In Treatment 3x03

On Wednesdays, Paul’s patient is Jesse, a precociously nervous teenager, who likes to toss about vocab items and talk about Facebook with attention-deficit disorderly panache, rebelliously throwing his angst about while trying to hide his insecurities. He doesn’t like to be corrected when he mispronounces Miriam Webster for the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. Jesse has been adopted, and apparently his behavior at home has become too much to handle. He has been seeing Paul for some time. In his mind his birth mother is a crack whore, but Paul notices that every time he speaks about his biological father he comes up with a different profession – and probably the one he likes to see himself in. He lashes out against everything and has turned his sense of betrayal and rejection into promiscuous encounters with older men. Then he wants to show Paul something crazy on his iPhone, but Paul tells him no. He finds it distracting. Jesse still plays him a voice-mail message. It’s from his birth mother who has somehow traced his number and would like to talk to him. Her number’s area code is from Westchester. Definitely not a crack whore. More likely, rich WASP. But Jesse has no idea what to do and hasn’t spoken with anyone about it until now. Another interesting session, with lots of promise, and a phenomenal performance by newcomer Dane DeHaan.