Although the building is old and probably once contained spacious office suites and apartments, it has been modernized in a hap-hazard way. Everything is cramped and small. The doctor’s waiting room is no more than a hallway with chairs strung out in a line against one wall, and there is no receptionist to greet us. A far cry from the expansive and well-staffed waiting rooms of my youth, here it is hard for the four of us to maneuver in these close quarters—to hang up coats and hats and to find space for the walker, my overstuffed backpack, and the all-important brown paper bag filled with my father’s pills.
The office itself, dominated by a cluttered desk piled high with manila folders and drug samples, requires that I bring in additional seats from the waiting room to accommodate us. Once we are settled inside and after my opening explanation of our visit, Dr. R turns to my father. In a controlled voice, the anger seething just beneath the surface, my father delivers a ten-minute indictment of all those involved in his care. Everyone—family, friends, and professionals—has failed 130 n jonathan g. silin
to respond adequately to his physical needs and to appreciate the depths of his suffering. His words are direct, his thoughts well organized, and his focus clear.
My mother and I are each allotted a brief time to recount our recent experiences with my father. But Dr. R is no family therapist and takes little interest in our stories. He attends only to the identified patient. As we talk, Dr. R dumps out the contents of the brown bag on to the desk and copies down the names and dosages of my father’s medications. Noting the antidepressant drugs, he asks my father if he has been to a psychiatrist before. My father answers by talking about Dr. M, a well-known psychoanalyst whom he saw regularly during the 1950s. Dr. R pursues a line of questioning—did my father sit or lie down during the sessions? Did he go three or five times a week?—designed to reveal if my father was in a classical analysis. No, my father insists, he always sat up and could not possibly afford five sessions a week. He chuckles to himself as he reports that Dr. M found his case so interesting that he often allowed him to pay whatever he could.
From time to time, he even asked my father’s advice about the stock market. My father reserves for himself a special place in Dr. M’s practice and refuses standard categories. When Dr. R makes explicit his own assumption that my father was in therapy for depression, my father reacts quickly and sharply. “No,” he asserts, “I was not depressed, although I didn’t feel great. I went to Dr. M because I was dissatisfied with my life. Because I thought I could do better.”
I am stunned by this carefully considered formulation. During the years of my own psychotherapy, I had developed an understanding of my father as a deeply depressed person, which I had never questioned before. Nor can I reconstruct exactly how this understanding came about. Perhaps it was more a reflection of my own situation than my lived experience of his frequent moodiness, occasional tears, and demanding ways. In contrast to my therapeutic attempts to stave off existential despair and emotional paralysis, my father suggests something quite different about himself—a drive to improve his situation.
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My father was ambitious as well as dissatisfied, determined as well as unhappy.
At this moment in Dr. R’s office, just a few streets north but many decades removed from Dr. M’s practice, my father displays his continuing ability to rise to the occasion, to show himself to best advantage.
He still has resources to draw on, accounts that have not been completely emptied. Despite all his infirmities, my father does not present himself as a victim but rather as someone who wants to live up to his potential. He is ready to accept professional help in a way that preserves his pride and emphasizes his sense of agency. His story of Dr. M
is as much about the present as about the past.
I will never know the truth of my father’s clinical diagnosis, although I did come to know Dr. M, who acted as a kind of family therapist long before that discipline was invented. He is part of my history as well as my father’s, and I remember our first encounter vividly.
I am a shy, anxious child, a bed wetter who, according to my mother’s oft-repeated words, lacks self-confidence. My first visit to Dr.
M is the emotional equivalent of a general checkup. His office, located on the ground floor of narrow brownstone, consists of a waiting room in the front and a large office in the rear of the building. These rooms do not open directly onto each other but are connected by a narrow passageway with doors at either end, so that privacy is assured.
In these days before white noise machines and Muzak, it is the archi-tecture itself that assures privacy. I don’t recall the content of our conversations or of any play that I might have engaged in. But I do remember that near the end of this session, I admire a tiny balsa wood model, no more than two or three inches long, of an old sailing ship replete with linen sails and painted designs on the side. I am fascinated by this model and, before I leave, Dr. M asks me if I would like to have it. I hold the boat carefully in my hands as I rejoin my mother in the waiting room. Deeply satisfied with my gift and our visit, I do not mind at all when she leaves me alone in the waiting room to 132 n jonathan g. silin
have a private conversation with Dr. M. Later, on the street, she pronounces me perfectly healthy and happy. Shortly after, the bed-wetting stops.
My second meeting with Dr. M is as deeply unsettling as the first is satisfying. I have just dropped out of college, am living at home again, and have become ensconced in an affair with a married man more than twice my age. I know I am homosexual by age thirteen but begin to live out my gayness only when I start college. There I em-brace my homosexuality with such fervor that there is little energy left for anything else. My erotic and affective life are all that matter. Despite the best efforts of a well-meaning college psychiatrist, academic pursuits quickly fall by the wayside. Paralyzed by two unsuccessful relationships, I eventually leave school, but not before the psychiatrist can make one final pronouncement about my prospects. “On aver-age,” he cautions in his most concerned tone of voice, “homosexual liaisons don’t last more than a few weeks or, at best, several months.
Only in the rarest cases do they last two years, the outer limit of same-sex relationships.” After summarizing these latest research findings on homosexuality, he telegraphs two seemingly contradictory messages in the Morse code of therapeutic jargon: I have willfully chosen this road to ongoing suffering and disappointment; I am only going through a difficult stage, a developmentally appropriate adolescent identity crisis. Whether I am simply the victim of development gone awry or a free agent who is making a perverse choice, however, the doctor reassures me that the course on which I have set out can be reversed with proper professional help. “Help,” fortunately, that I do not find.
At the same moment that I am learning my fate in one office of the new 1960s modern health services building that we affectionately refer to as the “Magic Mountain,” a fellow classmate, the writer An-drew Holleran, is receiving similar instruction just next door. In a 1993 interview he describes seeking help because he suspects that he might be homosexual. Although Holleran finds a sympathetic ear at his initial interview, the psychiatrist to whom he is referred, and to m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 133
whom he guiltily reports his failure to make sexual overtures to the woman he is dating at a nearby woman’s college, resorts to more cur-mudgeonly if direct advice, “Well, next time, go kiss her!” No need to cite the latest research, to become entangled in needless self-doubt, or to return for future sessions.
Recently, I learned that after years of marriage, children, and the heterosexual life, my own Magic Mountain doctor has finally come out. He is living happily with a man who is considerably younger than he is. Perhaps he spent too long seeking proper help, as did Dr. Ralph Roughton, the prominent psychoanalyst profiled in the New York Times who came out at age sixty-three after two long analyses in which he tried to become straight. While I recogni
ze that most people may go through some struggle in coming to terms with their sexuality, I cannot help but feel bitter irony when Dr. Roughton’s 1998 act is described by his peers as courageous. My own admiration is reserved for the gay activists of 1973 who successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders and for the first openly gay doctors who entered psychoanalytic training in the early 1990s.
But back in 1963, despite my determined efforts to find romantic happiness, I am not feeling very courageous or admirable myself. Upset by my extreme mood swings that alternated with long periods of inertia, my parents send me to see Dr. M again. I agree to go because of my favorable memories. Notwithstanding the college psychiatrist’s assessment of my prospects for future happiness, I had become very attached to him and do not want to begin therapy with someone totally unknown. Dr. M is already part of my world and seems an obvious choice.
In the end, however, Dr. M proves too much a part of that world.
Although my father’s analysis concluded before I was an adolescent, his work with Dr. M did not enable him to treat me with equanimity.
The heat of our relationship reflects the intensity of our mutual attachment. My father acts as an emotional lightning rod, attracting the electricity that breaks through the storm clouds almost always 134 n jonathan g. silin
hanging in the air. The resulting sparks set off countless brushfires that require all my mother’s mediating skills to keep them from spreading out of control.
Not shy about my gayness, at least in the therapeutic setting, I am soon telling Dr. M about my feelings for other men and the pleasures I find in their arms. He listens carefully and thoughtfully. At first he seems to be the patient, nonjudgmental father I long for. Unfortunately, he soon reveals himself to be the father I know so well, the father with confused boundaries and overwrought identifications. He tells me that my father loved to hold me as a baby, that I was a particularly warm and responsive infant, a source of physical and emotional sustenance for him. How am I, a young gay man who has experienced short crushes on peers but already fallen deeply in love with two older men, one a father of a young child himself, to make sense of Dr. M’s confidence? Is he telling me that he knows from my early life that I have the makings of a responsive partner, someone capable of providing great satisfactions to another man? Is he telling me that my father is the source of my erotic longings and the later desire to reexperience early pleasures?
In part, I know Dr. M speaks the truth about my relationship with my father. After all, I have my own deep reservoir of bodily memories
—riding atop my father’s shoulders to watch soldiers coming home from World War II, sitting on his lap as he ate dinner long after we children had finished, lying in bed with him at night when I couldn’t sleep. Nonetheless, I am unready to hear Dr. M’s report from the past.
News of my father’s sensuality contaminates my blossoming sexuality.
Filled with my own complex and ambivalent emotions, I do not want to hear about my father’s desires and my role in their fulfillment. I certainly do not want to think of my father’s connection to me as erotically charged, nor am I experienced enough to understand that the sensual enjoyment he received in holding me might be distinct from a specifically sexual one.
Now I imagine that my father, against the male stereotype of the 1940s, may have permitted himself some of the same pleasures that m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 135
women report who breastfeed their children and are otherwise physically bonded with them. Indeed, it is hard to imagine otherwise. I recall the discomfort of my undergraduate students, especially the males, when I suggest the sensuous pleasures, tinged with incestuous and potentially homoerotically charged desires, that might be enjoyed by parent and young child. Were my own feelings of discomfort any different from those of my students? It is easier for them, I imagine, to deny these possibilities or to entertain them as theoretically interesting ideas in a classroom than it was for me, trapped as I was in a therapist’s office with someone who could validate the specificity of my father’s feelings. Experiencing great difficulty breaking away from my parents, I did not need to be reminded of the ties that bound me to them. Dr. M insisted on speaking the language of attachment and connection while I tried to speak the language of separation and divorce. How could I ever trust him to keep my own confidences when he willingly revealed my father’s?
Dr. M made what I still consider to be a daring therapeutic move by revealing my father’s sensuous attachment to me. It is also one that failed, if judged only by my immediate decision not to return for further help. In the succeeding years, however, I managed to transform the discomfort caused by Dr. M’s maneuver into a guiding set of questions that I continue to explore in my work as an early childhood educator: What kind of knowledge can children tolerate about their teachers, teachers about their students, children about their parents?
How does this tolerance change over time? I am drawn to teach what is most personally difficult for me. In the end, I believe that good teachers, like effective researchers, use the classroom to explore that which confounds and troubles them. How boring it would be to do otherwise.
Through most of my adult life, I maintain a carefully modulated distance from my parents. This seems the best way to protect myself from their emotional intrusiveness and the porous boundaries that make separation so difficult. Like many gay people, this means that I live in a glass closet for a very long time. My parents and I simply 136 n jonathan g. silin
agree not to acknowledge that I am gay. Then in the mid-1970s, with my increasing political activity, I decide to shatter this closet with an official announcement about my sexual orientation.
The dining room—in which our later conversations about their care and my father’s tirades about his loss of control will take place
—is thick with emotion. There are no raised voices, however, or obvious shock expressed by my parents. This interview is about transforming unarticulated into articulated knowing. My parents are far from stupid. They know their children well. Besides, I am too old, and too much the black sheep, for them to think that being gay is a temporary stage in my life. For my parents, the moment seems to be about sadness and loss. My father expresses fears for my safety, for the potential prejudice that I may experience. Perhaps he is remembering the anti-Semitism he endured in his own childhood.
My mother’s most potent protest is to decry the fact that I will not have children. Although I am not sure if they feel bereft for me or for themselves, this disappointment is understandable. After all, they have built their own lives around their children. At that moment, my parents cannot seem to separate what they know about me as an individual from the way that gay people are so often characterized—as selfish and self-absorbed because of the absence of children in their lives. I remind my parents of my work as a nursery school teacher. At best, they see this vocation as an inadequate substitute for raising children of one’s own. They counter with embarrassing comments about the genes that will be lost if I decide not to reproduce. I am left speechless by their hubris, and the conversation ends.
In retrospect what strikes me about this conversation is the combination of fear and sorrow that drives my parents’ response. These are not new themes, and perhaps it is only the baldness with which they are stated that takes me aback. After all, protectiveness, the worry that I am somehow vulnerable and will be the target of physical or emotional harm, preoccupied my parents throughout my childhood. The grief that I will not reproduce is an iteration of the elitism that has characterized their approach to my upbringing from the be-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 137
ginning. However my parents understand their family’s special tal-ents, they are now endangered because there may be no grandchil-dren, at least from this son. They are caught up in a set of narrow, dare I say narcissistic, ideas about how one generation lives through and influences another. In the end, there are no
questions about intimacy, love, and the gay world in which I live: No curiosity about what being gay means to me, only statements about what it means to them.
It is at about this time, 1978, that I go to see Dr. M for the last time.
In 1963 he had opened a door just wide enough for me to peer into a space where my father and my infant self could be seen in mutual rap-ture. Back then actually entering such a room felt intolerably threatening. Only fourteen years later do I feel secure enough to visit Dr. M, now ostensibly for professional advice.
We meet at Dr. M’s office in the highly respected therapeutic nursery school that he helped to found. Having spent ten years teaching young children, I want to refocus my career, and Dr. M, a colleague of Anna Freud, seems an appropriate person with whom to discuss possible study at her clinic in London. In retrospect, the answer to my specific question—how will my application as an openly gay man be received?—is obvious. Even then, nearly ten years after Stonewall, my professional pride is loath to accept exclusion from what my educator colleagues judge to be the seat of therapeutic knowledge. My very presence in Dr. M’s office is paradoxical. I am eager to proclaim my mental health and seek approval from someone whose earlier remarks, at best, were a clinical error in judgment and, at worst, left me deeply disturbed.
My question makes the usually confident Dr. M uncomfortable.
Perhaps it is that I have forced him to articulate the popular clichés and biases that have dominated the psychoanalytic world until recently and announce a professional judgment on my life that causes him difficulty. I would like to think that Dr. M had not succumbed to the worst excesses of analytic thought and had approved of the 1973
American Psychological Association decision to excise homosexuality from its official list of psychiatric disorders.
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I cannot know where Dr. M himself stands on the subject of homosexuality. He doesn’t say, and the silence following my question is long and palpable. When he does respond, his words are smooth and skillfully crafted: “I think you might be more comfortable elsewhere.
My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents Page 16