Photo: Dina Litovsky for New York Magazine In 1964, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, Icek Perel hosted two parties. The first, held on a Friday, was populated by friends from the neighborhood: working-class Belgians with whom he had formed a joyous, if circumstantial, alliance. Over beer, they told jokes in Flemish; his guests, who were also customers at the clothing shop he ran beneath his apartment, hardly knew he and his family were Jewish.
When we meet for lunch, she speaks with the conviction of someone who has been rehearsing her lines for years. Anyone who has gone to therapy will recognize the trappings of the profession in her speech. She is prone to repetition, and her advice is so crystallized as to sometimes seem premeditated. In response to more than one of my questions, she recites phrases from her books and lectures word for word. Perel’s greatest trick, perhaps, is that she still feels present.
Perel wondered if performance could make sense of the conflicting narratives produced by migration. What is the difference between departing from one’s home willingly and fleeing without choice? And how do those differences influence the way people act as immigrants in the countries that host them? From her parents, she had learned identity was malleable, but the therapy of her time espoused a one-size-fits-all approach.
After facilitating a guest seminar at a drug-addiction clinic, she was invited to provide counseling for its resident families and couples on an ongoing basis. Eventually, one of her supervisors took notice of her unconventional style and offered her a job teaching in the psychiatry department at New York University. Perel was still unlicensed and had no degree beyond her master’s but nevertheless began teaching and supervising psychiatric residents.
Perel had no training in sexual psychology, but she knew she had found the inspiration for her first book. In its final form, Mating in Captivity is a treatise on the paradoxical compulsions that condition long-term relationships. Because eroticism is sustained by fantasy, Perel realized it could be used as a portal — into an individual’s idiosyncratic kinks, sure, but also into the sociopolitical strictures that make one desire escape.
Even now, Perel seems surprised by her audacity. She pauses her recollections a handful of times to point out that, at every stage of her career, she has had “no idea” what she was doing. So it should come as no surprise that by the end of her initial meeting with producers from Audible for her now-hit series, Where Should We Begin?, it became clear to everyone that Perel had never listened to a podcast.
She's a tedious played-out self-promoter.
EstherPerel mayabinyam
EstherPerel mayabinyam
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