at N.Y.U. Medical Center, has noted in his own work when Freud reaches the limits of psychology, he blames it on biology.

Freud is not respected clinically, but for all his contentiousness, he’s an easier sell as a pop culture figure than he is a scientist. Dr. Alan Bass, a psychoanalyst and a first generation student of Derrida (he translated four of his books), teaches Freud in both a clinical and an academic setting (at the New York Freudian Society and in the philosophy department of the New School, respectively). He said that with philosophy students he stresses how Freud’s theory is constructed and held together. With analysts in training, he emphasizes clinical principles—what a given theory has to do with the way one works with a patient.

“I would say Freud’s clinical reputation in my very particular view is mixed,” he said. “It contains clinical genius, it provided clinical tools that are indispensable but there are also major problems and blind spots in it at the same time. To be really responsible about Freud is to really come to grips with both sides.”

This is a time of 140-character rants and news updated by the half-minute, all of it breaking. The NYPSI’s Dr. Gann put it succinctly: “the zeitgeist runs counter to what an analytic perspective and process necessitates.”

WOODY ALLEN HAD A SESSION BARBARA WALTERS HAD A SESSION ALEC BALDWIN HAD A SESSION JERRY STILLER HAD A SESSION MARCIA GAY HARDEN HAD A SESSION WARNER WOLF HAD A SESSION CELESTE HOLM HAD A SESSION DICK CAVETT HAD A SESSION JOHN CLEESE HAD A SESSION T.R. KNIGHT HAD A SESSION PATRICIA HEATON HAD A SESSION DAN LAURIA HAD A SESSION

So goes the sign out front of the theater where Freud’s Last Session is playing. It is referring to the celebrities who have gone to see the play. Based on The Question of God by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr., it imagines an encounter between C.S. Lewis and Freud on the day England declared war on Germany, a few weeks before Freud’s death. The two are in Freud’s study in London; Freud provides the comic relief. He talks to a non-complacent dog. He says things like, “Psychoanalysis does not profess the absolutes of religion. Thank God.” As a recurring joke, he answers the phone with a drastically drawn-out Teutonic “Hey-looooo?” When Lewis enters the room for the first time and hesitates before the famous couch in the study, Freud sneers at him and tells him to sit in the chair by his desk. That got a big laugh from the crowd.

“From day one, Freud was a huge magnet to pull people,” said Mark St. Germain, the production’s playwright of the audience-garnering subject.

Psychoanalysis changes along with culture, but Freud stays the same. Analysts and theorists continue to work with him, to build on his foundations, but to much of the American public he remains a cocaine-sniffing, whacky old man, the kind who speaks of an unseen other, buried deep inside us, who really just wants to play house with Mommy. His life’s work, of course, goes deeper than that, and what he created persists—but he remains, as one practicing Freudian called him, “a figure of levity.” For that, Freud is the great patriarch of mental health: both feared and respected, hated and idealized.

Near the beginning of Mr. St. Germain’s play, there is a moment that alludes to a scene from Freud’s childhood that is recounted in Peter Gay’s brilliant biography Freud: A Life for Our Time. His father, Jacob, a feckless wool merchant, was talking to his son about how much life had improved for Austria’s Jews. “When I was a young fellow,” he told Freud, “one Saturday I went for a walk in the streets in your birthplace, beautifully decked out, with a new fur cap on my head. Along comes a Christian, knocks off my cap into the muck with one blow, and shouts, ‘Jew, off the sidewalk!’” Freud asked his father what he did. He said: “I stepped into the road and picked up my cap.” “I don’t know which of them I detested more,” the dying Freud tells Lewis in the play.

It is the one indisputable fact that Freud got right: there’s no living down one’s parents.

mmiller@observer.com

“I thought you’d be exchanging psychological positions with Dr. Sternin,” says Sam when Frasier walks into Cheers for a beer after his first encounter with Lilith. Cue laugh track. “Maybe the reason he doesn’t like vegetables is because they remind him of his mother,” says Lilith, sitting at the bar. Laugh track. At one point Frasier hypnotizes Lilith to remove her severe black stilettos every time anyone says “brie cheese” and to unbutton her shirt when he says “tambourine.” And then there are the moments of passion. “Dear, you’re using sex to express your aggressions towards the confines of polite society,” says Lilith. They glare at each other. “I love that.” Passionate embrace, laugh track, etc.

So what’s it really like when therapists marry each other? Perfectly normal, or at least that’s how they present it.

“We try and steer clear of being all psychotherapeutic about everything,” said Steve, a Manhattanite who preferred not to use his last name. Steve might be an extremist in his separation of therapy and life. He says that when he gets home from work he’s so sick of it he can’t even watch television shows about therapy. He tells his clients they should avoid the Woody Allen syndrome: don’t talk about therapy outside of therapy, he advises.

“There’s a time and a place for therapy and it’s not at home,” he said. Steve and his wife actively avoid using jargon with each other and even discussing what stage their offspring might be at. If their son ever needs therapy, he said, they won’t dare try to analyze him themselves: they’ll send him to a therapist. “We can’t not know the things we’ve learned about human behavior,” he said. “But we rarely talk about it.”

Other therapists might insist their marriages are like those of less self-aware civilians, but signs to the contrary creep in. “I think sometimes people who are not in the field have this fantasy that we must diagnose each other but really our day-to-day life and our family looks so normal you wouldn’t know that we’re therapists,” said Wendy E. Miller, a psychologist who gives workshops on sustaining sexual desire at the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute. She said, however, that her marriage does benefit from a shared world view that there is a deeper meaning to the actions and decisions of others. “If he doesn’t take out the garbage,” Dr. Miller explained, “it’s not just ‘Oh, he’s lazy.’ It’s ‘What’s going on? What kind of cycle is he going through?’ But sometimes I just say, ‘Take out the garbage.’” (We did notice that therapist couples referred to what civilians might call “being annoying,” “miserable arguments” or “days-long nightmares of crippling emotional drama” as “cycles.”)

Most of those interviewed agreed that being a therapist is generally a good thing for marriages: to be a therapist, one must go through a fair amount of therapy oneself, after all—years of it—which ideally would make husbands and wives who come into a marriage already aware of their personal shortcomings and prejudices. There is a drawback from having been through so much therapy, however: it’s really easy to recognize when one’s spouse is switching into work mode.

“The therapist listens to you and then often tells you what he thinks you’re saying behind what you think you’re saying, but you don’t want that in a boyfriend or girlfriend,” said Steve. “If you tell me that you don’t want to do something, and if I were to say, ‘You don’t really mean that,’ then you’d be like, ‘Shut the fuck up.’”

Another therapist, who asked to remain anonymous, said that sometimes her husband suggests she’s reacting to him the way she does to her mother. “Then I say, ‘Stop being a therapist with me,’” she said.

But even worse is the prospect of fake empathy. “Couples always have to be empathic to a certain extent but there’s a way that therapists do it that’s slightly different,” the anonymous therapist noted. “I guess I experience this more on the receiving end than the giving end, but sometimes my husband will switch in an argument and be supportive and empathic.” She called it “disingenuous.”

“My wife would never say that,” insisted Steve. In fact, he said, she would probably say the opposite. He then lamented therapists who “have a fake calmness or neutrality about them all the time.”

Other difficulties faced by therapist couples include both having to work evening hours to accommodate clients’ schedules and not feeling particularly motivated to listen to one’s spouse talk about his or her emotional travails after having listened to other people talk about their problems all day. “There is an occupational hazard of spending the whole day listening attentively and not really wanting to listen to your husband when you get home,” said Dr. Miller.

All the therapists we interviewed said that couples therapy was the unexpected source of much introspection about their own marriages. Pointing out to other couples the ways in which their marriages have broken down can occasionally lead to physician-heal-thyself moments. “I’ll be aware of a client always leading with a negative with her husband,” said one therapist. “And I’m thinking, ‘I do that too.’”

“Every time I work with couples I do get the feeling that I’m being taught lessons,” said Steve. “When I hear people start arguing in a really unproductive way, I always feel like I’m learning or relearning ‘Oh, you really don’t want to say that to your wife.’ Or, ‘What a reminder that I should be more kind, and don’t be sarcastic!” He said doing couples therapy really makes him aware that “you have a choice to be a jerk or not.”

One couple, Mary and Parker Stacy, not only are married therapists but they practice Emotionally Focused couples therapy together as a unit in Connecticut. They started working together about 10 years ago, when Ms. Stacy was having difficulty resolving the problems of a couple and invited her husband to participate in a session. The Stacys have developed a system of cues to allow for interruption and feedback from each other within the session, and they say their clients like having both the male and female perspective available to them. “We try to model what it looks like to have a healthy giving relationship,” said Ms. Stacy. The couple even gives presentations where they model a couple that’s “in a cycle” versus a couple that is instead communicating with what Ms. Stacy called “primary feelings”—“Where I come from an ‘I’ place instead of a ‘you’ place,” she explained.

When the two married, Mr. Stacy was not a therapist but was working in business. He said that switching careers affected their marriage only in positive ways. “We have become much more aware of what our arguments are really about,” he said, adding that even the happiest couples (he described his wife as his “soulmate”) have “cycles.” “Most people argue about money, kids, the in-laws, those kinds of things, but underneath they’re really arguing for more closeness or the failure of feeling safety with each other. So for us, we get very quickly to what’s underneath the argument.”

But, as Dr. Miller pointed out, just because one is aware of problems does not mean that awareness always translates into action. “I feel like I can sometimes be smarter in the consulting room than in the relationship,” she said. “I can sound wiser talking to couples.”

ewitt@observer.com

In 1936, Karen Horney, a Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst who once had an ill-fated affair with pioneering social psychologist Erich Fromm, published what was then the definitive work on neurosis, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. Naturally, she was a New York City resident at the time. (Brooklyn, actually.)

As long as the terms “neurotic,” or “high strung,” or “nervous breakdown” have been around, they have been inextricably linked with this city. As Evelyn Waugh put it, “There is [a] neurosis in the air which inhabitants mistake for energy.”

For a while, when Woody Allen was really nailing it and Seinfeld topped the ratings, it was all to the good—part of our charm.

Then, in 2008, a Cambridge University study showed that New York was home to “the most neurotic and unfriendly people” in the United States. The study went on to say that people living in eastern states along the “Stress Belt”—especially New Yorkers—are likely to be anxious, stressed, impulsive and prone to heart disease and cancer. Ah, something else to be neurotic about.

Mr. Preven, who described himself as “chronologically 53, but mentally 12 or 19,” was so fascinated by New Yorkers’ nuttiness that he started an alterna-tour for out-of-towners called NEWrotic New York City Tours. “It’s an anti-tour of the city,” he explained.

But what makes us so neurotic? One answer seems to be space. Or the lack thereof. “New York is mental illness, drug addiction and eating disorders served on a silver platter,” Mr. Preven said. “A lot of us are cognitively challenged. There are so many different worlds here and we all overlap and bump up against each other. I call Grand Central a human particle accelerator.”

There do seem to be a lot of neuroses that are particular to our city, some of which might be better described as micro-neuroses. For instance, “Air-conditioning drip,” a condition that was pointed out to us by two separate friends (both of whom, oddly, are employed by Conde Nast), which is a fear of being struck by drips and drops of water from air-conditioners in the apartment windows overhead.

And there’s a common meta–micro-neurosis, of which almost everyone contacted about this article displayed symptoms. One by one, they detailed their personal peccadilloes—followed by the panicked, paranoid cry: “Don’t quote me!,” or “Don’t make me sound crazy!,” or “No, you can not use my full name, people will make fun of me,” or “Shit—I sound nuts right? Can I get quote-approval?”

For our purposes, we will stick to the bigger neuroses, and look at how they’ve changed in the 75 years since Horney published her original list.

1. The Neurotic Need for Affection and Approval

Ever wonder why there are so many small, yappy dogs on the streets of New York? Ever wonder why they have human names and are dressed in human-esque clothes? The fact is, you’ll never get more approval than you will from your small dachshund—I mean, dog.

Alas, dogs aren’t always enough. We hunger for human approval as well. And for a little help, many turn to specialists like Dr. Jon Turk.

“When the economy tanked, people gave up their Birkins but they didn’t give up their Botox,” noted Dr. Turk, a handsome cosmetic surgeon who practices on the Upper East Side. “I’ll give them some Botox and some will come in two weeks later and point to a single, 2-millimeter crease and say, ‘It’s moving!’ I try to point out that faces are supposed to move a little.”

2. The Neurotic Need for a Partner

For men and women, at least in New York, this neurosis manifests differently. Women tend to worry about settling down, whereas men, who are outnumbered and can produce children late into life (sometimes ridiculously so), tend to always be looking for another partner. That’s why he just snuck a peek at the coat-check girl’s ass, the bastard.

According to Matt Titus, a matchmaker and love coach, “In New York City, when a guy is out on a date with a girl he knows in the back of his mind that there is a hotter, better model either around the corner. If the lighting isn't right or the conversation interesting enough, he, at any moment, will divert his time and energy to extricating himself and finding the next best thing.”

Sure, women often hope to trade up as well, but the guys have an easier time of it. “In New York men become repercussionless daters because of the sheer numbers,” Mr. Titus added. “With 237,000 more single women than single men on the island of man-hattan [emphasis his], men are kings. Women become accustomed to men's dating habits and become even more desperate to find Mr. Right.”

3. The Neurotic Need to Restrict Life Within Narrow Borders

Holly Phillips is a doctor who lives with her husband and two daughters on the Upper East Side. She has many friends all over the city, but they all know the rules: if they want to see her, they will have to go to Holly.

“It takes too much mental preparedness to leave a 15-block radius,” Dr. Phillips explained. “If I had driver maybe it would be different. As it stands now, if I leave my area, I literally have to prepare myself, physically and mentally. It’s like a voyage—I have to make sure I have all the essentials in my purse, think how I’m going to get there and how I’m going to get back, what the traffic situation is going to be if I can’t walk… I just get stressed out.”

Downtown, Craig Walker agrees. Mr. Walker, an actor who lives on Thompson Street, is also the owner of Local, a coffee shop on Sullivan. “I get a little nervous if I’m outside my hood too long,” he admits of his 26-block neighborhood. “I’m just more comfortable in Soho.”

4. The Neurotic Need for Power

This is an easy one—so commonplace a neurosis that it’s barely considered a personality disorder at all. The drive to dominate others and to value strength practically defines life in the city, where the buildings are bigger, the bonuses fatter and the mayor richer by a factor of hundreds of millions than almost anywhere else. And don’t even think about messing with your co-op board.

But isn’t it interesting how that desire for control so often falters when it comes to controlling our own impulses? We drink too much, smoke too much—even when we’re taxed to a fare-the-well and exiled down the block to do it—go home with the wrong people, and Tweet photos of our private parts indiscriminately. It’s all come to be expected. Even Eliot Spitzer, our former governor, clawed his way back from “client 9” ignominy, with a show on CNN. It didn’t survive, but you can be sure he’s plotting his next assault on the gates of power. He’s a New Yorker, after all.

5. The Neurotic Need to Exploit Others

Many of the one percenters that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are railing against live in our fair city. (Some of us may even be among them!) And let’s face it, a bit of that lucre may indeed have come—inadvertently, through no fault of our own, nor as the result of any illegal acts—at the expense of our fellow citizens. Things happen.

Remember how Wall Street reaped unheard of gains by exploiting the loose regulation of derivatives after the Glass Steagall act fell in the 1990’s? Then there were all those zero-percent-down mortgages bundled, via derivatives, into products that were sold to pension funds and other investment groups that were only supposed to be sinking the people’s hard earned money into triple-A assets?

Seemed like good business, right? Especially when the government stepped in and bailed out the banks. (Muwahaha...) Turns out it was also a symptom of a mental disorder.

6. The Neurotic Need for Social Recognition or Prestige

Paris Hilton started it. The girl had money, she had looks (hey, quit that). But she wanted something more. And she got it, big time.

Then came the stampede. Before long, we even had actual, albeit mid-level socialites—like Tinsley Mortimer, married to oil heir Topper Mortimer, Olivia Palermo and (ahem) Devorah Rose—people for whom the endless cage match for social prominence was already a way of life, doubling down for a shot at a larger audience. It’s not like they needed the money either. They needed the attention.

Lately, the fight for the spotlight has become fierce. Kelly Killoren Bensimmon, Jill Zarin, Alex McCord and Cindy Barshop were unceremoniously dumped from the “Real Housewives of New York” cast for fresher, more interesting housewives: zany Carol Radziwill, Heather Thompson, and Aviva Dresher, all of whom were hired, sources tell The Observer, long before the “regulars” were fired. Worse, the switcheroo was leaked to the press just days after Bravo head Andy Cohen, a study of narcissism in his own right, had told the lades they were “safe.” Ouch.

So what are you waiting for? If you haven’t yet dropped off your dry cleaning while a knot of dudes in cargo shorts walks backwards with a camera in front of you, you may not be an authentic New Yorker at all.

7. The Neurotic Need for Personal Admiration

Several months ago The Observer was at a dinner with our friend, a TV producer, her husband, and a “TV personality”—you know, a talking-head type from cable news. The TV personality was trying to impress the producer into giving him a show and, after one particularly long, somewhat masturbatory speech, added, “I mean, I know my 30,000 twitter followers want to know what I have to say!”

“I try to stay far away from those people,” laughed Caroline Waxler, a new media specialist. “Or the ‘humble braggers’—where people allegedly are self-deprecating but really want you to know how awesome they are. Like, ‘I’m going to be on the Today show this morning. Clearly they got me confused with someone else—hahah.’ So annoying.”

Staying away from those people is getting harder every day. We are those people!

Ah, technology.

The sad fact of the matter is, Twitter, instead of satiating our need for personal admiration, has actually multiplied it beyond comprehension. Remember when you first heard about Twitter? “Why would anyone care if someone got a latte or a frappe? It’s ridiculous!” A few months later, you’re tweeting like a retarded plover.

By the way, if you want to follow me, it's @pfro.

8. The Neurotic Ambition for Personal Achievement (and by “Personal” We Mean Our Children)

In New York, the battles to get into private—and even some public—schools are as Machiavellian as Bobby Fischer’s Poison Pawn Variation. And no one takes it more personally than the parents when little Victoria and Declan don’t get in to the school of choice.

“I felt like such a…social outcast,” said one Upper East Side parent when his four-year-old daughter failed to land a spot in the primo nursery schools he had his eye on (annual tuition: around $30,000). “I was devastated—it was just so humiliating. She’ll never make it into Harvard now.”

He might actually be lucky. One society matron sent her daughter to boarding school out of state this year rather than have her continue on at her well-regarded Upper East Side high school because “she was turning into a monster.” The last straw was when the girl demanded a chauffeur as a birthday present (“All my friends have drivers!” she explained) and proceeded to flip out when her parents told her she couldn’t go out to the clubs with her friends after her birthday party. She had just turned fourteen.

9. The Neurotic Need for Self-Sufficiency

There’s no greater expression of one’s independence than a home of one’s own. Just ask the many thirtysomethings still living with mom and dad. But even for those of us who are gainfully employed, the right apartment can be hard to come by.

Even if you do find that perfect pad, you then often have to get past a condo board, which—surprise—is often worse than dealing with your parents ever was. Madonna, Courtney Love, Mariah Carey, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Calvin Klein have all been turned down by snooty members of coop buildings.

Reasons for denial can include: a scandal in your past, too much press—whether favorable or unfavorable—the wrong friends or the wrong kind of money (the older, the better). “It’s all about who you know, what you’ve accomplished, what charity boards you’re on, et cetera,” noted Kirk Henkels, director of private brokerage for Stribling. “You have to have a clever broker—one who makes sure that recommendation letters come from people the board members know and like, on business proper stationery, not social stationery. It’s like joining a private club.”

Our need for independence also finds expression in our favored modes of transportation. The subways have improved tremendously since the ’70s, but a highly neurotic subset of New Yorkers are eagerly keeping the cabbies in business (no wonder the price of a medallion just topped $1 million). Nicole Young, a “30-something” fashion designer who was born and bred in New York, hasn’t stepped through a turnstile since 2001.

“I used to take the subway everywhere,” Ms. Young said. “But after 9/11 I could never go back. It’s crazy—but I figure if I’m above ground, it’s one less way the terrorists can get me!”

Ms. Young admits it’s a phobia, but that doesn’t make her any less determined to remain far from any tunnels. “I tried once to get back on the subway and I nearly passed out,” she said. “Sometimes a tiny part of me wishes I could go back to it, because it’s quicker and cheaper, but I just can’t!”

10. The Neurotic Need for Perfection

Nobody’s perfect. We know that. Maybe back in Horney’s day, people had a decent shot at it. Nowadays, if we can sleep through the night and not awaken with those telltale lines of little red bites on our calves, we’re good.

Bedbugs are haunting our nightmares. Ever since those minuscule bloodsuckers exploded onto our consciousness a few years back, they have wreaked havoc with New Yorkers’ linens, their finances, and their mental health.

“The last time I went to the movies in NYC was…honestly, I don’t know when,” a vivacious former assistant district attorney told The Observer. “I did go to a movie theater in January—but that was in a D.C. suburb. It’s cleaner. I wasn’t as worried.”

Meanwhile, Ariel (first name only, she insisted) obsessively tosses her clothes and other personal items into PakTite—“the Rolls Royce of bedbug protection,” she said—every time she returns from a trip. It’s a portable heating unit in in a bag. “You put everything in there and cook it—books, shoes, bags and papers. Sometimes leather gets a little warped but I don't even care. I know some people who use it every time they come in the house!”

Given our many issues, perhaps it’s no wonder so many New Yorkers are downing Paxil, Cymbalta and Lexipro. It’s either that, or move. And where the hell else are you gonna live, Chicago?

Too much "help"?

Three days after we picked up The Secret, we won the lottery. It was a Friday night in Williamsburg, and we were drunkenly blinking into the fluorescent lights of a local bodega, waiting for our dinner—also, technically, a late lunch and tomorrow's early breakfast—of a beef patty with cheese, when we decided to feed two dollars into a machine to purchase an Instant Take 5 ticket, which enticed us with a promise that we could "Win Up To $5,555!"

We used a quarter to scratch the ticket, revealing our win of $5, not five grand, but more than double the amount we had paid for the privilege of entering. It didn't matter that we would have to wait until the next day to retrieve our winnings, or that we would inevitably forget to do so and continue to hold the prize-winning piece of paper in our wallet for the rest of the week before we remembered that we had hit it big in an alcoholic stupor. At the time it was a sign: that if we could win money just from reading The Secret, than one week of piling on the self-help books would lead to bigger and better things (and hopefully give us the tools to keep track of our earnings).

We were so wrong.

By Friday afternoon, we had speed-read (or at least skimmed through) Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, the aforementioned Oprah-certified The Secret, the celebrity-smattered Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self, Marina Spence's Make Every Day a Friday, and Russell Simmons’ Do You!: 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success. Every day, we took one more "self-help" suggestion from each of the books and added it on to our daily schedule.

At least we know we're in good company: in the year 2008 alone, according to Forbes, Americans spent more than $11 billion improving themselves through classes, seminars, CDs, and books. (Ironically, the majority of the self-help books you'll find in a Barnes & Noble will have a chapter on managing your finances. The other half will involve a Real Housewife telling you how to lose weight.) Because we are cynical non-believers, we decided to start with The Secret, which didn't cost us a penny since we already owned it as a gag gift we were planning to give a friend for a birthday.

Sunday

We begin with the positive thinking exercises outlined in Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (Atria Books/Beyond Worlds, 2006). We get a kick out of reading passages out loud to our siblings like an over-eager guidance counselor, or zealous Tony Robbins-esque figure. Stuff like: "If you see it in your mind, you're going to hold it in your hand!" and "In fact, parts of our body are literally replaced every day!" For those out there who have never read The Secret—which has sold more than 21 million copies by promoting "the laws of attraction"—the idea is simple. You want something, you think hard enough about it (while keeping the rest of your thoughts positive), and you will get it.

This is so shammy and hokey that we can't believe Oprah promoted it, until we remember that Oprah promoted James Frey as well. Two for two, Oprah.

As an experiment, waiting for coffee in Starbucks, we decide to will a cupcake into our possession. We focus on the idea of a cupcake; how we will come to own and then enjoy it. While we're thinking about how stupid this whole process is, we notice a Starbucks employee replacing the breakfast items in the counter with afternoon snacks. Including...yes! Cupcakes! We buy one while pondering the miracle of The Secret, which we had finished in a record two days—What? It's a small book—and attracting positivity into our lives, which lasts approximately four minutes until we remember that we are supposed to be on diet anyway and discard the entirety of our tasty, magical treat. Money down the drain! This is probably why we need financial self-improvement books.

Monday

Time to plunge into Mr. Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek (Crown Publishing Group, 2009). We avoided Mr. Ferriss' other tome, The 4-Hour Body, because we didn't want to exercise, and also because we didn't want to think about Mr. Ferriss giving women extended orgasms, which we know from a New York Times' article is in there somewhere. Plus, we were excited about the suggestion in Workweek that we completely ignore email except for two short windows per day: one at noon, and one at 4 p.m. But this immediately presents a problem for our editors, who were not aware of the "stay offline" portion of Mr. Ferriss' program when they suggested we look into it. Oh well! By 10 p.m., editors have found a loophole in our system and are now texting us notes about work whenever we're out of the office.

The problem with Ferriss' book, which promotes (among other things) the "80-20 principle"—i.e., that 80 percent of our benefits come from 20 percent of our work—is that the 4-Hour logic doesn’t hold water when you are doing field reporting. The concepts the author outlined in his D-E-A-L program (Definition, Elimination, Automation, Liberation) might work for would-be entrepreneurs or office slackers, but try "eliminating" your reading of the news to just two hours a week (which Mr. Ferriss claims to do) when your job is to be on top of the news cycle. Being fired can’t possibly be part of the game plan, right? Automation—which involves a sort of out-processing of most of your work so one can spend as little time as possible actually doing one's job—is also not an option if you work in a creative field, though we did appreciate Mr. Ferriss' sound financial advice and persuasive arguments for taking "mini-retirements" now, instead of saving it up until we are too old to travel.

As for the whole Definition part...we have trouble with that too. The "D"  is for defining in very specific terms what you want from your career and life. We begin to notice a disturbing trend in self-help literature, asking us to formulate a concrete example of our ideal lifestyle—the very thing we have been avoiding having to think about since we picked a major in college.

Tuesday

"Go Where the Action Is" is one of the crucial components laid out by Russell Simmons in Do You!: 12 Laws to Access the Power In You to Achieve Happiness and Success (Gotham, 2007). Though it has all of the literary heft of a fortune cookie, we assume that this book will have the most helpful, down-to-earth advice in our new library, something we belatedly acknowledge is due to our love of Def Comedy Jam.

Mr. Simmons gives a lot of lip service to moving to New York, L.A., or Atlanta, because, as he says: "...You ain't going to become a rapper or an actor living in Idaho...You can't wait for the action to come to you. You must go to the action."

We already live in New York, but as it stands, the "action" on Tuesday night seems to be in Zuccotti Park, where we park ourselves for the night in an attempt to sleep among the protesters. We've written enough about the movement, it's time to dive headfirst into the grimy late-night underbelly in order to live up to our full potential as an in-the-field reporter. Mr. Simmons, himself an Occupy-advocate—and a member in good standing of the 1%—spends most of his book talking about the lessons of Kanye, Jay-Z, and his own clothing brand, Phat Farms. Unfortunately the rules governing rapping and entrepreneurship are still far from those of journalism, and we spend half the night shivering, climbing in to share sleeping bags with drunk Canadians who make us recite lines from Good Will Hunting in a Boston accent. We're operating under the misguided premise that being close to the epicenter of "action" will somehow make our lives better. Instead, we get a sinus infection, and are two hours late for work the next day.

Wednesday

Humpday! We feel like the inside of a dirty hippie's sock (and probably smell just as bad) after trying to overnight it in Zuccotti the night before.There's nothing more we rather do than go home and shower, so what better book to read than Marina Spence's slight little number, Make Every Day a Friday! (Morgan James Publishing, 2009). The book touts itself as a "stress-free" system to "gently guide" you to change either your work, or your attitude towards your current job. Unfortunately, it doesn't take more than 10 pages to realize that Friday! is one those books: the ones that work under the presumption that your dream job is out there for you somewhere, or that you have the perfect job but you need to make some other life-shifts in order to appreciate it fully. Because our mood is so dark, we decide to embrace Ms. Spence's tip/sub-chapter that "Hating Your Job is a Gift!" from the "Taking Steps to Clarity" chapter. We make a list of all the things we don't like about our work.

We hate:

• Having to do assignments that involve trying to "better ourselves" in any way
• Getting up early in the mornings
• Long commute
• No good food places in Times Square

Now, Make Every Day a Friday tells us to look at our list and imagine the opposite of what we wrote in our "career hate" list. And we can imagine this life perfectly: working from home all day (when the "work day" starts at noon); eating MSG-laden Chinese food from the place on the corner; never taking any steps to get ourselves into a healthier, more social lifestyle. The thing is, we've already had that career before...it's called freelancing, and after a year and a half of it we went so stir-crazy we were begging friends to let us just come in and hang out in their offices, just to give us an excuse to brush our teeth and get dressed in the morning.

So, the opposite of our current "career dislikes" is an even worse scenario. Great. Why can't any book just tell us what we want to hear...that things are perfect the way they are and maybe we should just take a nap?

Thursday

We do some of the time-traveling exercises encouraged by Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self (Simon & Schuster, 2009). Joseph Galliano’s book has a wide range of celebrities writing letters to their awkward, adolescent selves, which technically isn't "self-help" as much as "inspirational" and/or "somewhat terrifying." After all, who isn’t better off now than when they were 16? Certainly not Stephen King, though he does council his younger incarnation to "Stay away from recreational drugs." Hugh Jackman keeps it vague with "You've had many blessings in your life and will have many more...don't forget where those blessings came from." (Australia?)

Still, if James Franco and the guy who plays Fred on YouTube are qualified to give life advice to younger versions of themselves, certainly we must have some wisdom to impart as well. After many false starts, we eventually wind up with a piece of paper that sounds more like an evil twin's of King's:

Dear Us at 16,

You might think that all those psychedelic drugs you are currently taking will eventually have long-term consequences. To the best of our knowledge…you’re good. Ecstasy stops working when you are around 21, so do as much as possible now. Oh, and you’re not imagining things: mom and dad are getting a divorce.

Keep on truckin’,

Us at 27

The problem with writing a letter to ourselves after reading this book is that everyone in "Dear Me" is famous and living the dream, so their advice is applicable not only to their former selves, but to anyone who also wants to be Alice Cooper/William Shatner/J.K Rowling. Their advice (for the most part) is of the "It Gets Better" variety...because for them, it did. We can't offer that kind of solace to our former selves. Life is better in some ways...other ways, it's worse. (At 16, we probably would have loved to spend a night sleeping in a concrete park in New York, who are we dash our young dreams by whining about it now?)

We stared at the piece of paper for awhile, feeling depressed. Sort of wish we had eaten that cupcake when we had the chance; binge on carrots and hummus instead. Never have we felt so stressed out, overworked, underpaid, and unlovable as when we started taking the advice of other people on how to make our lives better.

Friday

During our last day of formal self-improvement, we go to Williamsburg to meet Anna Goldstein, a New York life coach who specializes in helping women in their 20s and 30s (she can be found online at Self In The City). Running late to the meeting, we quickly scarf down a(nother) beef patty while smoking a cigarette simultaneously, which we assume means that these programs have not been working the way they should.

Ms. Goldstein’s process revolves around the Model of Behavioral Function, a sort of thought-to-action guide to getting our shit together. As we sit in her home office, a huge, brightly lit studio space with a large-screen TV and wacky furniture that actually looks more like a well-funded tech start-up than a therapist’s office, we jot in a notebook as she instructs:

Think

Feel

Behavior

Results

Of course, Ms. Goldstein is not our therapist, but as we go over the events that immediately preceded our encounter—the rushed and greasy lunch when we really wanted sushi—we find ourselves venting a week’s worth of pent-up frustration. Ms. Goldstein prompts us occasionally on how we could alter our first line of thinking to create a different belief system about work, health, interpersonal relationships, and the rest. It’s harder than it seems, which we're beginning to realize is why the the self-help books haven’t done us much good. While books can encourage you to act differently, Ms. Goldstein helps us isolate those early negative thought patterns that feed into our pre-existing (but somewhat unconscious) belief system. For example: "We never exercise because our bike is in the shop and we can't find time to pick it up," which leads to the belief of "We never exercise." And if we take it as a given that we never exercise, why bother being proactive about picking up our bike?

Eventually, we cycle (so to speak) to the problem that's been plaguing us all week:

“What do you want to do?” asked Ms. Goldstein.

“We want to write comedy,” we tell her. And when we say it out loud, it sounds just as stupid as all the times we've thought about it while reading self-help books.

“And what would that look like?”

After we're done pragmatically laying out the details of our eventual “Shouts and Murmurs” piece, the hypothetical book we will write, and how to deal with obligations of fame and fortune, it doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea after all. It also seems like we've put a lot of subconscious thought into our Goal Lifestyle, despite floundering for weeks over the absurdity of answering the world’s vaguest question: “What do we want?”

Feeling better, we treat ourselves to sushi after meeting with Ms. Goldstein, and then break our “no e-mail” rule to send our boss a message: we'll be taking the rest of the day off.