Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir

by Irvin D. Yalom

  “Why don’t you just ask me what happened during the last week that made me feel bad?” she replied.

  I followed her suggestion and posed the question: “What happened to make you feel bad this last week?” It led to a productive discussion of disappointments and slights she had experienced the past few days. Toward the end of the hour, I circled back to the beginning and inquired how it felt for her to have been so angry with me. She wept as she expressed gratitude for my taking her seriously, for assuming responsibility for my role in it, and for hanging in there with her. I think we both felt we had entered a new phase of therapy.

  The session left me thinking about anger as I rode my bike over the creek toward my home. Though I was satisfied with the way I had handled this incident, I know I have more personal work to do in that area, and I would have been far more uncomfortable had I not liked Brenda so much, and known how hard it was for her to criticize me. I had no doubt, also, that I would have felt far more threatened had my patient been an angry male. I’ve always been uneasy in confrontation, personally and professionally, and have carefully avoided any administrative position that might require it—for example, a chairmanship, committee head, or deanship. Only once, a few years after I had finished my residency, did I agree to be interviewed for a chairmanship—at my alma mater, Johns Hopkins. Fortunately—for me and for them—they selected another candidate for the position. I’ve always told myself that avoiding administrative positions was a wise move because my real strength lay in clinical research, practice, and writing, but I have to admit now that my fear of conflicts, and my general shyness, played a significant role in it.

  My wife, knowing I prefer only small social events of four or, at the most, six people, finds it hilarious that I became an expert in group therapy. But, in fact, my experience in leading therapy groups turned out to be therapeutic, not only for my patients but for me as well: it greatly increased my comfort in group situations. And, for a long time, I have felt little anxiety in addressing large audiences. But then, such performances are always on my own terms: I want no part of a spontaneous confrontational public debate: I don’t think quickly in such situations. One of the advantages of old age is that audiences now treat me with great deference: it’s been years, decades, since a colleague or a questioner in the audience has verbally challenged me.

  I halt my bike ride for ten minutes to watch the Gunn High School tennis team practice, thinking back to my days on the Roosevelt High School tennis team. I played number six on the six-player team, but was a much better player than Nelson at the number-five slot. Whenever we played one another, however, he intimidated me with his aggressiveness and cursing, and, even more, by his halting play at crucial points and standing still in silent prayer for a few moments. The coach was unsympathetic and told me to “grow up and handle it.”

  I continue biking and think of the many attorneys and CEOs I’ve treated who thrive on conflict, and I marvel at their appetite for battle. I’ve never understood how they got to be that way, nor, of course, how I came to be so conflict-avoidant. I think of elementary school bullies who threatened to beat me up after school. I remember reading stories of kids whose fathers taught them how to box, and how I pined for such a father. I lived at a time when Jews never fought: they were the ones who got beaten up. Except for Billy Conn, the Jewish boxer—I lost a wad betting on him when he fought Joe Louis. And then found out, years later, that he wasn’t Jewish after all.

  Self-defense was no minor issue during my first fourteen years. My neighborhood was unsafe, and even short trips from home felt perilous. Three times a week I went to the Sylvan cinema, just around the corner from the store. Since each show was a double feature, I saw six films a week, usually westerns or World War II flicks. My parents unhesitatingly allowed me to go because they figured I was safe in the theater. I imagine that as long as I was in the library, at the cinema, or reading upstairs, they must have been relieved: at least for those fifteen to twenty hours each week, I was out of danger.

  But peril was always there. I was about eleven and working in the store one Saturday evening when my mother asked me to get her a coffee ice-cream cone from the drugstore four doors down the street. Immediately next door was a Chinese laundry, then there was a barbershop with yellowed pictures of various types of haircuts in the window, next a tiny, cluttered hardware store, and finally, the drugstore, which, in addition to a pharmacy, had a small eight-stooled lunch counter serving sandwiches and ice cream. I got the coffee ice-cream cone, paid my dime (single-scoop cones were a nickel, but my mother always liked a double-decker), and walked outside, where I was surrounded by four tough young white guys a year or two older than me. It was unusual and risky for groups of whites to hang out in our black neighborhood, and generally a sign of trouble.

  “Oh, who’s that cone for?” snarled one, a boy with small, dull eyes, a tight face, a crew cut, and a red bandana tied around his neck.

  “My mother,” I muttered, looking furtively around for some escape route.

  “Your mommy? Well, why not have a taste yourself?” he said, as he grabbed my hand and shoved the cone into my face.

  Just at that moment, a group of black kids, friends of mine, turned the corner and walked down the street. They saw what was happening and surrounded us. One of them, Leon, leaned in and said to me, “Hey Irv, don’t you go taking that shit off that jerk. You can handle him.” Then he whispered, “Use that uppercut I showed you.”

  Just at that moment I heard heavy footsteps pounding and saw my father and William, his delivery man, running up the street. My father grabbed my hand and yanked me away, back into the safe harbor of Bloomingdale Market.

  Of course, my father did the right thing. I would have done the same thing for my son. The last thing any father would want was for his son to be in the center of some interracial street fight. And yet I often look back upon his rescue with regret. I wish I had fought the guy and showed him my pathetic uppercut. I had never stood up to aggressors before, and here, surrounded by friends who would protect me, was the perfect opportunity. The boy was about my size, though a bit older, and I would have felt so much better about myself if I had traded punches with him. What’s the worst that could have happened? A bloody nose, a black eye—a small price to pay for once taking a stand and holding my ground.

  I know that adult patterns of behavior are complex and never initiated by a single event, and yet, I persist in believing that my unease in dealing with open anger, my avoidance of confrontation, even heated debates, my reluctance to accept administrative positions entailing confrontation and dispute, all would have been different had my father and William not yanked me out of that fight one night so long ago. But I also understand that I grew up in an environment of fear: iron bars on the windows of the store, danger everywhere, and hovering over us all the story of the Jews of Europe hunted down and killed. Flight was the only strategy my father taught me.

  As I describe this incident, another scene seeps into consciousness: My mother and I were going to the movies, and we entered the Sylvan just as the film was about to begin. She very rarely went to the movies with me, especially in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, but she adored Fred Astaire and often went to his films. I wasn’t happy about going with her because she had no manners, was often discourteous, and I never knew what was going to happen. I was embarrassed when any of my friends met her. In the cinema she spotted two seats in a center row and plunked herself down. A boy sitting next to one of the vacant seats said, “Hey, lady, I’m saving this seat.”

  “Oy, the big shot. He’s saving a seat,” she answered in a loud voice to all those sitting nearby, whilst I tried to hide by pulling my shirt over my head and covering my face. Just then the boy’s companion arrived and the two of them, scowling and muttering, moved over to a side row. Shortly after the film started I snuck a look at them and the boy caught my eye, shook his fist at me, and mouthed, “I’ll get you l
ater.”

  And that was the boy who smashed my mother’s ice-cream cone into my face. Since he couldn’t get back at my mother, he must have remembered and lay in wait for a long time until he could catch me alone. What a double-decker pleasure for him to have learned the cone was meant for my mother—he got us both with a single stroke!

  This all sounds plausible and makes for a satisfying narrative. How powerful is our drive to fill gestalts and to fashion neatly composed stories! But was it true? Seventy years later I have no hope of excavating the “real” facts, but perhaps the intensity of my feeling in those moments, the desire to fight and the paralysis, has bound them together somehow. True? Alas, I am now uncertain whether it was truly the same boy and whether the time sequence was correct: for all I know the cone-smashing may have preceded the movie incident.

  As I get older it becomes ever more difficult to verify answers to such questions. I try to recapture parts of my own youth, but when I check with my sister and cousins and friends, I’m shocked at how differently we remember things. And in my daily work, as I help patients reconstruct their early lives, I grow increasingly convinced of the fragile and ever-shifting nature of reality. Memoirs, no doubt this one as well, are far more fictional than we like to think.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE RED TABLE

  My office is a studio about 150 feet from my house, but the two structures are surrounded with so much foliage that one is barely visible from the other. I spend most of my day in the office, writing all morning and seeing patients in the afternoons. When I feel restless, I step outside and putter over the bonsai, pruning, watering, and admiring their graceful shapes and thinking of questions I should pose to Christine, a bonsai master and my daughter’s close friend, who lives only a block away.

  After my evening bike ride, or a walk with Marilyn, we spend the rest of the evening in our library, reading, talking, or watching a film. The room has large corner windows and opens up to a rustic redwood patio with lawn furniture and a large redwood hot tub surrounded by California live oak trees. The walls are lined with hundreds of books, and it’s furnished in a casual, California style, with a leather “back rest” chair and a sofa with a loose-fitting red and white cover. Standing in one corner, in stark contrast to everything else, is my mother’s garish, faux-baroque table, with a red leather top, four curved black and gold legs, and four matching chairs with red leather seats. I play chess and other board games with my children on that table just as seventy years ago I played chess on Sunday mornings with my father.

  Marilyn dislikes the table—it matches nothing else in our home—and she’d love to get it out of the house, but she gave up that campaign long ago. She knows it means a great deal to me, and has agreed to keep the table in the room, but in permanent exile in the far corner of the room. That table is tied to one of the most significant events in my life, and whenever I look at it I am flooded with feelings of nostalgia, of horror, and of emancipation.

  My early life is divided into two parts: before and after my fourteenth birthday. Until I was fourteen, I lived with my mother, father, and sister in our small, shoddy flat over the grocery store. The flat was directly above the store, but the entrance was outside the store, just around the corner. There was a vestibule where the coal man regularly delivered coal, and therefore the door was unlocked. In cold weather, it was not uncommon to find one or two alcoholics sleeping on the floor.

  THE ENTRANCE TO THE FAMILY FLAT OVER THE GROCERY STORE, CA. 1943.

  Up the stairs were the doors to two flats—ours was the one overlooking First Street. We had two bedrooms—one for my parents and one for my sister. I slept in the small dining room on a davenport sofa that could be turned into a bed. When I was ten my sister went to college and I took over her bedroom. There was a small kitchen with a tiny table upon which I took all my meals. During my entire childhood I never, not once, had a meal with my mother or father (aside from Sundays, when we had dinner with the entire network of the family—between twelve and twenty people). My mother cooked and left food on the stove, and my sister and I ate our meals on the small kitchen table.

  My friends lived in similar places, so it never occurred to me to wish for a nicer apartment, but ours had a unique and persistent horror: cockroaches. They were everywhere, despite the efforts of exterminators—I was (and am to this day) terrified of them. Every night my mother put the legs of my bed in bowls filled with water, sometimes kerosene, to stop them from climbing up into the bed. Still, they often fell from the ceiling into my bed. At night, once the lights were out, the house was theirs, and I could hear them scuttling on the linoleum floor of our tiny kitchen. I didn’t dare to go to the bathroom at night to pee, but instead used a jar I kept by my bed. I remember once, when I was about ten or eleven, reading a book in our living room when a giant roach flew across the room and landed in my lap (yes, cockroaches can fly—they don’t often do it but they sure can!). I screamed and my father ran over and knocked it to the floor and stepped on it. The sight of the squashed roach was the worst thing of all, and I ran to the toilet to throw up. My father tried to calm me, but he simply couldn’t understand how I could be so upset over a dead bug. (My roach phobia is still there, in hibernation, but has long been irrelevant: Palo Alto is too dry for roaches and I haven’t seen one in half a century—one of the great bonuses of California life.)

  And then, one day, when I was fourteen, my mother told me, almost casually, that she had bought a house, and we were going to move very shortly. The next thing I recall is walking into our new home on a lovely, quiet street only a block from Rock Creek Park. It was a large handsome two-story, three-bedroom home with a knotty pine recreation room in the basement, a screened-in side porch, and a small lawn surrounded by a hedge. The move was almost entirely my mother’s project: she purchased the house without my father ever taking time off from the store to see it.

  When did we move? Did I see the movers? What was my first impression of the house? What was my first night there like? And what about the enormous pleasure of saying adieu forever to that roach-infested flat, to the shame, and filth, and poverty, and the alcoholics sleeping just inside our vestibule? I must have experienced all these things, but I recall very little. Perhaps I was too preoccupied and anxious about transferring to the ninth grade in a new school and making new friends. Memory and emotions have a curvilinear relationship: too much or too little emotion often results in paucity of memory. I do recall wandering through our clean house and our clean yard in wonderment. I must have been proud to invite friends into my home, I must have felt more peaceful, less frightened, better able to sleep, but these are mere assumptions. What I do remember most clearly from that whole period is a story my mother proudly told about purchasing the red table.

  She decided to buy everything new and keep nothing from our old flat—no furniture, no linens, nothing except her kitchen pots (those I still use today). She, too, must have been fed up with the way we had lived, though she never spoke to me of her inner longings and feelings. But she did, more than once, tell me the story of the table. After she bought the house, she went to Mazor’s Department Store, a popular furniture store frequented by all her friends, and in a single afternoon ordered everything for a three-bedroom house, including carpets, house and porch furniture, and lawn chairs. It must have been a huge order, and just as the salesman totaled it up, a garish, neo-baroque card table, with a bright red leather top and four matching red leather chairs, caught her eye. She instructed the salesman to add the table and chairs to the order. He told her that this particular set of table and chairs had already been sold and that, regrettably, most regrettably, there were no other sets—the model had been discontinued. Whereupon my mother told him to cancel the entire order and picked up her purse and prepared to leave.

  Perhaps she was serious. Perhaps not. At any rate, her move worked. The salesman caved and the table was hers. Hats off, Mother, for an audacious bluff
—I’ve played a lot of poker, but this was the best bluff I’d ever heard of. Sometimes I’ve flirted with the idea of writing a story from the point of view of the family that did not get that table. There was some energy in that idea: I would tell the story from both perspectives: my mother’s great bluff and triumph and the other family’s dejection.

  I still have that table despite my wife’s lament that it doesn’t match anything in our home. Though its aesthetic shortcomings are apparent even to me, that table holds memories of my Sunday chess games with my father and uncles and later with my children and grandchildren. In high school I played on the chess team, and proudly wore an athletic sweater displaying a large chess piece. The team, consisting of five boards, competed with all the Washington, DC, high schools. I played first board, and, after being undefeated in my senior year, I considered myself the Washington, DC, junior champion. But I never improved enough to play at a higher level, in part because of my uncle Abe, who scoffed at the idea of booking up, especially for chess openings. I recall him pointing to my head and pronouncing me “klug” (clever) and urging me to use my good Yalom “kopf” (head) and play in an unorthodox fashion to confound my opponents. This turned out to be extremely bad advice. I stopped playing chess during my college pre-med days, but the day following my acceptance to medical school, I tried out for the university chess team. I played second board for the rest of the semester, and then, when I began medical school, I once again gave it up until I began teaching my sons, Victor and Reid, who became excellent players. Only in the past few years have I gotten more serious about my chess. I began chess lessons with a Russian master and watched my Internet rating rise. But far too late, I fear—my diminishing memory is an invincible opponent.

  If it had been up to my father, we probably would have lived over the store indefinitely. He seemed almost indifferent to his surroundings. My mother bought all his clothes and told him what to wear, even which necktie, when we went out on Sundays.