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A terrorist attack and then a worldwide Covid pandemic brought the outside on the inside in the French television series En thérapie, and it has proved to be a huge hit. I first saw the original Israeli version, BeTipul in 2005. It, too, gripped Israel. Then came In Treatment, the American version, now followed by the French version. The format remains the same in every country: each day of the week (corresponding to an episode of about twenty-five minutes), a psychotherapist meets a patient (individual or couple) in his office; on Friday, the therapist goes to see a female supervisor. The viewer thus becomes a “voyeur” of what is portrayed as the intimate experience of psychodynamic work.
That said, the cultural context always changes. The Bataclan attack by Islamic terrorists in Paris, France, on 13 November 2015, is the backdrop to the first series of En thérapie. The assault left ninety people dead and 416 people injured, a quarter of them seriously. The main character in this French version is the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Dr Philippe Dayan, who has his consulting rooms a stone's throw from the Bataclan concert hall.
In the original Israeli version, the therapist was played by a well-known actor in Israel, Assi Dayan, the son of politician Moshe Dayan, who died in 2014. In the French series, the analyst is also called Dayan, a word which in Hebrew means “judge”, but can also mean “to evaluate”.
Dayan listens to the suffering of a police officer called Adel, who has post-traumatic stress disorder and was one of the first on the scene of the attack, as well as of other patients affected by the horror of what they saw and experienced. Adel, who is French of Algerian extraction, speaks loudly, he says he can't sleep, he has chest pains, he fainted during jogging, and can no longer stand being with his wife. He is nervous and has difficulty sitting down. “There was a smell … a smell of blood … it jumped up at me,” he says by way of introduction. In some ways, he r