As the year comes to a close, I am thinking of history, therapy, and Majora’s Mask. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Majora’s Mask is a Nintendo video game which has had multiple releases since 2000, most recently on the Switch. Part of the larger Legend of Zelda series, Majora’s Mask follows the hero Link as he sets out to stop the end of the world in what is one of the most innovative and poetic video game mechanics in (no pun intended) history.
The game is on a perpetual three-day cycle (think Groundhog Day) during which a grimacing moon descends closer and closer to the surface until Day Three when it crashes into the earth. A wave of fire races towards our hero Link, all fades to black, and… the clock starts up again. Everyone in the game’s town goes back to what they were doing at the start of the story, and Link starts racing against the clock to change the outcome this time.
This is a very different world building and lore than many current popular games. There is no possibility of such a heroic outcome in Elden Ring or Fallout for example. The worlds of those games are long since broken, ruined, shattered, and the heroes in Elden Ring are referred to as Tarnished in explicit reference to this ruination. These are game worlds where winning does not change the greater damage or tragedy that has gone before, although it may mitigate or bring closure to it.
In her 12/28 post, Heather Cox Richardson revisits the Wounded Knee Massacre, not for the first time. She revisits it annually, in part because it haunts her, and the experience she describes of the horrific events are not unlike symptoms of secondary traumatization. She writes with a sense of urgency, describes how the events still keep her up at night, and notes the emotional power of the anniversary of the date. I know many therapists and our patients read her blog, and can relate to it.
I suspect many therapists, like me, envy historians sometimes. They get to tell the tale, in fact humanity urgently needs them to tell it. Sometimes I have heard being a psychotherapist likened to being a historian, or an archaeologist, but I think that misses a crucial difference. True, we are asked to listen to a patient’s story, help unearth narratives previously hidden or repressed from themselves; but it is on the condition that we will never tell anyone what we have heard. We may witness, interpret, question, invite, affirm or even challenge their personal history—but to the world outside of the therapy office we are silent.
When I have written for journal articles or blog posts, the identifying information is changed to the point of unrecognizability, and that disguised altered version vetted by the patient. For the reality is that when therapists talk with a patient about confidentiality interpersonally, they are doing so to invite the patient to violate their own intrapsychic confidentiality (Ackerman, 2024). We ask them to extend their confidence beyond their own mind and censor and grant us access with the promise that we will not tell another soul. We take a different path from historians like Cox Richardson, who works to uncover suppressed histories - stories that those in power try to bury, while those without power struggle to bring them into the light.
I have sometimes struggled to bear witness and not give voice to some of the histories I have heard in my career. Especially in politically charged times like our present one where, I am convinced, some of the loudest voices in the arena go most days hearing very little of the specific details of human suffering and oppression that a therapist hears regularly. Most people in the U.S. live for weeks and months on end without seeing a bruised child or hearing the sobbing of a trans teen who has been rejected by their parents; they may go a whole lifetime debating about abortion or addiction or homelessness without ever sitting across from someone saying they were raped, or can’t stop shooting up, or hears voices that tell them to keep walking or hang themselves. Therapists hear hours-worth of these stories daily, and in order to do our work and keep our patients’ trust, we cannot offer their stories to the world to shake the privileged out of their complacency. This, to paraphrase Cox-Richardson, is what haunts me. This is what keeps me up at night.
What therapists, our patients, and historians may have in common, what we share with Link in fact, may be our confrontation with the repetition compulsion. I suspect we all quarrel with it in one form or another.
Historians like Cox Richardson strive to give voice, to “write these letters because no matter how hard I tried, I could not stop the Wounded Knee Massacre. But maybe I can help to stop the next one.”
Patients try to break free of the repetition compulsion, or get some different outcome from it, or seek to escape it only to run into it around the next corner. They seek out more love or understanding, or maybe they’re just so damned tired of the way things seem stuck even if they suspect that they are the sticking point.
Therapists can bear witness to the repetition, or explain it, or hold up a mirror gently so that maybe it can be seen earlier this time and even interrupted. We interpret ways it impedes a patients’ progress or spurs on growth, and we inevitably normalize and comfort when the repetition compulsion returns one way or another like that seasonal cold or some chronic back pain of the soul. We understand this because we often suspect that we are ourselves involved in some repetition compulsion of our own in our work: the parentified child, the estranged parent, the misunderstood or confused one, the monster or the perfect.
We do our best, and then, whoomph! The clock runs out, the moon hits the earth with a wave of fire and it fades to black. Here we go again.
And all along, and this year especially, many of us feel a larger sense of foreboding or stuckness as the year draws to a close. The world seems so out of kilter and beyond fixing that it borders on the absurd. With media flattening the relative importance of genocide and starvation to be on par with TikTok bans, mystery drones and holiday travel weather, it seems to border on the absurd so much that a grimacing moon crashing down really doesn’t seem an outlier anymore.
But the thing is, that urge to give up, to just throw up one’s hands at the wall of flame rushing toward you is itself a repetition compulsion. This probably won’t be the last time we find ourselves here, that’s true. There’s a whole lot of work to do. So, let’s take stock, review, and make some attainable goals. Here are a few goals I believe we can make progress on:
Let’s work towards eliminating starvation.
Let’s work towards eliminating genocide.
Let’s stop censoring people working towards eliminating starvation and genocide.
Let’s take care of children and not make them take care of us.
Let’s not believe everything we read.
Let’s not ignore everything we read.
Let’s strive to embrace critical thinking as a lifelong daily practice.
Let’s refuse to be monstrous or perfect.
Let’s prevent damage to others and the world when we can.
Let’s mitigate damage when we can’t prevent it.
Let’s acknowledge damage when we can’t mitigate it.
Let’s not pretend social injustice isn’t happening daily, and let’s try to stop the next injustices we notice.
Let’s agree that this is no one person’s job, that everyone can help, and that really, we are capable of doing a bit more than we have been doing and that this will always be true as we have an ever-expanding capacity for goodness.
Here’s the good news: Your world is not on a three-day repeating reset cycle, nor is it located eons after an unpreventable past apocalypse. What this means however, is that no one is certain how much time we have to learn from our mistakes and prevent the next catastrophe, be it climate change, pandemic or post-inaugural travel ban.
This need not be dire, for it starts with your creativity and playfulness. Play is extremely serious, liberatory even. Remember Burgermeister Meisterburger? Authoritarian regimes feel extremely threatened by play, its queerness and freedom. Find that ludic impulse within you now, and bring the full powers of your creativity to bear on this flamewall of totalitarianism rushing towards us. Rise to meet it with all your creative power.
Right now, a year is ending.
Right now, a year is beginning.
References
Ackerman, S. (2024). Confidentiality in the present moment. Presentation, American Psychoanalytic Association, February 7, 2024.
Cox Richardson, H. (2024) December 28, 2024, Letters from An American.