Dr. Orna Guralnik , with participants Casimar and Alexes , in a scene from Season 4 of"Couples Therapy."Before my interview with Dr. Orna Guralnik, I was a little more nervous than usual. Throughout the four seasons of the Showtime docuseries “Couples Therapy,” Guralnik — or simply Orna, as she is known to the show’s participants — has a commanding and authoritative presence. Each season follows Guralnik, a New York-based psychoanalyst, and several couples over a series of sessions.
The deliberate pace also allows for “leaving some room for uncertainty — both my own and my patients’, like opening up a realm of being that is not about quick answers, not about simplistic answers, which then allows room for complexity, which is so what we need nowadays,” she continued. “I mean, everything is getting so flattened into this ‘good, bad, us, them’ — like, we’ve lost our capacity to think, and the show is a really good antidote to that.
For instance, that meant “more emphasizing how early history shapes experiences now for people, and how becoming aware of unconscious motivation can really release individuals and couples from the grip of whether it’s trauma or defense mechanisms or early attachment styles — the benefit of making the unconscious conscious,” she said.
Once the show’s editors assemble a rough cut of the episodes, she watches them with a particular eye toward whether each installment is accurately capturing the arc of the sessions. At the same time, she said it’s been challenging to become a public figure, and to balance the show — which typically films two or two and a half days per week — alongside her teaching career and her clients in private practice. She now works pretty much nonstop.
But Guralnik also feels the show has strengthened her work overall. “It’s certainly sharpened my perspective a lot, because I have to talk about my work all the time with the directors and editors. So I’m constantly thinking about what I’m doing — and teaching it, in a way,” she said. “So that has been really good for my work, both as a clinician and as a teacher.”Guralnik talks with her mentor Dr. Virginia Goldner in a scene from Season 4 of"Couples Therapy.