Can we liberate ourselves from the god or gods of our fathers, the god or gods of our mothers? Literally, no. Transference rules us and controls us. Transference: the ubiquitous process by which we create internal representations of current people in our lives—be it spouses, lovers, bosses, teachers, coaches, clergymen—based on past important people in our childhoods, usually parents and siblings.
Our view of God is mostly a transference phenomenon, as the psychoanalyst Ana-Maria Rizzuto has pointed out. Our internal representation of god or the gods is remarkably congruent with our internal representation of our parents or other crucial parenting figures. In case after case she describes men and women whose view of God is virtually the same as the way they view their parents. If they grew up with a punitive parent, their god is punitive. If they grew up with parents who were dismissive and abandoning, their god is dismissive and aloof.
Atheists are not immune from this transference phenomenon. If they have grown up with grotesquely abusive parents, they may reject these parents and may reject all gods. If they feel poorly understood by a parent or parents, they cannot imagine a god or gods that can accept them and understand them.
Here is an example from Rizzuto’s work—a comparison of one man’s statements about God and statements about his father:
I have never experienced closeness to God. I was never close to my father.
If I am in distress, I do not resort to God, because I have no belief in God. I do not ask anything from my father.
I do not formally pray, but I may toss a coin in a fountain and make a wish or think in a hopeful way because it makes me feel good. I don’t talk to my father.
We human beings cannot win. Whether we like it or not, we are products of our experiences, products of our childhoods, products of our heightened hypnotizability during that childhood.
Our illusions are based on the reality of our lives. Our God delusion is no more an illusion than militant modern atheism is an illusion. Rizzuto again: “To ask a man to renounce a god he believes in may be as cruel and as meaningless as wrenching a child from his teddy bear so that he can grow up . . . Asking a mature, functioning individual to renounce his God would be like asking Freud to renounce his own creation, psychoanalysis, and the ‘illusory’ promise of what scientific knowledge can do. . . Men cannot be without illusions. The type of illusion we select—science, religion, or something else—reveals our personal history . . .” Likewise, to ask a man to renounce atheism may be just as cruel and as meaningless as . . .
Time for me now to select my own specific illusions, my own specific gods. The wonderful thing about adulthood is that we can personally select our own friends, our partners, our mentors—and our own gods. As kids we are a captive audience, stuck with the family, gods, illusions, and religion we are born into.
Those of us who have had the good fortune of growing up with nonpunitive parents also have the enhanced good fortune of being able to create a loving and comforting and encouraging set of gods inside our heads. A well-nurtured childhood can be a gift that keeps on giving. In contrast, adults raised in childhood by punitive parents have no such luck. The gods inside their heads only make them crazier and more neurotic, and they often thrust their punitive gods on the rest of us.
So, I wanted and needed gods that could support me through my grief. In 1984, with the initial diagnosis of prostate cancer and the subsequent surgery, mourning had dawned; mourning had broken. Shock and bargaining and anger and despair—all the steps any of us go through in grappling with grief and loss—were a staple of my life.
But with whom do I bargain? I have bargained with friends and colleagues and storekeepers and car dealers over material goods, but not so effectively over life and death stuff.
And at whom should I express my absolute outrage over my plight? No point in displacing my anger toward Helen or my friends or my doctors. My rage had to be directed somewhere, toward someone or something—no point in squashing it or suppressing it. If we did not have the “God of our fathers” to whom to express our ire, we would have to invent some other gods. Fuck it, if Job can express his rage at God, so can I express my rage at any gods of my choosing.
I will also take Pascal’s “wager” one step further. Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century mathematician who laid the theoretical foundations for measuring risk and probability. In his book, Pensees, he included a fragment asking, “God is, or he is not. Which way should we incline? Reason cannot answer.” Only an illusory reason can answer.
The only way to choose in this coin flip between a bet that God exists and a bet that there is no God, is by deciding whether an outcome in which God exists is preferable. For Pascal the choice was a no-brainer. A belief in God promised salvation in the after-death.
Again, I wanted something more—salvation in the here and now. I did not give a shit about the afterlife, the after-death. If there was a 50 percent chance that a god or gods existed, then why not believe in these gods? If one believes in these gods, then why not accept, say, the 50 percent chance that these gods are comforting and encouraging and reassuring, not punitive? So, if we use Pascal’s crazy fifty-fifty logic, there is a 25 percent chance that a caring and nurturing god or set of gods exists. One can create a whole new theology based on these simplistic statistical probabilities.
But I would allow none of the following bullshit in my spiritual life, in my religion—that “everything happens for a reason.” I got prostate cancer for a “reason.” I have been “chosen” for prostate cancer. I would not allow my silly illusory gods to become a source of militancy and a source of a sense of superiority.
The Jews got a lot of mileage out of the notion of being the “chosen people.” A nice idea: We are special, we have been selected from all the tribes and nations of the world for special attention. Even if the Jews were ultimately selected for pogroms and extermination, they were able to put a positive spin on it. “Thank you, God, for choosing us to be Your victims and for making sure that our fellow man chooses us as his victim too.” All said without a trace of irony.
But being a victim is a hell of a lot better than being ignored. Feeling “chosen” may have allowed the Jews to survive as a group, as a religion, as a nationality for centuries, whereas other ethnic groups may have disappeared.
In showering all this special attention on the chosen Jews, God received enormous attention in return. The more horrors this God handed out, the more religious many Jews became. Flog me more—I love it. Punish me, hurt me—I love my sadistic God.
Others found a way—much as I was doing—to find startling positives about God in the midst of horrors. They asked not “Where is God?” but instead “Where is man?” Man is an abomination; whereas God is great and beautiful. Man sucks, but God can do no wrong.
Admittedly, positive things come out of horrors. The Holocaust literature has been my friend, my companion since 1984, since the diagnosis of my prostate cancer. Yeah, I had prostate cancer to deal with, but at least I did not have to contend with the Nazis.
My favorite and arguably the best book on the Holocaust is This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, by Tadeusz Borowski, a non-Jew who survived the concentration camps. Here is an exchange in his title story—an exchange that reflects my own sense of priorities:
. . . Directly beneath me, in the bottom bunk, lies a rabbi. He has covered his head with a piece of rag torn off a blanket and reads from a Hebrew prayer book (there is no shortage of this type of literature at the camp), wailing loudly, monotonously.
“Can’t somebody shut him up? He’s been raving as if he’d caught God himself by the feet.”
“I don’t feel like moving. Let him rave. They’ll take him to the oven that much sooner.”
“Religion is the opium of the people,” Henri, who is a Communist and a rentier, says sententiously. “If they didn’t believe in God and eternal life, they’d have smashed the crematoria long ago.”
“Why haven’t you done it then?”
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So, my gods are gods of action. One can get too much of prayer and meditation, too much also of passive Marxist determinism. We can engage in excesses of most anything. As Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis is purported to have said in childhood, “Not lobster again tonight, Mother!” Chinese Daoists tell us that too much joy leads to heart disease.
A new vow began to evolve for me in the mid- and late 1980s, in the months and years just after surgery and radiation: I will make every effort to find a balance, to avoid excesses, to be conscious of the yin and the yang. I will be aware of potential errors of commission as well as potential errors of omission. I will be aware of the benefits, at times, of action and the benefits of inaction. I will find a balance that includes plenty of joy in the midst of grief. Some lobster, and yet not too much lobster.
Some people find their gods, their spiritual selves at the beach, at the ocean or sea with its endless horizons. I, though, wanted the solitude and privacy of a mountaintop—perhaps my own Mount Sinai. So, within months of the initial diagnosis, within months of surgery and radiation, I started heading up to the Shenandoah mountains—admittedly more like tall hills—ninety minutes from Washington, DC.
I found a mountain path just off Skyline Drive. It took only thirty minutes to climb to the top; and at the top I found an outcropping of rock fifty yards away from the trail that was at least fifteen or twenty feet higher than the elevation of the trail. It was an ideal spot for me to sit or stand or lie down as I talked to my gods, and it offered a swell view of the Shenandoah valley and river three thousand feet below and to the west.
My spot was far enough from the beaten track to allow me to rage against the gods, to cry uncontrollably whenever I wished, without being carted off by some worried hiker to the closest Virginia state mental hospital. Going up there monthly or bimonthly on a weekday, I rarely, if ever, encountered other hikers. My spot was always available—there were no other angry Job-like criers in this wilderness.
On my third visit, as I was meditating and talking to my gods, I noticed a small plaque nailed into the southern end of the rock outcropping. This metal plaque from the US Geological Survey noted that this very spot from which I was reaching out to the gods was the highest point in the Appalachians south of the Adirondacks. Had I randomly happened upon the Appalachian redneck equivalent of Mount Sinai? It even had its own insignia and polestar.
This modest find, this simple plaque, opened up the floodgates. All I could do was wail and rail. As much as I love rock ’n roll, wailin’ and railin’ is sometimes essential. These gods of my own creation, these illusions—not necessarily the God of my ancestors—accepted and tolerated all of my cries, my wails and rails. No back talk, no railing back at me, no punitive response. No, these gods of my own creation came through with comfort and encouragement—they were yes-gods. “Keep on doing what you’re doing,” was their implicit message.
No burning bush in this wilderness, no tablets filled with moral strictures for me to bring down from the mountain, no audible voices or palpable presence from these gods. That kind of god would have scared the shit out of me. No psychosis or temporal lobe epilepsy for me, thank you very much. I had enough problems.
These gods were veritable pussycats, quiet and unassuming. And I embraced these gods with unmitigated enthusiasm and hypnotic joy. In my own way I became possessed by these gods. On the mountaintop I was able to strengthen my hypnotic trance, to keep my eye on my goals, maintain hope, keep my focus, gain the energies necessary to achieve my seemingly impossible objectives. Yes, I will do everything humanly in my power to preserve my life and to preserve my sexual life. These gods of my creation will give me the courage, hubris even, to call the most significant people in any of the relevant scientific fields, to do everything I can to figure out the best course of action.
My world enlarged, and the Alps and the Rockies beckoned. Under the guise of these spiritual rounds, Helen and I, with our two daughters, headed off every few years—whenever we could put together enough money—to a tiny village in the Alps, accessible only by narrow-gauge railway. No cars, no pollution—the air was pristine. Several times during each of these trips, I went off for an afternoon by myself to a secluded mountain spot where I communed with my gods.
One afternoon after my communion with my gods, in the summer of 1992 when my PSA had begun to rise scarily, I met Helen and our daughters for a walk down to the village. At one point we took a short side trail that gave us a dazzling view of the glaciers and mountains above and the cliffs and valley below. There at the end of the trail, at the edge of the cliffs, stood almost as an apparition a family of four—a husband and wife and two daughters about the same age as ours. The man gestured to us, and his hardy “hello” told us they were Americans.
“Isn’t this spot amazing?” he veritably shouted to us. Surprised to see anyone, let alone Americans, at this unusual spot, we quickly exchanged pleasantries. “We’re from New York; I’m an oncologist in Manhattan. What brings you to this magical place?”
Helen and his wife began to talk separately, and all four kids broke off as well. The eight of us, now in three separate groups, started walking down the mountain. “To tell you the truth, we’re here partly because of my prostate cancer. I head up into the mountains to, in a sense, meditate about my predicament and what to do about it.” I did not normally tell strangers about my prostate cancer, but, hey, this guy had announced from the get-go he was an oncologist.
His ears perked up. “Did you know we’re having more and more success using chemotherapy agents to treat prostate cancer? When the disease load is low, as in your case, we can intervene quite successfully. We’ve effectively treated guys with metastatic prostate cancer, guys who may have been on the brink of death months earlier.”
Here I was on the edge of facing castration, with my PSA rising. Hope had taken a leap off the cliffs whether I was communing with my gods or not. And here came a mysterious stranger to announce that there was hope, that I might be able to resurrect myself, that there was such a thing as salvation in the here and now, not necessarily in the afterlife.
Although I did not follow through with any chemotherapy at that time—too little was known in the 1990s about how it might work in a slow-growing cancer like prostate cancer, and the effects of chemo may have been even more toxic than castration—I tucked away the information and let the sense of hope sweep over me. The salamander was going to resurrect his tail; the salamander was going to keep his third leg going even in the face of castration. I would continue to take action—meditation and wishful thinking had their place but action was crucial as well.
This disease would probably kill me, but not before I gave it a good ride, I thought. This cancer could possibly become a chronic long-lasting disease, not an immediate stone-cold killer.
CHAPTER 15
Psychotherapy for the Psychiatrist with Serious Castration Anxiety
“Desperate diseases require desperate remedies.”
English Proverb
“He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.”
Arabian Proverb
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
John Milton, Paradise Lost
It takes a village to deal with and manage prostate cancer—an ethereal village in the heavens along with a palpable earthly village. Psychotherapy was and is a critical part of my earthly village.
We human beings have an optimism bias. People who are depressed and pessimistic have the most accurate handle on reality. They are acknowledging, instead of denying, the ubiquity of disease and trauma and death. The rest of us—with our often unfounded optimism and hopefulness—are in a state of denial and delusion. We are deliberately oblivious to life’s afflictions. We assiduously avoid the nightside of life.
One of the ultimate paradoxes: Good psychological health is associated with a deluded optimism and a denial of death.
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p; My yes-gods and my wishful thinking empowered me to take action, but I realized I needed a dose of reality as a counterpoint to my delusional thinking. I had taken on a “never say die” attitude that informed many deluded oncologists when I was in my medical training in the 1970s.
Yes, the yin needs the yang. The proverbial canary-in-the-coal mine is just as essential as the sunshine in the anteroom. That dead canary, deprived of oxygen in the deepest removes of the coal mine, provides a warning, a sentinel we ignore at our own peril. If we feel excessively hopeful and empowered, we can end up rushing headlong into our own destruction. An acute awareness of the perils we face, an acute awareness of the destructiveness of certain treatments is essential. Without this wariness we run the risk of trusting our caregivers too heavily and hastily—without taking into account the caregivers’ vested interests that may or may not jibe with our own.
Ah, the wisdom of crowds, the notion that, as James Surowiecki has pointed out, a group of independent and diverse experts comes up with the wisest decision more often than any one individual. A crowd of experts balances out the biases of each separate individual. When we try to estimate the number of jelly beans or marbles in a large bowl, the mean estimate from a large group is almost always better than the estimate of any one person. Some of us may have a bias that leads us to estimate too small a number, others too large a number. A balance is essential.
Indeed boxers box, surgeons cut, radiation-oncologists irradiate—and people like me facing castration and death tend to overestimate our ability to survive and beat the odds. We are surrounded by family and friends who can become boorish cheerleaders, threatened as much as we are by the prospect of castration and death. I could not afford to deny my own death and destruction, and I would need someone to help me face the prospects of not beating the odds.
A Salamander's Tale Page 11