"No third person"

"In Treatment," the new show on HBO based on the amazing Israeli show "Betipul," transforms what we who study narrative understand by "character." It does this because it allows us, to an impressive and perhaps unheard of degree, to be the "third person" that Freud dreams up in the following passage from The Question of Lay Analysis: Freud, trying to familiarize someone who has never really dealt with psychoanalysis legally with what psychoanalysis does, thinks up a short cut, as it were:

It is to be regretted that we cannot let them be present as an audience at a treatment of this kind. But the "analytic situation" allows no presence of a third person. Moreover the different sessions are of very unequal value. An unauthorized listener who hit upon a chance one of them would as a rule form no useful impression; he would be in danger of not understanding what was passing between the analyst and the patient, or he would be bored. For good or ill, therefore, he must be content with our information [that is, a theory of what psychoanalysis does which Freud will present in the coming pages], which we shall try to make as trustworthy as possible.
-The Question of Lay Analysis, 3

That is, it is regrettable that those who have to make a legal decision about the status of psychoanalysis in Austria in 1926 (whether to allow it to be practiced only by certified medical professionals or not) can't simply go and watch a psychoanalytic session or two. This would give them firsthand experience with what they are legislating about. But this can't be so, because psychoanalysis forbids the third person, the witness to analysis, and tries to close off the dissemination of its proceedings as little as possible. This is not because it is inherently something that happens in secret: it is because, as Freud emphasizes, that it is a process that takes place over many many sessions, connecting together, as it were, very many disparate fragments over a long period of time. One can't just stop in on a session and actually be witness to anything--and if they are, it is probably because this witness misconceives the nature of what he is seeing (what he sees would make a different sense if it were placed back in the whole, where it belongs).
In "In Treatment"--and I think this might be less the case with "Betipul," for cultural reasons (that is, the status of therapeutic discourse in the US compared to Israel)--in this show, we get this shortcut. That is, we get to be the third person Freud talks about. And, moreover, we get the full danger that Freud speaks about here which comes with being this third person: we actually only get to witness the fragments of a process that takes a long, long time.
Now, obviously, the show tries to remedy this by following up these patients from session to session. Moreover, it tries to reconstitute the therapist's own experience by airing every day for a whole week, each time with that day's patient. But fundamentally, we are only getting fragments of a longer chain each time we sit down to watch the show. This means that each time we watch it, we are exposed to the danger--and this is the danger itself--of taking one of these fragments as representative of the whole. In other words, each time we sit down to watch the show, we have to accommodate the "very unequal value" that Freud ascribes above to the sessions, not unlike the therapist himself.
What this means, though, is that we can't make the sort of judgments we normally make about character in television shows. That is, we can't ask ourselves questions like we do when we watch "Friends," say (or, in a more dramatic and recent mode, "Lost"), which wonder whether we really "like" Chandler or Joey better (or "trust" Kate or Sawyer). In short, we can't "like" a character in the way we normally do. This also has its obverse: we can't hate a character that we normally would hate. In short, we have to suspend our judgement.
Or, better (because suspension is only a negative phenomenon), we have to judge the characters according to a completely different set of criteria. So in the show that I have posted above, I would normally hate Alex. He is overbearing and intense, and tough to listen to for roughly twenty-five minutes. But, at the same time, I can't (and don't) do this, because I know that his utterances are in question as to whether they really want to be made or not: Alex comes to therapy for the reason that he doesn't, at some level, trust himself, or loves or hates himself too much or too little--so it doesn't make sense to try and once more to hate or love him, or trust or distrust him, because he himself is already at this remove from himself. Thus everything being said, even though it is forceful and unnerving, has this particular provisionality to it because in the analytic setting, character itself comes into question: one doesn't have a character that one likes or dislikes, because the treatment is precisely trying to correct that character. Something is wrong, in other words, and this makes character less something someone is as something one performs. And if it is performed--to state it yet another way--what sense does it make to say you like it or not?
One can only have this sort of judgement over the course of many weeks, and even then it will not be a judgement about the particular character, but about the course this character's analysis has taken. This is the odd phenomenon that the third person produces in analysis, and what, at some level, exempts therapy from the sorts of evaluations that the law, for example, will make about its status. Or at least this is what Freud is getting ready, with this passage, to claim. But what is interesting is that treatment is also exempted from the narrative standards of the medium through which we are able to witness it in the first place--this is what "In Treatment" brings about. In other words, what is interesting is that if there were any third person (that is, even if he weren't connected with the law, but were, as he is with this new show, just an average TV viewer), there could be no judgement at all about the session, either. I might expand on this later, but I think it is really interesting, and makes the episode above a particularly interesting one to watch (as this is the first time you are introduced to this character). In "In Treatment" this particular disruptive feature of the witness to analysis is brought out even more by the fact that the therapist (Paul) is also analyzed (we are witness to this too), and so we can't even judge him unless we do it in this more holistic sense--that is, where we judge how his analysis (and all the analyses he himself is carrying out) as a whole is progressing, not him himself.
Everything, to sum this all up, suddenly has "unequal value."