As Good as It Gets

Abstract

As Good as It Gets Ronnie Levine1 issn 0362-4021 © 2013 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 37, No. 3, Fall 2013 251 1 Faculty, Center for Group Studies; Faculty, EGPS Training Program; and private practice, New York. Correspondence should be addressed to Ronnie L. Levine, PhD, ABPP, 330 West 58th Street, Suite 302, New York, NY 10019. E-mail: rlih@aol.com. Walter N. Stone’s reflections on romantic love have provided me an opportunity to discuss my thoughts about romantic love, love, and group psychotherapy. Romantic love, like beauty, has been understood differently through the ages. Though romantic love is often associated with passion and intimacy, each individual experiences love through the lens of his or her culture and psychological needs. Ormont (1988) proposed three nascent forms of intimacy that would inform one’s love experience, bonding, needing, and giving, to which I would add power and control. I would also add that, when there is an early environmental deprivation, other forms of intimacy can take root: an attachment to a compensatory idealized hope (Levine, 2007), in which a person discounts all real relationships, holding out for the perfect one, and an adaptation of self-sufficiency (Levine, 2011), in which a person renounces desire and need and lives without. These experiences affect our capacities to love and be loved and shape our attractions. All of these forms of loving and relating are manifested in group therapy. The reluctance to express feelings is sometimes a result of fears of feeling shamed and humiliated, rejected, or envied; or of feeling envy; or of not being protected, of surrendering to feelings and losing control. In the group, we strive to help people feel safe enough to have their feelings and express them. Through this process, the individuals move from a narcissistic mode of intimacy to more mature forms. A good example of the emotional development of mature intimacy is shown in the movie As Good as It Gets (1997). In the most affecting line in the movie, the character Melvin, played by Jack Nicholson, declares to the woman he loves, “You make me want to be a better man.” This is a particularly moving moment for a man who has, in the course of the 252 levine movie, metamorphosed from a misanthropic, provocative, and alienating person to a loving man. How was Melvin able to accomplish this? He is initially portrayed as a control freak who needs omnipotent domination of his environment, manifested through obsessive controlling behaviors. These behaviors, which serve to ensure a safe environment for him, drive others away—which is what he wants. He prefers to be isolated, alone, danger-free. Alone, he is free to write, as a successful author, about love (romance novels, of course!) rather than being in love. A traumatic childhood has made love a hopeless impossibility, so all efforts are made to close love off as a real-world expectation. All relationships are foreclosed, except with one woman—a waitress, who is kind, listens to him, is reliable, and sets appropriate limits. Through his increasing dependency on this woman, along with his involvement in a little group that includes the waitress, a previously hated dog, and his equally hated gay master, our hero is drawn into becoming a more mature person. He becomes attached to others, interested in how he is affecting others, and concerned about the welfare of those around him. In the course of a little over two hours, Melvin is able to move from his narcissistic attempts at achieving omnipotent forms of self-sufficiency, with a hidden desire to be loved, expressed in his novel writing, to becoming a man who can generously love another and (equally good) is loved back. It is romantic that the movie has such a nice outcome in such a short time. But I think this is the natural and extraordinary process of group treatment. Group members and the group therapist work together to evolve from narcissistic ways of being and relating to more mature forms. We become more defined selves. We learn to have our feelings, modulate our feelings, contain our feelings, and express our feelings—the easy ones and the difficult ones: love...