NEW YORK -- Helen: "What does your therapist say about all of this?"
Jessica: "Oh I could never tell my therapist."
Helen: "Why not?
Jessica: "Because it's private!"

scene from Kissing Jessica Stein

Is Woody Allen in the house?

Frida -- let us call her Frida X -- is in turmoil. She's a labour lawyer from the Upper West Side, and oy, does she have problems. She hasn't spoken with her parents in over a year. The eldest girl of six children raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, she thinks she's going to end up an old maid. Sure, you scoff. She's beautiful, smart, and obviously able to take care of herself: What man would let her pass by?

Yet here she is, inching toward her 32nd birthday with no romantic prospects in sight. Her two younger sisters have already paired up with their own life partners, while her parents' disapproving gaze grows ferocious. Even Yaffa, Frida's lesbian middle sister, meets with more parental approval because she's stayed within the Orthodox fold. Frida doesn't even go to synagogue on the high holidays. All of her male friends are gay: How's she supposed to meet a guy like that?

And how, you may ask, do we know all this about Frida X? Because last Saturday night she took to the stage at the East Village club Fez and submitted to the gentle pseudo-psychotherapeutic prodding of Lisa Levy, a performance artist of sorts who was in the first of a five-week stand of something she calls Psychotherapy Live!.

The show is a kind of cabaret version of Dr. Phil. You'd think it would be a slam dunk for New York, embodying as it does two of the city's core values: navel-gazing and egocentric exhibitionism. But New York's relationship with psychotherapy isn't what it used to be. Woody Allen, this city's patron saint of analysis, quit therapy about 10 years ago, right around the time he found true love with Soon-Yi. In the late nineties, the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik penned a wry memoir of his six years in analysis with a fearsome German he deemed the city's last Freudian, in which he noted that the talking cure was no longer the de rigueur fashionable treatment it had been for so many years.

True, things changed a little when patients started coming into their sessions talking about Tony Soprano. Psychotherapy seemed at least vaguely relevant again. Then came Sept. 11, 2001, which sent the city into a state of high anxiety that, to judge from data, shows few signs of abating. The one-year anniversary brought on a new wave of depression and need for psychological counselling, as thousands of New Yorkers realized they weren't as strong as they thought they were, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

Which makes Psychotherapy Live! oddly timely. While it is certainly not the first time someone has performed public therapy for entertainment -- the humorist David Rakoff dressed up as Sigmund Freud and analyzed his friends in a Barneys store window during the 1996 holiday season -- Lisa Levy's show may be the perfect symbol of this city's new and very genuine neurosis.

In geeky glasses and a halting voice that betrays its own troubles (she has been in therapy on and off for about 20 years), Levy invites audience members to lie back on her couch and tell her their problems. With a strict 13-minute time limit and a lot of help from the audience, she strives to diagnose her "client's" issue and prescribe a solution. Last weekend, three of the four volunteers discussed difficulties with romance; the fourth, a 21-year-old student, was troubled by persistent thoughts of being a "bad person." Now she's having sexual relations with her steady boyfriend. Say it ain't so!)

Clearly, as personal troubles go, Psychotherapy Live! offers rather benign material, several steps down from the racy stuff typically found on an afternoon's wanderings up the cable dial. And oddly, the audience is usually benign too. The crowds that show up for Dr. Phil, Maury, and other TV shows get their jollies when the host is nasty and judgmental. Yet if Psychotherapy Live! is any indication -- the city that is proud to have invented nasty and judgmental, or at least patented it -- has grown soft and sympathetic.

Last Saturday night, as the four "clients" followed each across the Fez stage, the audience applauded their bravery for baring their souls, and generally acted as a good encounter group should, affirming the volunteers' inherent self-worth. Each of them later said it felt good to be emotionally supported by a roomful of strangers.

In New York these days, if the issue isn't the perennial problem of love, it's probably an oppressive anxiety stemming from the attacks on the World Trade Center.

One year after Sept. 11, the city is only now beginning to realize how affected it has been by the attacks. Lifenet, a toll-free helpline run by the mental health association of New York that refers callers to professional therapists, is experiencing extraordinary demand for its services. Before the attacks, a typical month brought about 3,000 calls. In September, 2002, the line received more than 12,000 calls. Even last month, 7,000 people called for help.

These are not your typically neurotic Upper West Siders. Like those who died in the twin towers, the people calling Lifenet represent a broad cross-section of New Yorkers. Over 50 per cent of callers have never before sought professional mental-health treatment.

"A lot of people thought they'd be over it by now, and they're feeling very alone with their symptoms," says Dr. John Draper, the director of Lifenet. "At this point, the support systems have either faded, or they're not as supportive as they thought, or those helping out in those support systems are feeling they've done all they can to help. The rest of the world can and does move on."

"A lot of people who are calling see themselves as good problem-solvers, they've always been able to manage whatever life has thrown at them," Dr. Draper says. "This is kind of an identity-challenging event for people. They think, 'There's clearly something wrong with me and who I thought I was,' because they can't handle it, so there's a lot of shame."

That shame was probably mitigated a little by TV commercials featuring former mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who explained with paternal kindness that everyone needs a little help now and then. A series of similar radio commercials featured the soothing voices of Susan Sarandon and Alan Alda.

After the attacks, a daily call-in show on the local cable news channel New York 1 had gruff firefighters and police officers, calling in for help from the on-air therapist, frequently breaking down into open sobs. "A lot of days we were only supposed to do it for one hour, but we ended up going for two," recalls Mark Simone, a radio and TV host who frequently anchored the show. "It showed a lot of people that therapy works." Producers often assisted callers in finding professional help.

Professionals say that many people who were once in therapy but had finished treatment are coming back in more extreme states than ever before. "The people who actually make the call to a therapist now are feeling very strung out," says Polly McCall, a Manhattan psychotherapist specializing in addiction. "They're not returning because of, 'Oh, I'm not as enriched by my career, or I'm bored.' They're coming in with very serious depression, bipolar disorder, real addiction. With my colleagues, everyone across the board says that we're seeing people in worse shape now.

"They'll come in and say, 'Oh, so terrorists blow up my building, what do I care?' That's hard for the therapists, to listen to this kind of fatalistic, pessimistic stuff all day long. This is the first time I can ever remember it being like that," she says.

If you're the optimistic sort, you can look on the bright side. With something like 20,000 licensed therapists in the greater New York region, there are lots of professionals ready to listen.

"This city has always been overloaded with therapists," TV anchor Mark Simone says. "But we've had disaster-relief specialists in, the guys who go from place to place treating people, like after Hurricane Andrew and Oklahoma City after the bombing. They said they never saw a city so equipped to handle something like this. Maybe it was worth it now, having too many therapists for all those decades."