by Samuel Shem
‘Little things, like what kind of car you drive, ’n’ stuff like that.’
‘And what’s the first thing that comes to mind about my car?’
‘That it’s big and powerful, one of those big new Beemers.’
‘You have some thoughts about my car?’
‘I think, I dunno, that you must like it.’
‘You have some feelings about my liking it?’
‘Why all these questions, Doc?’
‘Our shared task is to explore, and these questions may help.’
‘OK. I’ll do whatever you want. Within limits.’
‘Limits?’
She squirmed, adjusted her legs, lifting her skirt briefly, showing her thighs. ‘I’ve been having a lot of … like funny feelings about you lately. And I had a dream. I just remember a piece of it.’
‘A piece?’
‘Your car – it was a big black Beemer – turned into a … a … I can’t say it.’
‘A penis?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘My penis?’
Nodding, she stared at her bare feet, then curled them up under her thighs, flashing white panties. ‘This isn’t … wrong, is it? Is this OK?’
‘Better than OK. This is psychoanalysis.’
‘Far out.’ She blushed. ‘OK, Doc. You’re the boss.’
‘Good, good, excellent,’ A.K. said in supervision that afternoon as she wrote down what Zoe and I had said, until we came to my penis and she said, astonished, ‘You said what?’
‘You told me to explore the erotic transference.’
‘She didn’t bring up your penis, you brought up your penis. You made one of the worst mistakes in the book: counter-transference distortion.’
‘Which is?’
‘Your shit gets in the way of her shit. Let’s see if it can be saved.’ She worked the right side intently. With each pencil stroke and frown I felt myself fade, lose bulk, like an astronaut too long in space. I waited and waited. Finally she put down her ledger and said, ‘She will run away.’
‘How do you know that?’
Her answer was to reach for number 2 number four.
Zoe ran away that night.
The next day I went to supervision with A.K. and said, ‘You were right. She’s gone. And she won’t be back.’
‘If you now make the correct interpretation, she will be back.’
‘Now?’
‘In her scheduled session.’
‘But how can I make the correct interpretation to her if she’s not there?’
‘Every time someone leaves,’ A.K. said, ‘it’s as if they take with them a little piece of our heart.’
‘What’s the correct interpretation?’
We sat in silence, a proclamatory silence, for the rest of the session.
* * *
At the time of Zoe’s session the next day, I sat in my office and left the door open in case she showed up. I free-associated to her, running through her whole history, from our first stormy meeting when I’d felt a ‘click’ of connection with her, all the way through to her fantasy of my ‘big black Beemer,’ which was really not a marvel of German engineering but my penis. As I sat there letting her fill my head with her self wherever she was, I felt – like a cloud coalescing from thin air solidly enough to cast a shadow – a coming together of her life, and I saw her as a girl desperate to engage her mother, and then as a baby hungering for love but being fed privilege, and suddenly I saw the present, all the men and sex and drugs, in terms of this past, and I whispered an interpretation to where she would have been sitting: ‘You’d like to mop the floor with your engulfing mother, for not giving you enough.’
Zoe was back the next morning. I was amazed.
In our session she was hungover, apologetic, and weepy. She’d gotten drunk and picked up a guy and gotten laid and robbed. I felt horrible – it was all because of my mistake.
In supervision with A.K., after I’d finished recounting the session, she kept on scribbling on the right side like a car motor kicking over after the ignition has been turned off, the pencil making loud scritches. She said:
‘You seem bright, but you keep making bad mistakes.’
‘But today I said almost nothing.’
‘Because you said almost nothing, when you should have. You failed to ask the crucial questions, to explore her acting out by running away.’
‘I did ask her about running away.’
‘Oh?’ She took up her pencil again. ‘And what did she say?’
To my surprise, I drew a blank. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘You do remember.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘You do, but you’re blocking. Your memory is repressed, buried under tons of unanalyzed garbage. You blocked out the most crucial part of the session.’
‘Why?’
‘How do I know? It’s your neurosis, not mine. You seem bright, but intelligence can take you only so far in this field.’
‘Are you saying I need analysis?’ She smiled. ‘Look, I’m getting more and more confused. I don’t know when I should be silent with her and when I should talk. I never know what I should say. I don’t know when to explore, when to interpret, when to have the lead weights, when to weigh in. How do I do this, anyway?’
‘It is an art. It is very hard to learn, to be good at. Even a genius like Freud had trouble learning it.’ She puffed up, her eyes got big. I grabbed the arms of my chair. She said:
‘You might not be good enough.’
Ka-boom! A blow to the head, my ears ringing my mother standing there looking down at me her eyes red with weeping and asking, ‘Can’t you help me, Roy?’ and I not knowing what to say but saying to myself, ‘Stay like this and don’t show anything on your face and it will be over,’ feeling iced by her love and as she turned away her shoulders shaking with sobs hearing a voice inside saying, ‘Compared to a normal boy certainly compared to that nice boy Mitchell Cohen down the street you’re not good enough not good enough you’re really not good enough …’
Life without Berry suddenly was unthinkable. That night I spent alone at home, obsessing about all the ways I had blown it. I felt lonely and desperate. Jill was at a UFO symposium; Malik was away in Akron, Ohio, on an AA retreat. I hadn’t seen Berry since that night she’d walked out saying, ‘You need help!’ Another example of my not measuring up. We’d talked on the phone a few times. At the start of each conversation we were both so relieved to be back in touch that we’d said we ought to get together, but as we’d talked, our rapt yearning for what was had been overwhelmed by the stark differences of our current lives, and we’d hung up with more coolness than when we’d started, with no further plans. In the wake of these phone calls I’d always felt shattered, having realized what I was losing. Do men only know what they’ve lost when they’ve lost it, when it’s too late? In hard times, especially in the House of God year, Berry had always been there for me. So that night, in the hollow echo of desperation, I picked up the phone and called her.
Machine. Her voice on the machine was a comfort, until she said, ‘… and I won’t be back until Monday.’ Monday? It was only Wednesday! Without leaving a message, I hung up, feeling terrible. Compared to Chandra – or another guy?, a hellish thought – I felt unimportant to her. If I loved her, why was I running from that love? Neurosis City. I got a glimpse of just how deep my psychopathology went. A long, scary night.
The next day I felt shaky. A.K. ran a Resident Support Group for first-year residents. I had gone to it a few times but then stopped, because she ran it as she ran everything, saying nothing until the last few seconds. Now, understanding her silence, and feeling that I needed some support, I went. Seeing Solini and Hannah, seeing that ‘scared deer in the headlights’ look in their eyes, I now got it: they too had glimpsed the sickness deep down in their psyches, the big diesels of the unconscious driving behavior that was neurotic. I understood their sense of doom, their need to be careful in what they said or did, knowing that the un
conscious was always humming down there. If each of their analyses was making them worse, well, wasn’t it what Malik said, that you had to walk back through the heartache to heal?
Of all of us, the drug fascist Win Winthrop seemed to be doing the best. He was always confident and smiley, making me feel that compared to him I was doing really badly. Whatever Misery rotation he was on, he kept up his drug work with Errol Cabot. He’d had several articles on psychiatric infomatics accepted for publication, involving drugs, computers, and rats. His home life too seemed to be soaring. His wife had just had another baby, a second boy, a gender that delighted him. Through some tax cheating and a drug company scam, he was making a ton of money. He’d bought a big old house in a quaint old town and had a full-time English nanny, Guatemalan housekeeper, and Thai cook. Lately, he’d told me, the three loves of his life were the Internet, drugs, and male bonding. He was often jetting off to Robert Bly–Sam Keen warrior camps, the latest being up in the wilderness outside Saskatoon with a ‘tribe of Iron John Wildmen, steaming our balls off in sweat lodges and then rolling naked in the snow. It’s the burden of masculinity, Roy. We men are the real victims now. You think white men aren’t angry? You bet your butt!’
Thinking of himself as a man who was a victim, Win was constantly alert to being victimized as a man. The other big change in Win over the course of the year was how he’d bulked up. Having started the year fat, now he was all muscle. With Errol Cabot, he worked out at the gym, and had that basted look of a man on anabolic steroids. Watching him now, brawny and threatening, I wondered if he himself was on drugs. Specializing in his defects? He exuded what he called ‘warrior’ power.
Hannah, noticing A.K.’s cigar smoke hovering in an elongated shape right in front of Win’s eyes, associated out loud, ‘Looks like a penis, doesn’t it?’
‘Hey, lady,’ Win shouted, ‘don’t denigrate my genitals! If you’re going to call it something, call it what it is: call it a cock.’
That day, even Arnie Bozer made me feel that, compared to him, I was a flop. Heilerized, he talked openly about breaking up with my patient Christine, saying, ‘I’m doing fine, thanks to Dr Blair Heiler, and to my psychoanalysis with Dr Schlomo Dove. The thing that I really miss after breaking with Chrissy is the sex.’ He talked about the sex in a hip, healthy way. Once again the subject was penises. God.
A.K. cleared her throat. Our eyes hit the clock. I could have sworn she was looking directly at me as she said, ‘You have failed in your task, which is to talk about your erotic fantasies about me.’
I walked out with Solini and Hannah. Henry was rotating in Toshiba. I asked him how it was going.
‘Going?’ he said, startled, like a man in a daydream crossing a street, awakened by a blast from a truck. ‘Bad?’
‘Yeah, I know. Toshiba is the pits.’
‘No, no, I mean my analysis with the Slapper? I’m one sick dude? I thought it was the fumes from my old man’s Ideal Cleaners in Mandan? Turns out it’s my old man himself? Five-foot-six, little fucking Napoleon? Wherever I look I see pricks? And I’m only five-five?’
‘You too?’ I said, realizing that I too was seeing penises. Once you start looking and listening for them, you see and hear them everywhere.
‘You? You’re six-three if you’re an inch?’
‘I’m feeling pretty bad, Henry.’
‘Still seein’ what’s ’iz name?’
‘I never was, Henry!’
‘Yeah, I hear he’s big on castration? Goes right for your nuts? It’s balls-to-the-wall time, babe, Oedipus City – hang tough?’
‘Why are you talking in questions, Henry?’
‘Am I?’
‘Yeah.’
‘No I’m not?’
‘See?’
‘Gotta take it up with Ed Slapadek, the Slapper will drill it out?’ He wandered down the hall, grazed a wall, stared at it, and stumbled out.
‘How are you?’ Hannah asked. Previously dark-haired and hefty, she was now bleach-blond and thinner. She’d even bleached her eyebrows. Rather than a dress with tiny flowers like Heiler’s ties, she now wore a beige cashmere sweater.
‘I’m bad,’ I said. ‘Depressed.’ I told her about what had been happening on Thoreau.
‘Could be worse. You could be me. I’m really really down. I’m rotating with Errol Cabot and Win on drugs, Heidelberg West. They’re Nazis.’
‘Loss of appetite?’ I said, seeing her thinness as a symptom of depression.
‘No, no, I did this for Blair.’
‘Really? You look terrific.’
‘Blairey says I look awful.’ She started to cry. ‘Got a Kleenex? I’m all out.’ I handed her one. Her eyes rolled up to the chandelier over the staircase. ‘Last month at a meeting in Dallas, he was ogling all these thin Texas blondes in cashmere, so I worked like hell to lose the weight at the Dr Brownburn’s Eat It Off Diet Clinic, and I did my hair. I even did my eyebrows.’
‘And he hates it?’
Crying, she nodded. ‘And then one of my patients – she’d lost both parents to cancer last year and her brother OD’d on heroin and she was a real mess – but she was doing OK, OK?’ I nodded. ‘I really liked her, and she had this chance to go on vacation, a free mileage thing, to Hawaii? Well, we talked it through and she seemed OK and I said, before she left, “Have a nice vacation.” And she—’ Hannah sobbed hard, clutching my arm.
‘She killed herself?’
Hannah pulled back. Horrified, she asked, ‘How did you know?’
‘Just a guess.’
‘Blair told you?’ I shook my head no. ‘It’s all over the hospital?’
‘It was a wild guess.’
‘You think that’s the kind of shitty therapist I am?’
‘No, you’re a terrific therapist.’
‘Liar. None of us is a terrific therapist yet. We don’t have enough experience being therapists to be even adequate therapists, let alone good.’
‘I guess I just picked it up, from your upset.’
‘Oh. That’s pretty neat, Roy. But you think it’s my fault?’
‘Of course not. Nobody would.’
‘Blair did. Said it was because I told her to have a “nice” vacation, that I laid a heavy expectation on her that she should have a nice vacation, that other people would and why not her.’
‘You mean you should have said to her, “Have a shitty vacation”?’
‘Blair said that might have helped. I think I’m toxic to patients.’
‘How’s the analysis going?’
‘I’m really really depressed.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’
She stared at me. ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’
‘Depressed about Blair?’
‘Blair is not “Blair,” Blair is “Daddy.”’ Saying this had a profound effect on her. She dropped to the floor in a faint. Not wanting to let her just lie there, I caught sight of a ladies’ room. Picking her up under her armpits, I dragged her in. She came to and groggily murmured, ‘In my purse … the Eat It Off bar…’
I found a giant-sized candy bar in her purse. On the space-age Mylar wrapping was printed, ‘Eat It Off Very Nutritious Brownburn Bar.’ I gave it to her and sat down on the tiled floor with her, leaning against the stall, her open purse in my lap, listening to her voracious crunchings that sounded like a dog on a bone. Dazed, she sat cross-legged, her skirt up to her waist, her cashmere sweater riding up over her bra. I looked at the label. Every ingredient was synthetic except for one: ‘A hundred percent refined sugar?’
‘The Brownburn Method,’ Hannah said. ‘You constantly eat food that has no nutrition value and that your body can’t possibly use, which makes you hypoglycemic. So you have to get to your Eat It Off Very Nutritious Brownburn Bar before you go under.’
The door opened. Faith Baltsburg walked in. She stared.
Silence, one of, So You’re a Pervert, eh?
Wordlessly I left.
As A.K. had predicted, Cherokee Put
nam failed to show up for his appointment a few days later. I was amazed. How had A.K. known? For the whole fifty-minute session I sat there associating to Cherokee and his perfect fit to Freud’s homosexuality – and freeing up a few of my own homosexual associations, which involved first a round of golf with him and me bare-chested and then hugging him and burying my rough Jewish cheek in his smooth Episcopal one, all of this really scary – finally whispering to his empty chair, ‘You feel inadequate in this therapy and you felt inadequate for your father.’
I ended the phantom session on time, closed the door, wrote up my associations in the ten free minutes, and then opened the door for Christine.
She too was not there. She hadn’t shown up the week before either. My fantasy was that she was getting it on with Cherokee in a motel. As Freud said:
For the development of femininity, the unsatisfied wish for a penis should be converted into a wish for a child for a man, who possesses a penis. (emphasis, S. Freud)
Feeling silly, I did another phantom session, ending with a whisper, ‘You feel you are not enough and your seduction of Cherokee is an attempt to fulfill your wish for a child and a man, for me and your father.’
I hustled downstairs out into the rarefied mountain air, and down the hill through the cold to Thoreau. Malik was coming out of his office with a woman wearing a gas mask attached by a hose to a box slung over her shoulder. They parted. I asked him what was going on.
‘Environmental distress syndrome. She’s so sensitive to the toxins, her immune system’s gone crazy. That box purifies the air, lets her breathe.’ He looked at me intently. ‘Ohhhhh, shit.’
‘Go easy on me today, Malik,’ I said, ‘I’m feeling kinda shaky.’
‘Me too.’
‘You?’ I asked, first surprised, but then remembering how he hadn’t been himself lately, sneezing and coughing, sounding strident and intolerant.
‘Yeah. I’m feeling really tired. C’mon in.’ In his office, action posters of pro athletes graced the walls. Spinning a basketball on his finger, he asked what was going on. As always when I was with him, I soon felt embraced by his attention, his energy, and his concern, and I opened up, telling him about Zoe and Christine and Cherokee, about how scared I felt, how confused.