Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  Delusional jealousy represents an acidulated homosexuality, and rightly takes its position among the classical forms of paranoia. As an attempt at defense against an unduly strong homosexual impulse it may, in a man, be described in the formula, ‘Indeed I do not love him, she loves him!’

  According to Freud, Cherokee’s paranoia about his wife fucking Schlomo was a defense against his own homosexual impulse to fuck Schlomo. And what did Freud say was the root of this homosexual impulse?

  The high value of the male organ and the inability to tolerate its absence in a love-object … Attachment to the mother, narcissism, fear of castration – these are the factors.

  Cherokee had mentioned his penis once before. He’d called it his ‘blue steel throbber,’ yes.

  Yet now as I stared at Cherokee rising up from his chair and about to walk out of my office for the last time, I had no idea how to use Freud on him. Desperate not to lose him, frantic to do something, I decided to go with the practical things A.K. had mentioned, the Three Techniques. So I said:

  ‘Wait. What are your fantasies about being “a hopeless case”?’

  ‘My fantasies?’ he said, stranded halfway up out of his chair.

  ‘Your fantasies.’

  ‘I did fantasies at Disney. You want to turn this into Fantasyland?’

  ‘Put it another way: What’s the first thing that comes to mind?’

  ‘Oh. Father,’ he said, lowering himself distractedly back down into the chair. ‘Father always gave me the feeling I was a hopeless case. When he was hospitalized in the Peter Bent with heart failure, I went to see him, and he looked so horrible – puffy, blue-lipped, wasted – I was overcome, and I blurted out “I love you, Father” and went to hug him. And then, with his last bit of strength he held up his hands and said, “Don’t act like a puff, Cher, not at this late date.”’ He paused. ‘That was the last time I ever saw him.’

  I found myself tingling with excitement. Homosexuality. For the first time in my training I had a sense of a frame around a person, a method of making sense, finding the deeper roots of the scraggly neurotic growth sprouting up haphazardly like suckers from a dead stump. I saw him now not only as a person, but as a person informed by a theory. I had in my power a way of leading him through. This was what Hannah had meant by ‘making the unconscious conscious.’ Free him from neurotic suffering by being a kind of Ross Perot of psychology, ‘getting in there under the hood.’ Suddenly I saw A.K.’s silence as a commitment to this exploration.

  But now Cherokee had gone silent again, and was fidgeting.

  ‘You have some feelings, in thinking about your father?’

  He looked at his hands. Large hands, long graceful fingers. Sadly he said, ‘Father loved my jazz piano. I’m a failure.’

  ‘And what gets in the way of talking about your feelings for your father?’

  ‘I feel ashamed.’

  ‘You have some thoughts, about feeling ashamed?’

  ‘I loved Father. The one time in my life I tell him, he calls me a fag. That must have been Hollywood to him. Chock full of fags.’

  I glanced at my watch. A minute left. I glanced at Freud. Go for it.

  ‘In your family, there was an incredibly high value placed on the male organ,’ I said, ‘and anyone without one was suspect.’

  Boom. His eyes popped open, then his mouth. I felt the ripples. My interpretation had hit home. Go for it again.

  ‘And so you keep thinking she’s fucking him because you want to fuck him.’

  Boom. Boom. He seemed to rock back in his chair.

  ‘I … Doctor, I’m stunned.’

  ‘“Doctor”?’

  ‘My uncle – Father’s brother – the only warm body in the family – he was a doctor.’ Cherokee looked directly at me, gratitude in his eyes, and then glanced away. ‘A … a … this is ridiculous … a rectal surgeon.’

  ‘It’s time for us to stop.’

  He, as I with A.K., now seemed to be having grave difficulty rising from his chair. Mopping his brow with his shirtsleeve, he walked out.

  I mopped my own brow with my own shirtsleeve. Then I scribbled furiously, as word-for-word a recounting of the session as possible, racing to finish in the ten minutes before Christine came in.

  She never did.

  Fidelity, especially that degree of it required in marriage, is only maintained in the face of continual temptation … He projects his own impulses to infidelity onto the partner to whom he owes faith …

  Exactly. And written with the touch of the poet, besides.

  Freudian family analysis of my patient Zoe began first thing next morning. Zoe, finally detoxed from her run on coke and booze in Rancho Mirage, had been transferred from Toshiba to Thoreau the day before. Malik had tried to transfer her away from Thoreau, to the Alcohol and Drug Unit, Heidelberg East. No luck. Zoe had insisted on being where Malik and I were.

  Now I was sitting with Zoe on the patient side of the one-way mirror. With us were her father and mother and their assigned couples therapist, Faith Baltsburg. Zoe’s siblings, an older brother and sister, had refused to participate.

  In therapy Zoe had said, ‘My parents are total opposites, and I take after both of them.’ She’d described her father, Zeke Bicker, a New York corporate lawyer, as ‘a lion, a really strong athletic person with a mind like a steel trap, but good fun too.’ Her mother was ‘a warm, caring, beautiful person who’d devoted her life to her family and volunteer work – I just love her to death!’

  Meeting them now was a revelation. The ‘lion’ was a frail old man hard of hearing, his mind less a trap than entrapped, by age. The ‘beautiful person’ was a slovenly, obese elderly woman smelling of sweat, beer, and gastrointestinal distress. Sitting there with them, Zoe herself seemed much different.

  The first time I’d met her, on my first night on call with Malik when she’d come in clutching a bottle of Xanax and a red teddy bear, she’d been ‘the good little rich college girl,’ all crisp white summer dress with tiny pink flowers encircling her neck, wearing a red bandanna, her light brown hair styled in that windblown look of fashion models. Her suicide note had talked about a fake smile plastered on her face, hiding the reality. The night of the feeding tube was the low point. Over the months with me she’d gotten more real, gingerly picking her path along her own life, wearing her own kinds of clothes – casual, cool – letting her hair grow, forming relationships with me, Malik, and Thorny. She’d done well until her trip back to her family over the holidays, the stress of which had revved up her ‘disease’ – Malik’s word – of substance abuse, and she’d come back in, as Thorny put it, ‘coked to her tits.’ Now she sat in the session as ‘good little rich college girl’ once again. She again wore white. Her tall slender flame and short light brown hair made her seem boyish.

  My cotherapist Faith had been silent the whole session, often staring down into her open purse. Faith was at the low-water mark of her analysis, four years in. She had that scared-rabbit look that I knew from Solini and Hannah was a sign of dire associations, a kind of perverse commercial for Freud’s ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,’ where even the most innocent-seeming object (a checkbook), when fed into the Freudian machine of fantasy and dream, loomed monstrous (a blue penis flattened by a truck). Nothing meant only what it meant; everything had a deeper meaning from the past, as if the corporate slogan were: IN TOUCH WITH YESTERDAY. FREUD.

  Now, on the business end of the one-way mirror for the first time, I felt intimidated, and as the session had gone on I too had said little. Zoe’s father had been as puzzled by our silence as had Farmer Olaf. Zoe’s mother, a veteran of years of hardcore analysis in Manhattan, had learned to chatter distractedly for fifty minutes at a clip and carried us along on her beery and biliary breath. From time to time she was joined by Zoe. Finally, like a dancer picking up the beat, father too jumped in, and in a voice trembling with the love of a father for a daughter, said:

  ‘Zoe, we’re behind you and Dr B
asch one hundred and ten percent.’

  I felt a sense of real warmth among them all. We ended with Zoe saying:

  ‘Thanks, guys, for this.’ She started to cry. ‘I love you both so much!’

  Her father cried. I felt teary. Faith and the hepatically challenged Mrs Bicker stared at us with sympathy. The session ended in silence, one, I thought, of reconciliation.

  We joined the group on the see-through side of the mirror. The discussion turned on how Zoe’s alcohol and drug abuse was a symptom of deep depression which was in turn a symptom of deeper childhood conflicts – our old friend the Oedipal Oscillator, whatever that was. Once her depression was analyzed out, her drinking would stop.

  ‘No way,’ Malik said. ‘Never. You got it ass-backward. She’s an alcoholic. Once she stops drinking, she won’t be depressed. We gotta transfer her over to Heidelberg East, Alcohol and Drug. Hook her up with AA. None of you Freudians have any idea how much damage you do tryin’ to analyze out depression, leaving behind a hopeless wet drunk. Wake up, OK?’

  No-one said OK. What was really strange was the bluntness of this assault from Malik, who’d always told us to be deft. He didn’t do ‘strident’ well. He looked tired, his energy damped down. Strange. I figured that this attack on analysis would provoke a strong, clear counter, but no. A.K. and Faith and the others reacted to Malik’s insults with silence, as if Malik had not said what he had just said.

  Then the silence was broken by enthusiastic talk of what else but the Oedipal Oscillator. Everyone else in the room, including poor, imploded Henry Solini, were into their own guesses about the Oscillator, vying for A.K.’s attention, as if, when that clock bonged out at the end of the hour, A.K. would be awarding a prize for ‘Freudian of the Day.’ Sure enough, just before the end, A.K. cleared her throat. We all looked up at the clock. Thirteen seconds. A.K. fixed first me, then Faith, in her high beams, and said, with immaculate scorn:

  ‘What the hell were you two doing in there?’ A wad of cash fluttered to Faith’s feet, many twenties, one fifty. I trembled, my hands, I realized, covering my nuts. ‘That whole session you were helping your patient deny her sexuality.’

  ‘How can you tell that, Aliyah?’ Malik asked pleasantly.

  ‘I can tell,’ she said coolly, ‘because she failed to turn me on.’

  Bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong.

  I sat there feeling skewered. I had failed totally. Everybody but Malik filed out.

  ‘Ah, don’t sweat the petty stuff,’ Malik said to me, ‘and don’t pet the sweaty stuff neither. You coulda talked more, sure, but in terms of protecting Zoe, you did good. Y’helped that family today. A lot. Let’s go. Hoop.’

  We went to Oly Joe Olaf’s room and uncurled him from his fetal position. We picked up a few other psychoanalyzed adolescents and went to the gym.

  My game was off. I couldn’t put the ball in the ocean.

  ‘A terrible job with Zoe,’ A.K. was saying to me that afternoon in supervision. ‘All year long you’ve been doing a terrible job. Subjecting her to Heiler treatment damaged your alliance with her, led to her feeling abandoned, and made her try to kill herself with alcohol and cocaine.’ We were almost at the two-pencil mark. As I’d described my work, with Zoe, A.K. had been writing at withering speed, finding clues in the left-hand column and writing the answer in the right. Now she stared intently at the page, like an oracle reading entrails. Finally she asked: ‘Has she spoken to you about her fantasies of you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Get her to tell you what, in bed, she imagines doing with your penis.’

  ‘How do you know her fantasies about me are erotic? Maybe her fantasies are just ordinary things, like where I live, or what kind of car I drive.’

  ‘Those are erotic.’

  ‘But won’t talking about my pencil make things too hot?’

  ‘Your “pencil”?’

  ‘I mean my penis.’

  ‘A slip. Impressive. You are concerned about inflaming the erotic transference?’ I nodded. ‘Good. But you’ve been colluding with her denial of it far too long. Her drinking and drugging are symptoms, sublimation of repressed erotic wishes. You’ve got to drill them out.’

  ‘How do I do that?’

  ‘What’s the first thing that comes to mind?’

  ‘Porpoises.’

  ‘“Porpoises”?’

  ‘Came to mind, yeah.’ A.K rubbed her eyes, as teachers do when dealing with slow learners. ‘But what should I do?’

  ‘Put lead weights in your pants.’

  ‘“Put lead weights in my pants”?’

  ‘You do nothing. Let her do the work. We are all just messes, trying to deal with bigger messes. She is sick. You, hopefully, are less sick. You separate her sickness from your sickness and throw yours away. Try silence.’

  ‘Silence?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  I shut up.

  ‘Not now.’ She stared at me intently, as if I too were entrails. ‘So many people who seem happy go home and cry into their pillows at night.’

  I felt a rush of cold air. ‘But when she was on Emerson,’ I said, ‘with Dr Heiler, she went through a phase of acting kind of sexy when she came to see me.’

  ‘And did you explore her fantasies?’

  ‘No. No-one told me to.’

  ‘So you colluded with her in denying her erotic fantasies about you. You probably even colluded in denying your own erotic fantasies toward her.’

  ‘I didn’t have any.’

  ‘Oh, so you didn’t have any, eh?’ She wrote this down. ‘Heiler,’ she said, with revulsion, ‘Heiler. See my analytic couch?’

  ‘I see your couch.’

  ‘That couch cost me $250,000. Remember Heiler’s couch?’

  ‘I don’t remember it, no.’

  ‘Because Heiler doesn’t have a couch. He has only chairs. Heiler failed his analysis. Not good enough. Too much the sadist. As I’m sure you noticed.’ I nodded. ‘Good.’ She flipped to a new section of her ledger and said, cheerily, ‘Next case?’

  I took out my notes on Cherokee. As I spoke, describing how Cherokee fit Freud perfectly, A.K. wrote at great speed – thirty-four across, sixteen down – with each new clue saying ‘Good, good, good, very good.’ I couldn’t believe it, all this approval. But at the very end, when I told her about my using Freud on Cherokee directly, she suddenly scowled and said, ‘Bad, bad, very bad.’

  ‘What do you mean? It was great. I can’t wait to see him next week.’

  ‘He won’t be back next week.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He may not be back at all. You may have ruined the therapy entirely. You made one of the worst mistakes in the book: premature interpretation.’

  ‘But I used Freud, word for word.’

  ‘Because you used Freud, word for word. You can’t use Freud. One has to filter Freud through one’s own understanding.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You can’t. You’re neurotic. You haven’t been analyzed.’

  ‘B-b-but what should I do?’

  ‘The lead weights.’

  ‘In the pants?’

  ‘If he comes back, get him to talk about your penis.’

  ‘Him too?’

  She glanced down her page to about fifty-six across, and read, ‘“Father loved my jazz piano. I’m a failure.’ If that’s not castration anxiety, what is?’

  ‘I get it,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Piano and everything else equals penis.’

  ‘You’re terrified of your own homosexuality.’

  Boom. Dark sweat at the Boy Scout meeting in the basement of St Peter’s Church after the Scoutmaster had gone home, Jimmy Gora and Ralphie Grzyb saying, ‘C’mon, let’s see that kike cock,’ my standing there pants at my ankles aroused as they inspected and ridiculed me. ‘Hey,’ I said now, ‘I’m hetero. Totally.’

  Silence, one of, Well If You Are, Why Insist You Are?

  And then all at once A.K. seemed to puff up like an a
dder. Her pupils widened. I braced myself. She said:

  ‘And why are you trying to be such a good little boy with him and me?’

  Boom. Through the curtain of metallic rain I heard the harsh chanting of men swaying back and forth and saw the hazy red and gold lights of the candles in the synagogue way down below and a man in black with a funny cap like a pillbox pointing up into the balcony at my mother and me and screaming, ‘Out out get dhat childt out of chere’ and my mother laughing but the man screamed louder and someone next to us hissed at us and my mother stopped laughing and roughly she picked me up turning carrying me screaming out saying, ‘Be a good little boy a good little boy, Roy, be a good little boy …’

  In Zoe’s individual therapy the next day, I got stuck again. She was still feeling great about the family therapy session, talking about what ‘great guys’ her father and mother were and how it had all been ‘good fun’ and ‘healing.’ Part of me felt it had been a good session, yet part of me saw A.K.’s point, that we hadn’t really drilled down to the deeper roots of the problem. Malik had said that the issue was alcohol and drugs, from which all else followed; A.K. had said that the issue was sex, repressed, from which alcohol and drugs followed. So far in the session I’d tried to take the Malik route, working on her suicidal drinking and drugging in Rancho Mirage, but she minimized it:

  ‘It’s not that bad. Thorny tried to get me into this AA stuff, but I can’t. It’s way too religious for me.’

  Nothing I tried would move her from this position. I felt stuck.

  ‘So, Doc,’ she said, cheerfully, ‘what’s on your mind?’

  ‘What comes to mind, about what’s on my mind?’

  ‘I dunno. I feel so good now. Like I don’t need to be in the hospital anymore. You’ve helped me. Knowing you were here made me come back. I feel now that we’re more equal, like I’d like to know more about you.’

  ‘Like what?’