In Therapy on Arte: Is Season 2 First?

Five years after Bataklan’s attacks, after his first arrest, psychoanalyst Philip Diane (Frederick PieroWelcomes four new patients: Ines (Eye Haidara), A forty-year-old and solitary lawyer, Robin (Aliocha Delmott), An overweight teenager who was bullied at school, Lydia (Susan Lyndon), A student who came to share a dark secret, and Allen (Jacques Weber), The business leader got into a media mess … Divorced, the family of one of his former patients has filed a lawsuit, Dr. Dejan addresses Claire (Charlotte Gainsburg), A well-known analyst and essayist, whose support he hopes for in his ongoing trial.

In therapy Season 2, created by Eric Toledano, Olivier Nakache and Laetzia Gonzalez

Every Thursday at 20:55 on Arte and in full on Arte.tv

Come out to the Parisian firm Ariane (Mélanie Thierry), Damien (Pio Marmaï), Leonora (Clémence Poésy) and Esther (Carole Bouquet), its former head. After the emotional outburst caused by the tragic death of Adele Chiban (Red Cats), who desperately went to war in Syria, after being traumatized by his intervention on the evening of the Bataklan attacks, Philip Diane changed his living environment. .

Five years have passed since this event, which threatened his career. In anticipation of a lawsuit initiated by Adele’s family, who accuse her of failing to avoid her actions, Diane, whose marriage ran into serious problems, has now divorced and settled in a small house on the outskirts of Paris.

He welcomes new faces as they name the season with their appointments, in the quiet tranquility of his new office. Quietly indeed, for Diane is characterized by loneliness this season, doubts and fears that she would not be able to measure, and the problems identified by new patients will find a special echo in her.

So different from each other, these new characters explore different stages of life: adolescence and its suffering related to the gaze of others and the fear of rejection through the young Robin, the absolute taboo of illness where a person feels omnipotent for Lydia. Fear of sacrificing everything for his career and the weight of family inheritance for Ines, the end of a crucial moment in his life and finally the time of conscience examination for Allen, at the age of seven, plunged into attacks of existential anxiety.

All of these issues will confront Diane with the boundaries of her practice, which she continues to transcend. His new supervisor, Claire, who is responsible for helping him prepare for the trial that will cost him his career, will try to understand where this savior syndrome is coming from that prevents him.

Written in late 2020, at the center of the third wave of the COVID-19 epidemic, this season, led by Clemens Madeleine-Perdrilat (Nona and her daughters) to capture this collective trauma. Through words and gestures.

While seeing masked characters on screen at first creates an amazing rejection effect, the series allows you to step aside and take a step back to change this paradigm. By paying attention to the rituals and fears integrated by each, the series also reflects a way of caring for others, expanding the therapeutic work started by clients as they enter into Diane practice.

They are also a ready-made tool for certain characters to illustrate the fear of loss, of abandonment. When he forcibly washes his hands with a hydroalcoholic gel and insists on measuring the exact distance between the sofa and the therapist’s chair to maintain the recommended meter distance, Robin is actually a victim of anxiety over the thought that his parents divorced him and for what. Responsible.

As for Lydia, it was the fact that she was infected with the virus that prompted her to go to the hospital, where she underwent tests that revealed a health problem completely different from what she had imagined was related to the pandemic. In solitary confinement, he is then unable to trust himself and refuses to ask for help, which creates fertile ground for his neuroses.

A wave of true individual and collective shock, this epidemic was the catalyst for everyone’s concern, the result of which is gracefully illustrated by the cameras of the four new directors who came around the Nakache-Toledano duo: Emanuel Berko, Arno Desplecin, Emanuel Serguez, Frédéric According to the cinematography, they correspond to the characters and their patients, whether it is modern or universal.

Hanging in the shadow of Adel Chiban in Philip Diane’s office in the first episode, the second tone of this season is formed. If patients sometimes spin, physically collapse during sessions, and allow their weaknesses to be overcome, this is a death theme that is ubiquitous in these new episodes. Against the background of a pandemic, of course, but also with the repressed and traumatic memory of the deaths of loved ones; Fear of one’s own mortal; The fear that death will strike loved ones and leave them helpless; Or regretting leaving a potential life aside.

In the face of these excited patients, Diane is not missed, as her own ghosts remind her when she consults Claire, her new boss, who is determined to destabilize her. And one of them (played by Agnes Zhaoie as a moving guest) who accidentally met between two sessions may bring him the relief he has always sought, in response to the sometimes dangerous emotional investment he makes in his practice. Therapy at risk of exceeding limits.

At the end of these new episodes, as if suspended in time as the imprisonment that preceded their recurring events, En Thérapie restores the power of all his humanity with greater vigor and perhaps more realism than the previous season, re-focusing on complexity. Human relations, bypassing script writing. And it reminds us once again of the importance of therapy-specific listening and compassion for everyone in this tense world of constant fuss.