The Golden Condom

by Jeanne Safer

  Personality is more important than gender in determining the fate of these relationships, which always have an unconscious component. Mentors of the same sex can behave quite differently. People tend to make the same assumptions about male and female mentors as they make about men and women in general. Having had both a warm, nurturing male analyst and a cool, intellectual female one, I have ample evidence that these stereotypes do not always apply.

  The mentor who gave me the most practical help, whom I met in middle age after I wrote my first book, was like a fairy godmother, but one who eventually could not tolerate the change in the dynamics of the relationship when her “godchild” no longer accepted all her magic spells and the behavioral dictates that accompanied them. She was a decade older than I, a savvy, generous, and wickedly funny bestselling author. We soon discovered, to our mutual delight, that we had a great deal in common. I was overjoyed and honored to be taken up by her, and she taught me, with enthusiasm and skill, how to do publicity, which included expert advice on how to be interviewed as well as on makeup and wardrobe. She gloried in my success, and I felt boundless gratitude. We became intimate friends, sharing confidences, meeting regularly for lunch and going out with our husbands, even celebrating holidays together.

  Then I wrote a second book. By this time, I was less of a novice and considerably less tractable. I reverted to my own natural style, and she felt no compunction about criticizing my hair (too short), my makeup (nonexistent), and my wardrobe (too unconventional for her taste), all of which she insisted would put me at a disadvantage. This time, I spoke my mind. “I took all your advice, and I can never thank you enough for all you’ve done for me,” I said, “but I never felt completely myself. This time, I have to do it in my own style. People will just have to take me as I am.” She didn’t argue with me, but she was clearly offended that I was rebelling against her authority and no longer took her opinions as gospel.

  We never had an acrimonious falling-out, but her calls and our lunch dates became less frequent. There were no more evenings out or invitations to her country house. Soon we were no longer in each other’s lives, not speaking for months and then years on end, our once-intimate bond becoming no more than a cordial former friendship. I was grieved and baffled.

  Why did she drop me? Here is what I think: she was playing the part of her own controlling mother vis-à-vis her younger, rebellious self; I also represented the daughter she never had—and she, a version of the opinionated mother I did have. When mentors and protégés are the same sex, mother/daughter or father/son dynamics are hard to avoid. Although her success was far greater than mine, she probably envied my independence of mind and the fact that her own most important work was behind her. I was no longer an awed beginner who needed and hung on her advice, but a younger peer, and she could not adapt. My admiration for her never diminished, but her ability to change roles as I matured professionally was limited. I lost her when I came into my own.

  THE END OF THE AFFAIR

  Finding a mentor is falling in love, even if the union you seek is psychic rather than physical—there is the same longing, the thrill of discovery, the preoccupation with the perfections of the chosen one. The intensity of your desire to please and to drink in everything your mentor has to offer can threaten his equilibrium, even if he responds to it. The intoxication of discovering a remarkable role model prevents you from understanding at the time that the person you esteem, despite his gifts, has the flaws humans are prey to. You cannot imagine that his unacknowledged insecurities could make him even more anxious about the relationship than you are yourself, causing him to behave coldly or inexplicably and to put distance between the two of you just when you hoped he would respond, approach, and offer more of himself.

  Such blinding idealization was especially compelling in the case of two therapists: one an exceptionally gifted senior clinician, and the other an eager and talented novice. Theirs was a bond almost as charged as if she had been his patient, and, since the boundaries between a student and a supervisor are not as clearly delineated, more dangerously ambiguous. Adoration and admiration—both of which are compelling—were mutually misinterpreted, causing scenes of intense embarrassment and distress on both sides, and, eventually, irreparable fissures. The divorce of a marriage of true minds—though there was a partial reconciliation later on—was as shattering as the finale of any other passion.

  THE HEIRESS UNAPPARENT

  It has been two years since forty-nine-year-old psychiatrist Dr. Helen Archer exchanged a word with her former mentor, Dr. Nathan Gold, and twelve years since they worked together in Chicago during her medical and residency training at a top-notch hospital. They met when Helen was a thirty-year-old, third-year medical student and Nate, then in his early fifties, was the storied director of education. Even though she is now married and has a prominent career in another state, their relationship continues to haunt and unsettle her. She still dreams about him, cries over him, and tortures herself about what went wrong between them. Did she ever really matter to him? Could she still?

  The first time she watched Nate conduct a psychiatric interview with a patient of hers, Helen was smitten. His remarkable clinical sensitivity awed and thrilled her; she vowed to become his disciple. “I was in my first psych rotation, and my first patient, who was having his first psychotic break, was in a locked unit. Nate was the teacher,” she recalled. So compelling is her memory of their first encounter that she switched to the present tense to describe it. “In the space of a few minutes, he manages to get this guy talking from his heart about his struggles, his hopes, his fears—something I always wanted to be able to do. He demonstrated how truly profound a psych history can be. This is beautiful, so gracious, so human. He’s a genius! It undid me.” She used the language of desire to describe her passionate reaction to his skill and her longing to make it her own, though she meant it intellectually and emotionally, not erotically.

  Helen’s ecstatic admiration only grew over time, as she continued to marvel at the depth and breadth of her designated mentor’s art. “For the next two years, I watched miraculous things in that hospital—liver transplants, open-heart surgery—but nothing compared to this. He was so intuitive. He asked questions out of left field, and patients would feel so deeply seen, and they were. He welcomed them back into the human community, and before my eyes, they became people I could identify with. I wept. I hated to leave every session. Seeing this changed my life and became my mission in life.” She had found her vocation and the master to emulate.

  At first, Helen’s dream seemed to be coming true. “He became a major mentor; I worked with him and for him. I was his adoring other, his deeply worshipful audience, and it was very intense.” One day, he finally said the words she was longing to hear: “Would you like to be my assistant?” But troubling, even maddening, ambiguities were already creeping into their mutual admiration society. Why, she wondered, hadn’t he asked her directly, rather than leaving it up to her? He never seemed to declare himself, to definitively single her out, as mentors often do. There was something elusive, something hesitant, in his personality that made him avoid ever embracing their relationship wholeheartedly.

  The master clinician turned out to also be a master of self-protection, and his young devotee threatened his equilibrium even as she fascinated him. “Once I asked him to make the psychotherapy class more than an hour and leave room for discussion, but he refused, with the explanation that ‘you should always leave them wanting more,’” she recalled. It seemed as if he was expressing his philosophy of life, not just of pedagogy—what Nate himself would have called “ambivalence” or “withholding” in anybody else.

  A pattern emerged that would bedevil the young doctor for the next decade, as long as she was under his aegis. “He kept turning down my requests to be my official clinical supervisor, but then he would advise me informally, as though he was giving me a consolation prize,” she said. Things between them were far too vaguely defined, and sh
e never felt secure that she had a special place in Nate’s mind and heart, as he had in hers. Even when he seemed to be offering her the keys to the kingdom, it was always at arm’s length. Was she pushing him away, or was he backing off?

  When Helen later became a psychiatric resident, Nate, true to form, made her two major offers in the most confusing way imaginable. First, he informed her offhandedly that he was “going to let [her] teach the psychotherapy class,” and then, in an equally casual tone, he asked her to go to the next departmental meeting of the psychiatry faculty in his stead. But the way he expressed the second, more personal request made her feel defeated rather than victorious. “He warned me that there was terrible backbiting in these meetings and seemed dumbfounded when I asked playfully whether he was setting me up to fail.” Her teasing remark was actually a bid for reassurance, but it had the opposite effect on the highly sensitive recipient. “He looked like I had stabbed him when I said that,” she said. “He was deeply hurt by my not immediately accepting his offer. It was as though he was grooming me for his job and I was refusing to take over for him. He acted as if he was handing me the most precious achievement of his life and I threw it back in his face. But he never said, ‘I want to hand over my legacy to you.’” She needed words, not just deeds, a straightforward declaration that she was his chosen one, which was something he could never do. To her chagrin, he rescinded the offer that she attend the meeting as his surrogate, although he did “let” her teach the class.

  Helen reacted to Nate’s ambivalence with some ambivalence of her own by refusing to go into psychoanalytic therapy as he had hoped she would. This would have been a prerequisite for becoming an analyst herself. “I objected on feminist grounds,” she explained, alluding to the misogyny and general befuddlement about female psychology that was a feature of the classical Freudian approach in vogue at the time. But she was also asserting her independence from him, the analyst extraordinaire, and punishing him for his refusal to declare her his heir. Why should she unilaterally expose her soul to a therapist when her mentor refused to examine his own conduct? Nate’s poetic term for Freud’s Oedipus complex, the passionate desire a young boy or girl feels for the opposite-sex parent, was “doomed longing.” At the time, this was considered the fundamental predicament of childhood, a major theme that analysis unmasks. But Helen had had enough doomed longing with him (though her passion was emotional rather than physical) to go looking for more on the analytic couch.

  Why did these two people, who were obviously simpatico in many fundamental ways and shared a rare professional rapport, keep frustrating and misinterpreting each other? They both had larger-than-life personalities, a knack for showmanship, and a need for an appreciative audience, but she wanted everything verbalized and out in the open, and he was far less forthcoming in his personal relationships—particularly one with an ardent young woman—than he was on the ward. Outside the safe confines of his professional role, the more she pressed him, the less he gave her. The best of him, she said with a sardonic laugh, “appeared only with patients and strangers.” Mixed messages were his forte, and he only “gave” at the office. Mentor and protégé did a decades-long dance that a colleague of mine has dubbed “come-away closer”: he made ambiguous and seductive offers, she demurred, he retreated, she implored, and then he promised the coveted prize she hungered for, only to withdraw both himself and his offer. Their back-and-forth was simultaneously over the top, as one or the other of them was sure to be “dumbfounded,” “shocked,” “deeply hurt,” “disappointed,” and so on in every interaction they had. The two psychiatrists were driving each other crazy.

  Helen was unable to access her own clinical skills to understand what was going on or recognize the impact of her own behavior on the man she idolized. She did not see that she threatened and overwhelmed Nate as much as she impressed him. Her desperate desire to break through to him was driven by an unconscious need to be acknowledged by him as her own father had never done. “There were many ways in which my father seemed not to be interested in me, and he never told me he loved me,” she said. “I can’t believe a feeling is real unless it’s put into words.” She could not endure being Nate’s heiress unapparent; she had to have it spelled out.

  Nate, for his part, could not approach Helen directly and declare his intention that she should succeed him because that would have been a frightening admission of what she meant to him. Reticence and avoidance of intimacy characterized all his relationships—“Everybody has a fucked-up relationship with Nate,” a more experienced colleague told her, to her great relief—but the unacknowledged physical attraction that he felt for her3 made it worse. (Nate was married with children.) He inconsistently kept her at arm’s length to fight the urge to take her in his arms.

  Only in retrospect was Helen able to understand what each party contributed to their excruciating union. “It took me years to realize that watching him tune in to patients made me long not just to learn to do that myself but to be understood by him as he understood them,” she said. The girl who had never seen “the gleam in her father’s eye”4—the delighted, loving sense of specialness every child needs—longed for her mentor to bestow it upon her as an adult. “I wanted to say, ‘Turn your high beams on me.’” Her raw desire for his undivided attention terrified Nate and made him flee, lest he be unable to resist.

  In her fourth year of residency, Helen was appointed a chief resident and given a title that coincidentally resembled Nate’s, and she no longer reported to him. He let her know that he was shocked that she took the job, as though she was usurping his position. (Of course, she intended no such thing, but he could not see that.) Helen took the risk of going to his home office to discuss it. “For the first time, I broached the subject of us, but he immediately shut down the conversation by saying, ‘We have no context or form to work on this.’” Nate deflected her by hiding behind the administrative hierarchy—he couldn’t stand the thought of more personal contact between them—and Helen felt so rejected she did not think to say, No context? How about the context of two people who have a long, complicated history? She left and wrote Nate a letter—what she called “the most courageously honest letter of my life”—addressing their folie à deux. “‘I see you as man of great integrity and great reserve, but I’m in this transference vortex and I’m having trouble coming out.’” Of course, he never answered, by post or in person.

  * * *

  At the end of her psychiatric training, Helen finally separated from Nate by falling in love, getting engaged, and following her fiancé to Wisconsin. This move, and the reason she made it, did not please her mentor; she could tell by his demeanor that he was crushed that she was leaving. A colleague jocularly warned her, “Tell your husband to watch out. Don’t be surprised if a courtly gentleman sneaks into your bedroom and tries to stab him.”

  When they were 150 miles apart, Nate became slightly less distant. He came to Helen’s new hometown to attend a professional meeting, and she called him. “I said, ‘Nate, I miss you,’ and he took me to dinner at this unbelievable restaurant, the best in the state. I decided to talk about ideas, and we had a wonderful evening, although he repeatedly mentioned his wife.” But Helen finally mentioned her and Nate. “I told him that I had realized things about our relationship, that I was ashamed of my longing, which had made me behave in confusing ways, and he actually said, ‘Are there things that I did that made this hard for you?’

  “‘I wanted you to love me and care about me,’ I said.”

  His explanation was convoluted. He said, “I didn’t want the group to punish you for being my favorite, so I protected you against being special to me. I never assumed we’d stay in touch—we don’t know each other that well.” Helen did not buy this. “Although I felt like a kicked puppy, I said, ‘You were of singular importance to me—how could we not have a lifelong relationship?’” To this, he had no reply. Denial is a powerful force that even the most seasoned psychoanalyst can fail to recognize w
hen he is in its throes himself.

  The last time they met was an unexpected encounter at the funeral of a mutual colleague. His guard was down, and his behavior, perhaps because of the occasion, was considerably more revealing than usual. “Nate saw me, seemed shocked, collected himself, and then greeted me. We shook hands, and he kept holding mine.” She told him what he meant to her. “I want you to know that everything I do is your legacy. Watching you all those years changed me. You taught me to return the outcast into the circle of humanity.” Her guard was down too, so she also told him how trying he was. “You never meet me. I make myself so vulnerable and you never show up—you’ve been crazy too.” But the moment passed, and he retreated once more into silence. This time, she was fully prepared never to hear from him again. Their exchange, she assumed, would trail off, as in a Henry James short story, never to be fulfilled.

  But she was wrong. Two years later, Helen got an unexpected “Friend” request on Facebook. It was from Nate. “I almost fell off my chair,” she told me. A little research revealed that he had opened his account just hours earlier and that she had been one of the first people he contacted. She accepted, with the old anticipation but with more insight than she had when they were working so closely together at the same hospital. Time, distance, and maturity have sharpened her perceptions but not severed her tie to him or diminished the intensity of her distress over his elusiveness. Maybe, she hopes, she will finally see the real Nate—Facebook to Facebook, even if not face to face. Or has she already seen all that there is? Has age—he is now seventy-five—mellowed him? Will the protective shield of the Internet allow him to reveal more of himself to his former acolyte? The jury is still out. Sometimes the second act between mentors and protégés is every bit as curious, compelling, and unpredictable as the first.