Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are the remnants and the memory symbols of certain [traumatic] experiences … They cannot escape from the past, and neglect present reality in its favor.

  And why, deep down, do they do this?

  Every hysteria is founded in repression, always with a sexual content … Envy for the penis – the striving after the possession of a male genital.

  A.K. said that since I was seeing her only once a week, I had to hit her with harder interpretations. This I did. In a session a few weeks before, she’d offered a dream fragment:

  ‘I dreamed that I floated out of my bed and into the arms of a woman in white standing tall, and as I went to her we both burst into flames.’

  ‘White standing tall’ was obviously a penis, and ‘burst into flames’ an ejaculation. I said, ‘You have the wish to suck my penis?’

  ‘Yeah. I’d like to turn off the lights and give you a blow job.’

  ‘As you wished to do with your distant/sadistic Father.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said cheerfully, ‘and as I’m gonna do in about ten minutes, with Cherokee, in the Jammer Motel just down the road.’

  Failing to get my interpretation, she was ‘acting out’ sexually. Freud’s ‘economic’ theory of repressing libidinal energy was hydraulic, like trying to stuff a fat lady into a tight bathing suit: if you got one part in, another part would pop back out. Repressing her desire to suck her Father’s penis, she sucked any man’s penis she could find – even, for a while, Arnie the Lunkhead Bozer’s.

  After my dream interpretation she ‘cut down’ on ‘giving head’ but started having migraines. I interpreted this hysterical conversion symptom as repressed penis envy for her distant/sadistic Father – ‘Giving head gives you headaches.’ She stopped having migraines and started blacking out at work – ‘hysterical blindness,’ as in nineteenth century Vienna. She’d always wanted to be a painter. In the last session we’d analyzed this right out: She’d held herself back from painting because her Father was legally blind. ‘Canvasing men’ sexually was a symptom of her inability to ‘hold a paintbrush to the canvas without shaking’ — penis envy, big-time. It was exhilarating work.

  But my most challenging case was Zoe.

  Zoe had money. Living on the Family Unit and seeing me three times a week, she was regressing like crazy. The erotic transference was like a good fastball: high-inside and hot. The previous week A.K. had quoted me this, by heart, from Freud’s ‘Observations on Transference Love’:

  ‘One motive at work, connected with falling in love, is the patient’s efforts to reassure herself of her irresistibility, to destroy the physician’s authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said excitedly, ‘that’s exactly what she makes me feel.’

  ‘You want to fuck her?’

  ‘No. Well … maybe a little.’

  ‘Fuck her a … “little”?’ She smiled. ‘Or do you want to suck her?’

  This too seemed appealing. I nodded. She smiled again, and suddenly I had the fantasy of getting up and unpeeling A.K. herself from that dark, manly suit. What was under there? I blushed. ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘You want to suck me?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, trying to make a joke, ‘you found me out.’

  ‘Like you always wanted to suck your mother because you were not enough?’

  Boom. A curtain parted like in the Columbia Movie Theatre and I saw my mother in a summer ‘playsuit’ and my father’s gentle dental hands and I myself playing right field in Little League behind the Elks Club – my father always said their initials, BPOE, stood for ‘Best People on Earth’ – needing glasses and not having told anyone I couldn’t see and suddenly there was a high fly ball to right and with everybody yelling ‘Catch it catch it!’ watching it sail over my head for an inside-the-park home r—

  ‘Fuck is Oedipal,’ A.K. was saying, ‘Genital Stage. Suck is pre-Oedipal, Oral Stage. “Guck” is Anal Stage. We won’t get into that, yet. Penis Equals Breast. Deep down – when she talked about your “big black Beemer”?’

  ‘She wanted to suck my penis, yes.’

  ‘No,’ A.K. said, dismayed, and blew out a lump of smoke which before my eyes seemed to go from penis to turd to long nipple, recapitulating nicely the Freudian regression A.K. said was the Holy Grail of analysis. ‘She wants to suck your breast. Suck Penis, Suck Breast. Bite Penis, Bite Breast. She’s regressing down through the Genital Stage to the Oral Stage. The transference will soon turn maternal: She will see you as Mother, engulfing and intrusive, and will want to suck you and bite you. Take her up to five times a week. Regress her more.’

  And so I did. But I must have been doing something wrong because rather than talking about her mother, she talked about her older brother, Butler:

  ‘When I was about twelve – I’d just gotten my period, and my boobies – I loved my boobies so much! Anyway it was summer. We were at our camp in the Adirondacks – we own like four hundred acres – it was really really hot and I was swimming under our dock in the lake. And my brother Butler swam over to me under the dock, I think my mother was up on the dock, and he said, “Let me stick it in there” and I said, “No way José,” and he said “Just once” and he kind of trapped me up against a slick piling and the sunlight was coming down in slits and he pulled down my bikini bottom and he said “Here feel this,” and he took my hand and his penis was hard as a rock and so big! And I said, “Hard as a rock,” and he said again, “Just let me stick it in to feel it a second” and I felt this huge thing splitting me open and screamed but his hand was on my mouth so I just let it happen and he came and then I bobbed under and wanted to drown myself and he hoisted me up and said, “You tell on me I’ll kill you.”’

  She sat there, one leg curled under her, the heel rocking back and forth in her genital zone, breathing hard. I said, ‘Your mother was overhead?’

  ‘Yeah, and it hurt, but it was exciting too. All that night I cried to myself, but … my hands were between my legs – God I’m so embarrassed to tell you this – I never told anyone this before. And it went on from there. We did it a lot, under the dock, in the boathouse, in his room, his bed …’

  I found myself feeling enraged at this brother, this incest. I burst into my next session with A.K. and said, ‘I’m going to get that sonofabitch Butler to come to Family Analysis and confront him in front of everybody!’

  ‘Fantasy,’ A.K. said.

  ‘Fantasy?’

  ‘She wasn’t abused in reality; she has the fantasy of being abused. Freud’s greatest discovery was to see reality as less important than fantasy, to see that the so-called reality of the “real” world is in fact fantasy.’

  ‘But Freud said’ – I quoted, from my notebook – ‘“Their symptoms are the remnants and memory symbols of certain (traumatic) experiences.”’

  ‘First he said that, but then he took his step of genius: these memories were fantasy.’ She quoted, from memory:

  ‘Analysis had led back to these infantile sexual traumas and yet they were not true … Hysterical subjects create such scenes in fantasy … to cover up the autoerotic activity of the first years of childhood, to … raise it to a higher plane … When their mothers gave them enemas or rectal douches they used to react with fear and screams of rage … This is why, in fantasies of later years, father so regularly appears as the sexual seducer … but the seducer is regularly the mother.’

  ‘Freud moved the world,’ A.K. went on, ‘from out there’ – she pointed number 2 number one directly at me, at a point between my eyes – ‘to in here.’ Number 2 number one swiveled so that it was pointing directly between her eyes, above her beautifully done nose. ‘The world is not the world out there,’ she said. ‘The world is within us.’

  ‘Like Christ? As in “the Kingdom of God is within you”?’

  ‘Spare me,’ she said coldly. ‘God is sublimation. God!’

  ‘What should I
do about it?’

  ‘Do nothing. It’s Oral. If she talks fucking, you talk sucking.’

  ‘And if she talks sucking, I talk fucking?’

  A.K. stared at me as if I were mentally challenged. ‘The goal of regression-analysis is to regress her,’ she said. ‘If she talks sucking, you talk more sucking.’

  Which I did. But my technique must have been off, because it didn’t work. The more I talked sucking, the more she talked fucking. She seemed to blossom, appearing in the office renewed and glowing, popping with sexual energy. She got a flashy haircut – light brown hair cut even shorter – and wore tasteful makeup and tenacious perfume. Her clothing seemed to be having trouble staying buttoned or snapped or hooked or down over skin or up over skin. She’d come in with a blouse unbuttoned down past Thursday, revealing a red satin bra, and sit with her legs crossed high up, a long length of thigh whooshing up into a bulging triangle of red satin. She would smile at me and ask: ‘Do I turn you on?’

  She did. Stiffening my face so that it had all the responsiveness of a stone, I used the Three Techniques to try to shift her from Genital to Oral. She revved up, filling our sessions with her erotic history: from childhood masturbation to rubbing nipples and ‘matching snatches’ with girls at Miss Schader’s Boarding School, through first sex with a waiter in Grand Cayman and dozens of sordid drunken affairs with both sexes and group sex on boats in trains crossing Austria under tables or over oceans embellished one day with a dream of ‘flying in a big pink balloon over the Matterhorn and through a dark dirty tunnel to Germany and diving into a river of beer’ – clearly a regression from Genital to Anal to Oral – and on up to the disastrous affair at Dartmouth College that had led her to that edge called suicide and then back a step, into Misery.

  Once, leaving my office, she slipped and fell into me. By reflex I grabbed her around the waist, and my palm, I swear unintentionally, found a breast. As she straightened up she turned to me and suddenly we were a man and a woman and there was a jolt of sex between us.

  The erotic flew between us, like a confused bird.

  I turned brick red and backed away clumsily, pushing her gently toward the door. I locked it and sat there sweating, seeing just how easy it would be to seduce her in my office. The door would be locked. No-one would know but us. Neither of us would dare tell. That night I couldn’t get her out of my mind.

  I called up Henry Solini, told him about Zoe, and asked what I should do.

  ‘Don’t do anything?’ he said. ‘At times like that I hear my old man’s voice, the one time he told me about the birds and the bees? “Remember, Henry,” he goes, “flies cause disease. Keep yours zipped.”?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, man, thank your analyst? He’s doing a great job?’

  When Zoe came into the office the next day she brushed against me. As she crossed in front of the low-angled February sunlight slipping in through the window, I saw she was wearing nothing under her flimsy shirt. When she sat, I saw she wore no panties either. If ever I wanted to do it, now was the time.

  No way. Something in me, something like what you feel when a child is with you, a sense of her vulnerability, her waif-like fragility, filled the space between us. I felt a wave of revulsion. It would not only be wrong, it would be evil. Her offering herself to me was offering me a chance to groove on myself. It wouldn’t be sex, it would be power. Like rape. It would be rape. I the therapist had the power. I could use it. If I were desperate or empty or into power, I might just use her to fill me up. What did this say about Schlomo Dove? If anything, he seemed full – too full. Cherokee was the empty one, the thin dusk of moneyed twilight as opposed to ten shouting Jews. And while Schlomo was ultra-analyzed – President of the Freudian Institute – Cherokee, so far, was just getting a handle on his paranoia.

  I responded to Zoe that day by being more theoretical than ever. Rejected, she screamed, ‘You are a royal pain in the ass!’ and stormed out.

  I wrote up the session for A.K., who praised me for using the theory but pointed out that I must be using the theory wrong because while, even if I were to be given the benefit of the doubt and her ‘pain in the ass’ were a regression from Genital Stage to Anal Stage, there was no hint, no hint at all, of any Oral.

  ‘I’ll try harder.’

  ‘That’s the worst thing you could do.’

  ‘I’ll try less hard.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Until I’m analyzed?’

  Number 2 number four:

  Work with my cases was intense and exhilarating. I looked forward to seeing them, spending hours the nights before going over my ledger and reading the relevant Freud, and then after each session transcribing for supervision with A.K. Now I had a vision of how therapy went. As I held to this vision with my cases, except for Zoe they mostly went that way. I’d float out of sessions light-headed, full of ideas. With my associations, dreams, and fantasies, my inner life was rich, a garden of unconscious delights. No wonder so many analysts had creative hobbies like sculpture or painting or basket-weaving. In terms of my cases, it was the best.

  But in terms of myself, it was the worst.

  On Thoreau, surrounded by Freudians, I felt watched constantly. Feeling watched constantly, I came out constantly with words and actions that were bizarre, a sign of my deep psychopathology. Tapping a pencil on a desk was guess what? Fondling a basketball while waiting for Malik? Eating a banana in public? – the stares of Faith and other Thoreauvians soon made me stop, fold it up, hold it down – more stares – ‘What is he going to do with that banana?’ It was astonishing how any object or action could be seen, deeper down, as sexual. At first it had only been penises. Now it was also breasts. Breasts and nipples were everywhere! It was remarkable just how many breasts you could see and hear, if you kept an open mind. Lunch-times were hell, with hot dogs and melons – once, with Faith, a taco transformed itself before my eyes into a vagina.

  It was a vicious cycle: the more I started to feel that my every move and my every word were being analyzed, the more wary I became, and the more utterly stupid things I seemed to say or do. Worst was my seeming to be happy – say, about my cases – which deep down meant I was unhappy. The happier I seemed, the deeper down was my unhappiness, the more miserable I must be. The present became mythic, almost Jungian! It was hard to take.

  My own worst psychopathology came out around A.K. herself. I began to show up for supervision either too early or too late, at the wrong time or on the wrong day. One day I barged in on her during a session, interrupting a well-dressed woman, knees up, weeping on the couch. Humiliated, knowing I had set the analysis back several weeks if not months or years, bowing my abject apologies, I slunk back out. Suddenly I seemed in possession of a trick appointment book, its pages now porous, unable to hold my writing, or acidified, so as to render my ink invisible, or even with whole days missing. My mind seemed made of mud. My everyday life was pure neurosis. My head felt like a bog, my stomach raw hamburger. My life felt jinxed. I was a nervous wreck.

  Then, soon, I got paranoid. Was it our old friend homosexuality? I walked Thoreau on eggshells, when I wasn’t hiding out behind the closed door of my office. When in public, I was as silent as possible. I was living under a kind of Freudian Miranda warning – ‘Anything you say can be used against you.’ I shut up. But when I did speak, Freudian slips abounded. My efforts to cram my words down into silence seemed to make my actions burst out in ever more bizarre ways – the Fat Lady in the Bathing Suit theory. Everyone seemed to be wondering when the hell I’d get myself into analysis.

  When I told A.K. about Cherokee finding condoms in his wife’s purse and being vasectomized, so that she was fucking someone, A.K. said nothing. Then I told her about Cherokee dating Christine, and she was furious. ‘You fixed them up with each other? What the hell are you doing, running a dating service?’

  ‘I happened to leave the outer door open, she came in early, and they just happened to meet.’<
br />
  ‘You didn’t “happen” to, and nothing is “just” something. Your repressed wish to fuck her came out in your “leaving the outer door open” so he could fuck her. It’s Oedipal. Primal Scene.’ Her eyes widened. I braced myself.

  ‘And do you imagine that you saw your father fucking your mother?’

  Boom. Pitch-dark, and on the other side of the thin wall of my bedroom a grunting, a muffled crying …

  ‘Are you going to go on?’ A.K. was saying.

  I fought back tears, and said nothing, my head hanging down. I felt her staring at me, slats of heavy winter light through Venetian blinds. Childhood.

  ‘When you’re ready,’ she said, in a kindly tone I’d never heard before, ‘you’re ready.’ I looked up. There was kindness in her eyes. ‘There’s a lot of pain in there, waiting to be let out.’

  Astonished and touched by her concern, I went back to talking about the found condoms in Lily’s purse and Cherokee’s vasectomy. When A.K. reframed this, saying, ‘The reality of the condoms in her purse is less important than the deeper meaning of “the condoms in her purse,” the dreams, fantasies, and associations to the condoms,’ I nodded my agreement. Somehow I managed to stumble through the session until she grasped number 2 number four and said:

  ‘You’re not doing that badly. You’re bright, and even though you’re only a first-year resident, I’ve been giving you third-year-resident supervision. Perhaps it is beginning to pay off.’

  I floated out of her office on a pink cloud, as if tipsy, or in love.

  ‘“Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,’” Malik was saying, staring at my new Schlomo suit and rainbow-colored Jackson Pollack tie, the first suit and tie I’d worn since the day I’d met him on Emerson, lifetimes before. ‘A quote, from Henry David Thoreau.’

  It was late Thursday afternoon February 25; the talons of winter were hooked so deeply into the year that you could almost feel the horny cartilage all icy against your ribs. Malik was standing outside his office on Thoreau, and beside him were an elderly woman and a seeing-eye dog. I wanted to talk to Malik about Cherokee.