‘Couples Therapy’ Season 4: What Dr. Orna Guralnik Has Learned

Before my interview with Dr. Orna Guralnik, I was a little more nervous than usual. Throughout the four seasons of the Showtime docuseries “Couples Therapy,” Guralnik — or simply Orna, as she is known to the show’s participants — has a commanding and authoritative presence. Each season follows Guralnik, a New York-based psychoanalyst, and several couples over a series of sessions. As the couples, who come from a wide range of backgrounds, work through impasses in their relationships, they uncover wrenching pasts and arrive at deep emotional truths. But for many viewers, the most captivating part of the show is Guralnik’s seemingly unflappable demeanor.

Like on the show, whose new season begins streaming Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime and will air Sundays on Showtime, Guralnik spoke in a measured way during our Zoom interview, pausing to consider each response and whether she had given a complete answer. It was a good reminder to myself — and maybe all of us — to slow down and take a beat, instead of launching right into the next question or comment.

That measured, deliberate process exemplifies what Guralnik sees as the appeal and value of the show. Each season, she and the couples typically meet in weekly hour-long sessions for 15 to 20 weeks, which the show’s editors compress into nine half-hour episodes. We only get a sliver of the many hours of work Guralnik and the couples are doing, but there’s a depth and richness to each episode, and emotional arcs that don’t feel manufactured for the camera.

“Even though it’s obviously edited down from a longer session, we take our time. When you work as a psychoanalyst with your patients, you take your time. Nothing can be rushed. So there’s a certain kind of leaning into the practice of slowness, as opposed to instant gratification,” Guralnik told me. “On some level, we all know that we need something a lot slower to be able to process what’s going on.”

The deliberate pace also allows for “leaving some room for uncertainty — both my own and my patients’, like opening up a realm of being that is not about quick answers, not about simplistic answers, which then allows room for complexity, which is so what we need nowadays,” she continued. “I mean, everything is getting so flattened into this ‘good, bad, us, them’ — like, we’ve lost our capacity to think, and the show is a really good antidote to that. To really work through a couple’s struggle, you have…