On Showtime’s documentary series “Couples Therapy,” clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Orna Guralnik has served in many roles for her clients: sounding board, support system, referee, reality check and sometimes, an uncomfortable mirror. And she shares her insights in each capacity with plainspoken simplicity and with empathy. It’s what has made the show such a revelatory watch for her patients as well as viewers — it exemplifies the virtues of the therapeutic experience.
“As a psychoanalyst, you want to really have the same distance from all the inner voices in the patient,” says Guralnik. “Otherwise, I try to really keep going back to a place of what we call neutrality. Now, that’s not always possible, but that’s the North Star. That’s where I try to go to.”
Series co-creators Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres initially found Guralnik after embarking on what they call an “insane outreach” across New York City involving conversations with hundreds of potential candidates. “When I got on the phone with Orna, it took me only two minutes to know that she was the one,” Steinberg remembers. Adds Despres, “She’s an intimidating listener. She is so attuned to what people are saying and what they are not saying and picks up on things so quickly and with such erudition that it’s startling.”
On a show that ran the risk of reducing therapy to voyeuristic entertainment, Kriegman says Guralnik possessed the exact quality they were most seeking about their endeavor: doubt.
“She came to this project with a certain kind of skepticism, which is to say that she wasn’t interested in being on television,” he says. “It took a lot of conversation to discover that we kind of shared a certain vision of what this could be that ultimately made her comfortable coming on board.”
After four years and a pressure-cooker of a pandemic, “Couples Therapy” has not only offered a balm for audiences processing the complexities of their own interpersonal relationships, but it’s become a bellwether for the cultural changes impacting those relationships from the outside. “There’s a lot of change and upheaval happening culturally around gender, around what’s a family structure, all of these identity coordinates — race, class,” Guralnik says. “People are questioning a lot, like should we be monogamous or are there other ways to navigate these frustrations?”
Among the couples profiled in the season that premiered in April, lesbian partners Christine and Nadine explore the possibility of a polyamorous relationship, while former Mormons Kristi and Brock reckon with the damage inflicted by their shared upbringing and subsequent marriage under the church of Latter-Day Saints. Two other couples — Natasha and Joe, Erica and Sean — are wrestling with more conventional relationship challenges, like intimacy and fidelity, but Guralnik’s incisive approach makes finding an accord or path to resolution no easier to come by.
Each couple begins their session in a waiting room, staring at wall art whose ambiguity gets them asking questions even before starting the hard work of self-examination. When asked if the paintings are deliberately chosen as a Rorschach test for clients, Guralnik says, “Well, first of all, everything is a Rorschach — especially one’s partner. But we try to choose art that is evocative and will bring up associations. That’s why we don’t put flowers.”
Within the handsomely appointed room where she holds her sessions, Guralnik attempts to operate in a judgment-free zone, unencumbered by personal opinion or political affiliation, beyond maintaining what she describes as a baseline moral compass (“otherwise it’s madness”). It’s an especially vital distinction when she encounters clients from different backgrounds than her own, as the Jewish Israeli American therapist did while coaching Christine, who is Palestinian.
“I mean, I have a Palestinian woman who’s traumatized by my country of origin,” she says. “There’s no way to not feel completely implicated and in it.”
An increase in therapeutic language, in our contemporary vernacular but particularly on social media, has enabled many individuals to diagnose themselves and their behavior. Even without the added pressure of one of the world’s most enduring conflicts, Guralnik admits she has had to adjust her approach over the course of her career to accommodate the language and feelings of clients while delivering more educated, objective insights.
“To some degree, it does indeed make for better communication, but I’ve had to, in many ways, adjust to American culture and then adjust to the way younger generations are speaking,” she says. “I might feel a little cynical about it, or it makes me laugh sometimes. But I’d like to believe that I still know how to distinguish what is a good progression in learning how to communicate better, and when you need to really put your nose to the issue and tolerate difficulty, tolerate not feeling great, and get things done.”
Despite professing to be a “not very self-disclosing analyst,” Guralnik reveals more vulnerability in the latest collection of episodes than she has in the past — not just personally, but in depicting the overall difficulty and fragility of the therapeutic process. After Sean not only shows little contrition for cheating on Erica but virtually refuses to take any accountability for his behavior, the analyst must work through how best to help the couple — or if she can at all. And at the conclusion of Christine and Nadine’s tenure as clients, she confesses that she will miss the two of them. Guralnik credits the pandemic for the shift.
“It changed because everyone was just like, we’re working from home. We’re all in this craziness together,” she says. “And in the same way people don’t want to go back to the office, there’s a certain kind of intimacy that has been created — and it’s there to stay.”
In addition to a counselor of her own, Dr. Virginia Goldner, and an informal supervisory group to talk through roadblocks she encounters with patients, Guralnik benefits from the perspective of the series’ production team, whose members make observations after each session. “They point out things that I may not have noticed — it might have even been a camera person, by their way of focusing the camera,” she says. “And then I have conversations with the editors when they want to understand something. So, between the session and what you eventually see in the series, there are a few important steps where we’re comparing notes and thinking about it together.”
When not participating in the show, Guralnik enjoys maintaining a private practice. “It does feel kind of great to have everyone out of the room and it’s just me and my patient,” she says. “I work with people that want to do the work, and they’re amazing. I can facilitate a certain process, but really my job is to get out of the way and let people just problem-solve.”
But for a person whose professional life is devoted to helping people find ways to work together, it comes as little surprise that one of the great rewards of doing “Couples Therapy” is not just helping others but collaborating with them. “A lot of a therapist’s work is quite isolated,” Guralnik says. “This is a real team project, so it feels like an extraordinary plus, a real good add-on to my work.”
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