Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  Sometimes Dr. Grosskurth would talk about his own history. He was born in Berlin before World War I, at a time when German Jews were German above all. His mother had hoped that he would become a diplomat. But he had decided to study medicine instead, particularly psychiatry; he was of that generation of German Jews who found in Freud's doctrines what their physicist contemporaries found in Einstein's. He had spoken out against the Nazis in 1933 and had been forced to flee the country at a moment's notice. One of his professors had helped him get out. (He was notably unheroic in his description of this episode. “It was a lesson to me to keep my big mouth shut” was the way he put it.) He fled to Italy, where he completed medical school at the University of Padua.

  He still loved Italy: He ate almost every night at Parma, a restaurant nearby, on Third Avenue, and spent every August in Venice, at the Cipriani. One spring, I recall, I announced that my wife and I had decided to go to Venice.

  He looked at me tetchily. “And where will you stay?” he asked.

  “At this pensione, the Accademia,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “You wish to stay at the Monaco, it is a very pleasant hotel, and you will have breakfast on the terrace. That is the correct hostel for you.”

  I reached into my pockets, where I usually had a stubby pencil, and searched for a stray bit of paper—an American Express receipt, the back of a bit of manuscript paper—to write on.

  “No, no!” he said with disgust. My disorderliness was anathema to his Teutonic soul. “Here, I will write it down. Oh, you are so chaotic. Hand me the telephone.” I offered him the phone, which was on a small table near his chair, and he consulted a little black book that he took from his inside right jacket pocket. He dialed some long number. Then, in a voice even deeper and more booming than usual—he was raised in a time when long distance meant long distance—he began to speak in Italian.

  “Sì, sono Dottore Grosskurth.” He waited for a moment—genuinely apprehensive, I thought, for the first time in my acquaintance with him—and then a huge smile, almost a big-lug smile, broke across his face. They knew him.

  “Sì, sì,” he said, and then, his voice lowering, said, “No,” and something I didn't understand; obviously, he was explaining that Mrs. Grosskurth had died. “Pronto!” he began, and then came a long sentence beginning with my name and various dates in giugno. “Sì, sì.” He put his hand over the receiver. “You wish for a bath or a shower?” he demanded.

  “Bath,” I said.

  “Good choice,” he said. It was the nearest thing to praise he had ever given me. Finally, he hung up the phone. He looked at the paper in his hand and gave it to me.

  “There,” he said. “You are reserved for five nights, the room has no view of the canal, but actually, this is better, since the gondola station can be extremely disturbing. You will eat breakfast on the terrace, and there you will enjoy the view of the Salute. Do not eat dinner there, however. I will give you a list of places.” And, on an “Ask Your Doctor About Prozac” pad, he wrote out a list of restaurants in Venice for me. (They were mostly, I realized later, after I got to know Venice a bit, the big, old, fiftiesish places that a New York analyst would love: Harry's Bar, Da Fiore, the Madonna.)

  “You will go to these places, order the spaghetti vongole, and then …”

  “And then?”

  “And then at last you will be happy,” he said flatly.

  He was so far from being an orthodox Freudian, or an orthodox anything, that I was startled when I discovered how deep and passionate his attachment to psychoanalytic dogma was. One day about three years in, I came into his office and saw that he had a copy of The New York Review of Books open. “It is very sad,” he began. “It is very sad indeed to see a journal which was once respected by many people descend into a condition where it has lost the good opinion of all reasonable people.” After a few moments, I figured out that he was referring to one of several much discussed pieces that the literary critic Frederick Crews had written attacking Freud and Freudianism.

  I read the pieces later myself and thought them incontrovertible. Then I sat down to read Freud for the first time—Civilization and Its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, The Interpretation of Dreams—and was struck at once by the absurdity of the arguments as arguments and the impressive weight of humane culture marshaled in their support. One sensed that one was in the presence of a kind of showman, a brilliant essayist, leaping from fragmentary evidence to unsupported conclusion, and summoning up a whole body of psychological myth—the Id, the Libido, the Ego—with the confidence of a Disney cartoonist drawing bunnies and squirrels. I found myself, therefore, in the unusual position of being increasingly skeptical of the therapeutic approach to which I fled twice a week for comfort. I finally got up the courage to tell Grosskurth this.

  “You therefore find a conflict between your strongest intellectual convictions and your deepest emotional gratification needs?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He shrugged. “Apparently, you are a Freudian.”

  This seemed to me a first-rate exchange, honors to him, but I couldn't let it go. My older sister, a professor of developmental psychology at Berkeley, regarded Freud as a comic relic (I had told her about my adventures in psychoanalysis), and in the midst of the New York Review debate, she wrote one of the most devastating of the anti-Freud letters to the editor. She even made a passing, dismissive reference to the appeal of “figures of great personal charisma”—I knew what that was about—and then stated conclusively that there was nothing to be said in defense of psychoanalysis that couldn't also be said in defense of magic or astrology. (“She is very well defended, your sister,” Grosskurth said.)

  On behalf of his belief, Grosskurth would have said—did say, though over time, and not in these precise words—that while Freud may have been wrong in all the details, his central insight was right. His insight was that human life is shaped by a series of selfish, ineradicable urges, particularly sexual ones, and that all the other things that happen in life are ways of toning down these urges and giving them an “acceptable” outlet. An actual, undramatic but perilous world of real things existed, whose essential character was its indifference to human feelings: This world of real things included pain, death, and disease, but also many things unthreatening to our welfare. His project—the Freudian project, properly understood—was not to tell the story of our psyche, the curious drawing-room comedy of Id and Ego and Libido, but just the opposite: to drain the drama from all our stories. He believed that the only thing to do with the knowledge of the murderous rage within your breast was not to mythologize it but to put a necktie on it and heavy shoes and a dark blue woolen suit. Only a man who knew that, given the choice, he would rape his mother and kill his father could order his spaghetti vongole in anything like peace.

  There was, however, a catch in this argument, or so I insisted in the third year of my analysis, over several sessions and at great length. Weren't the well-defended people he admired really the ones at the furthest imaginable remove from the real things, the reality, whose worth he praised so highly? Did Susan Sontag actually have a better grasp of things-as-they-are than anyone else? Would anybody point to Harold Brodkey as a model of calm appraisal of the scale of the world and the appropriate place of his ego in it? Wasn't the “enormous narcissistic overestimation” of which he accused me inseparable from the “well-defended, internalized self-esteem” he wanted me to cultivate? The people who seemed best defended—well, the single most striking thing about them was how breathtakingly out of touch they were with the world, with other people's feelings, with the general opinion of their work. You didn't just have to be armored by your narcissism; you could be practically entombed in it, so that people came knocking, like Carter at King Tut's tomb, and you'd still get by. Wasn't that a problem for his system, or, anyway, for his therapy?

  “Yes,” he said coldly.

  “Oh,” I said, and we changed the subject.

  My friends were al
l in therapy, too, of course—this was New York—and late at night, over a bottle of red wine, they would offer one “insight” or another that struck me as revelatory: “My analyst helped me face the recurring pattern in my life of an overprotective-ness that derives from my mother's hidden alcoholism,” or “Mine helped me see more clearly how early my father's depression shaped my fears,” or “Mine helped me see that my reluctance to publish my personal work is part of my reluctance to have a child.” What could I say? “Mine keeps falling asleep, except when we discuss Hannah Arendt's sex life, about which he knows quite a lot?”

  His falling asleep was a problem. The first few years I saw him, he still had a reasonably full schedule, and our sessions were usually late in the day; the strain told on him. As I settled insistently (I had decided that if I was going to be analyzed, I was going to be analyzed) into yet one more tiresome recital of grievances, injustices, anxieties, childhood memories, I could see his long, big, partly bald head nodding down toward the knot of his tie. His eyes would flutter shut, and he would begin to breathe deeply. I would drone on—“And so I think that it was my mother, really, who first gave me a sense of the grandiose. There was this birthday, I think my sixth, when I first sensed …”—and his chin would nestle closer and closer to his chest as his head dropped further, so that I was looking right at his bald spot. There was only one way, I learned, after a couple of disconcerting weeks of telling my troubles to a sleeping therapist, to revive him, and that was to gossip. “And so my mother's relationship with my father reminds me—well, in certain ways it reminds me of what people have been saying about Philip Roth's divorce from Claire Bloom,” I would say abruptly, raising my volume on the non sequitur.

  Instantly, his head would jerk straight up, his eyes would open, and he would shake himself all over like a Lab coming out of the water. “Yes, what are they saying about this divorce?” he would demand.

  “Oh, nothing, really,” I would say, and then I would wing it for a minute, glad to have caught his attention.

  Unfortunately, my supply of hot literary gossip was very small. So there were times (and I hope that this is the worst confession I will ever have to make) when I would invent literary gossip on the way uptown, just to have something in reserve if he fell asleep, like a Victorian doctor going off to a picnic with a bottle of smelling salts, just in case. (“Let's see: What if I said that Kathy Acker had begun an affair with, oh, V. S. Pritchett—that would hold anybody's interest.”) I felt at once upset and protective about his sleeping. Upset because it was, after all, my nickel, and protective because I did think that he was a great man, in his way, and I hated to see him dwindling: I wondered how long he would go on if he sensed that he was dwindling.

  Not long ago, I read, in a book about therapy, a reference to a distinguished older analyst who made a point of going to sleep in front of his patients. Apparently, Grosskurth—for who else could it have been?—was famous for his therapeutic skill in falling asleep as you talked. It was tactical, even strategic.

  Or was he just an old man trying to keep a practice going for lack of anything better to do, and doing anything—sleeping, booking hotel rooms, gossiping, as old men do—so that he would not have to be alone? Either limitlessly shrewd or deeply pathetic: Which was it? Trying to answer that question was one of the things that kept me going uptown.

  As we went on into our fourth and fifth years, all the other problems that I had brought to him became one problem, the New York problem. Should my wife—should we—have a baby? We agonized over it, in the modern manner. Grosskurth listened silently for months and finally pronounced.

  “Yes, you must go ahead and have a child. You will enjoy it. The child will try your patience repeatedly, yet you will find that there are many pleasures in child rearing.” He cleared his throat. “You will find, for instance, that the child will make many amusing mistakes in language.”

  I looked at him, a little dumbfounded—that was the best of it?

  “You see,” he went on, “at about the age of three, children begin to talk, and naturally, their inexperience leads them to use language in surprising ways. These mistakes can really be extremely amusing. The child's errors in language also provide the kinds of anecdotes that can be of value to the parents in a social setting.” It seemed an odd confidence on which to build a family—that the child would be your own live-in Gracie Allen, and you could dine out on the errors—but I thought that perhaps he was only defining, so to speak, the minimal case.

  So we did have the child. Overwhelmed with excitement, I brought him pictures of the baby at a week old. (“Yes,” he said dryly, peering at my Polaroids, “this strongly resembles a child.”) And, as my life was changing, I began to think that it was time to end, or anyway wind down, our relationship. It had been five years, and for all that I had gained—and I thought that I had gained a lot: if not a cure, then at least enough material to go into business as a blackmailer—I knew that if I was to be “fully adult,” I should break my dependence. And he was growing old. Already aged when we began, he was now, at eighty-five or -six, becoming frail. Old age seems to be a series of lurches rather than a gradual decline. One week he was his usual booming self, the next week there was a slow deliberateness in his gait as he came to the office door. Six months later, he could no longer get up reliably from his chair, and once fell down outside the office in my presence. His face, as I helped him up, was neither angry nor amused, just doughy and preoccupied, the face of a man getting ready for something. That was when we switched our sessions to his apartment, around the corner, on Seventy-ninth Street, where I would ring the bell and wait for him to call me in—he left the door open or had it left open by his nurse, whom I never saw. Then I would go inside and find him—having been helped into a gray suit, blue shirt, dark tie—on his own sofa, surrounded by Hofmann and Miró engravings and two or three precious Kandinsky prints.

  About a month into the new arrangement, I decided to move to Europe to write, and I told him this in high spirits and with an almost breathless sense of advancement: I was going away, breaking free of New York, starting over. I thought he would be pleased.

  To my shock, he was furious—his old self and then some. “Who would have thought of this idea? What a self-destructive regression.” Then I realized why he was so angry: Despite all his efforts at fortification, I had decided to run away. Fort Gopnik was dropping its flag, dispersing its troops, surrendering its territory—all his work for nothing. Like General Gordon come to reinforce Khartoum, he had arrived too late and failed through the unforgivable, disorganized passivity of the natives.

  In our final sessions, we settled into a nonaggression pact. (“Have we stopped too soon, Doctor?” I asked. “Yes,” he said dully.) We talked neutrally, about art and family. Then, the day before I was to leave, I went uptown for our last session.

  It was a five-thirty appointment in the second week of October. We began to talk amiably, like old friends, about the bits and pieces of going abroad, visas and vaccinations. Then, abruptly, he began to tell a long, meandering story about his wife's illness and death, which we had never talked about before. He kept returning to a memory he had of her swimming back and forth in the hotel pool in Venice the last summer before her death.

  “She had been ill, and the Cipriani, as you are not aware, has an excellent pool. She swam back and forth in this pool, back and forth, for hours. I was well aware that her illness was very likely to be terminal.” He shook his head, held out his hands, dealing with reality. “As soon as she had episodes of dizziness and poor balance, I made a very quick diagnosis. Still, back and forth she swam.”

  He stopped; the room by now had become dark. The traffic on Seventy-ninth Street had thickened into a querulous, honking rush-hour crowd. He was, I knew, too shaky on his feet to get up and turn on the lights, and I thought that it would be indelicate for me to do it, they were his lights. So we sat there in the dark.

  “Naturally, this was to be the last summe
r that we spent in Venice. However, she had insisted that we make this trip. And she continued to swim.” He looked around the room in the dark—the pictures, the drawings, the bound volumes, all that was left of two lives joined together, one closed, the other closing.

  “She continued to swim. She had been an exceptional athlete in addition to being, as you know, an extremely witty woman.” He seemed lost in memory for a moment, but then, regaining himself, he cleared his throat in the dark, professionally, as he had done so many times before.

  “So you see,” he said, again trying to make the familiar turn toward home. And then he did something that I don't think he had ever done before: He called me by my name. “So you see, Adam, in life, in life …” And I rose, thinking, Here at our final session—no hope of ever returning, my bag packed and my ticket bought to another country, far away—at last, the truth, the point, the thing to take away that we have been building toward all these years.