The Golden Condom

by Jeanne Safer

    2. She did not speak or turn away

  But saw the man she’d loved just yesterday

  And knew he was ordinary

  —“The End of Love,” by seventh- and eighth-century Indian poet Amaru, adapted from the Sanskrit

    3. Compulsive disorder, which is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder (now known popularly as OCD), is characterized by physical and mental activities that feel involuntary and aversive to the afflicted person, including intrusive thoughts and uncontrollable-seeming behavior (such as stalking, among driven unhappy lovers). Symptoms can range in severity from distressing to disabling. In contrast, addictions always involve physical—not just psychic—dependency.

    4. Since Freud’s revelatory paper “Mourning and Melancholia” in 1917 (Standard Edition, vol. 14), it has been a basic tenet of psychoanalytic therapy that depression (the contemporary term for melancholia) is anger turned against the self.

    5. Freud wrote a prescient paper about men who choose unavailable women: S. Freud, “Contributions to the Psychology of Love: A Special Type of Choice of Objects Made by Men,” in Standard Edition, vol. 11 (1910), 163–176.

    6. I believe that overt or covert sexual passion is a sine qua non in obsessive love. However, sexual passion is what psychoanalysts call “overdetermined”; it has a multitude of meanings and complex origins.

    7. Helen Fisher, Arthur Aron, and Lucy Brown, “Romantic Love: A Mammalian Brain System for Mate Choice,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 361 (2006): 2173–2186; Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004).

    8. E. Hatfield and R. L. Rapson, “The Neuropsychology of Passionate Love and Sexual Desire,” in Psychology of Relationships, eds. E. Cuyler and M. Ackhart (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science, 2009), 1–26.

    9. TED, “The Uniqueness of Humans,” by Robert Sapolsky, September 2009, www.ted.com/talks/robert_sapolsky_the_uniqueness_of_humans; Robert Sapolsky, Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (New York: Scribner, 2005).

  10. Gestalt psychology (which is unrelated to Gestalt therapy) is a twentieth-century German school of experimental psychology that studies how people integrate and organize perceptual and cognitive information into meaningful wholes. The antithesis of behaviorism, which reduces behavior into discrete stimuli and responses, the Gestalt approach can be summarized as “the whole is different from the sum of its parts.”

  11. B. Zeigarnik, “On Finished and Unfinished Tasks,” in A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, ed. W. D. Ellis (New York: Harcourt, 1938), 300–314.

  12. C. M. Seifert and A. L. Patalano, “Memory for Incomplete Tasks: A Re-Examination of the Zeigarnik Effect,” in Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Chicago, 1991), 114–119.

  13. “[T]he suddenness and vehemence of the beginning [of] passion mark the great effort made to escape an intense psychical distress … sometimes boredom or loneliness, a distaste or even dislike for oneself.…” Theodor Reik, A Psychologist Looks at Love (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), 43.

  Pierre Janet, an early French psychologist and predecessor of Freud, said something uncannily similar: “If a man is depressed he will fall in love, or receive the germ of some kind of passion, on the first and most trivial occasion.… The least thing is then enough: the sight of some face, a gesture, a word, which previously would have left him altogether indifferent, strikes us, and becomes the starting point of a long amorous malady. Or more than this, an object which had made no impression on us, at the moment when our mind was healthier and not capable of inoculation, may have left in us some insignificant memory which reappears in a moment of morbid receptivity.” Frederick W. J. Myers, “Professor Pierre Janet’s ‘Automatisme Psychologique,’” in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 6 (London: National Press Agency), 196–97.

  14. D. Marazziti, “The Neurobiology of Love,” Current Psychiatry Reviews 1 (2005): 331–335.

  15. S. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” in Standard Edition, vol. 12 (1914).

  16. What is now referred to as “reenacting” used to be called “acting out,” a pejorative term that referred exclusively to the negative consequences of behavior that actually has multiple functions, some of them beneficial.

  17. “Abreaction” is a term from the early years of psychoanalysis (Studies on Hysteria was written by Freud and Josef Breuer in 1895), when Freud was experimenting with hypnosis to treat hysterical symptoms and noticed that reliving the full emotional force of traumatic experiences was therapeutic for his patients. Later on, he adopted interpretation as a preferable—and less explosive—technique, with insight as the goal. In contemporary approaches to treating trauma, including attachment theory and the various relationship-oriented approaches to psychodynamic therapy, abreaction has been resurrected in new guises and has lost none of its curative power.

  18. According to the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896–1971), a founding member of the British Object Relations school in modern psychoanalysis, the “holding environment” of the therapeutic relationship offers the patient the same comfort and sustenance as a mother’s loving arms give her child. D. W. Winnicott, The Child, the Family and the Outside World (New York: Perseus, 1987).

  3. Vengeance Is Mine: The Dark Side of Rejected Love

    1. It is intriguing that authors who have written about the pair have shown considerably more sympathy for Medea than for Jason. In Euripides’s play, Medea never pays for her crimes and is conveyed in a dragon-drawn golden chariot sent by her grandfather, the sun god Helios, to Athens, where she remarries and has more children. Jason fares far worse. In Apollonius of Rhodes’s third-century BC epic Argonautica, Jason is punished for breaking his vow to Medea by dying, miserable and alone, when his rotted ship, The Argo, falls on him while he sleeps, crushing him under its stern. Dante has him suffer an even more wretched fate: as a treacherous seducer, Jason inhabits the Eighth Circle of Hell in The Inferno, where he is compelled to march about endlessly while being whipped by devils. Breaking vows was taken very, very seriously in the classical world and the Middle Ages.

    2. All three networks made movies about the Fisher case, a first in television history. Newsweek rated them with garbage cans for trash content. The Harris case inspired only two made-for-TV movies, which were at least superficially more tasteful.

    3. Critic Diana Trilling’s Mrs. Harris and journalist Shana Alexander’s Very Much a Lady.

    4. Kohut (1913–1981) was the founder of self psychology, a modern psychoanalytic approach focusing on the development and maintenance of a person’s sense of self. With his emphasis on the centrality of the therapist’s empathy in the analytic process, he has been a major influence on my thinking and my therapeutic stance. Kohut’s most significant works are The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (New York: International Universities Press, 1971), The Restoration of Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1977), and How Does Analysis Cure?, edited by Arnold Goldberg with Paul E. Stepansky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

    5. Heinz Kohut contrasts narcissistic rage with “mature aggression,” the more nuanced, less automatic, and not massively destructive response of a more integrated personality to damage inflicted by others.

    6. The set of skills that underlie ego strength and other cognitive organizational and planning abilities has been located by contemporary neurophysiologists in the prefrontal cortex and is now widely known as “executive function.”

  4. Betrayal

    1. This delicious and profound observation is from Theodor Reik’s autobiography in which this gifted therapist and writer on masochism and the criminal mind (he was one of the first psychologist/psychoanalysts without medical training and a forerunner of the current relation
al orientation in psychoanalysis) relates how he grasps a patient’s reality through intuition, empathy, and self-exploration. Running from the Nazis, being rejected by the medical establishment in the United States, and his own temperament undoubtedly contributed to his understanding of the consolations of sadistic fantasy. Here is his interpretation of one of his own dreams:

  “It seems that I go out of my way to retaliate with fantasies against a person who has tried to humiliate me. Such fantasies have, it seems to me, psychotherapeutic value as well. When not accompanied by guilt-feelings, fantasies of such a violent kind protect me, I suppose, from becoming neurotic. If it is permitted to joke in such serious matters, I would say they are to be recommended as useful counter-advice against a boy-scout mentality. A thought-murder a day keeps the doctor away.” Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experiences of a Psychoanalyst (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 43.

  5. Unrequited Love: My Golden One

    1. Philip Bromberg’s powerful paper “One Need Not Be a House to Be Haunted” in his book Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys (Mahwah, NJ: Analytic Press, 2006), 153–73, presents a compelling clinical example of dissociation.

    2. Sydney Smith, “The Golden Fantasy: A Regressive Reaction to Separation Anxiety,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 58, no. 3 (1977): 311–324. My relationship with Michael did not exactly replicate the fantasy Smith describes, but it had many of the same dynamics. Dr. Smith was for many years clinical director of the Menninger Foundation, a major American psychoanalytic training and treatment center then located in Topeka, Kansas. This paper is a classic in the field because it identifies a particular type of problematic relationship in a compelling, poetic way. Since I had independently used the same term to describe my own beloved, it had special significance for me.

    3. Regressive experiences harken back to an earlier stage of life.

    4. Heinz Kohut, founder of self psychology, called “the gleam in the mother’s eye” the essential act of delight and appreciation a mother gives an infant.

    5. Psychoanalyst Leo Stone’s term for the early role a mother plays in her child’s development. Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation (New York: International Universities Press, 1977).

    6. Martha Stark, “Transformation of Relentless Hope: A Relational Approach to Sadomasochism,” lifespanlearn.org/documents/STARKtranform.pdf, April 2006. Dr. Stark, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in the contemporary relational tradition, teaches at Harvard Medical School.

    7. “Object” is the psychoanalytic term for a person in whom one is emotionally invested.

    8. Jan Abram, The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of Winnicott’s Use of Words (London: Karnac Books, 1966), 171. The other unthinkable anxieties are Going to Pieces, Falling Forever, and Having No Relation to the Body.

  6. The Man Who Could Not Love

    1. Sullivan, like Peter, was a gifted, abrasive loner, and his only friends growing up were the animals on his parents’ farm—which was more company than Peter had. Sullivan also coined the term “participant observer” to describe the analyst’s role.

    2. Heinz Kohut, the founder of self psychology, said that “analysis is always conducted on the front lines,” by which he meant that the deepest conflicts of both participants can be aroused at any time. There is a constant, unpredictable, unconscious dialogue. Hopefully, one’s own treatment—in my case, twenty-five years total with two different analysts—alerts you to the most critical pitfalls so that you can resolve them before they overwhelm the relationship. If it really feels unmanageable, you consult informally with friends and colleagues or, on rare occasions, pay a supervisor to advise you. I was all too painfully aware of what Peter provoked in me and why, which allowed me to repair the unavoidable rifts between us—the process through which I and many other analysts believe the most important work actually happens.

    3. Even though I was never trained in Sullivan’s approach to therapy, and his system and his style did not resonate for me, I was struck by how many of his concepts illuminated Peter’s predicament. I think this is partly because he resembled Peter in his personality; Sullivan was so adept at treating seriously disturbed patients that his colleagues said when he spoke with schizophrenics, they no longer sounded schizophrenic. He gave me hope, because he believed that if you made real contact with a patient, you could help him, no matter how bizarre or alien he seemed. M. Blechner, “The Gay Harry Stack Sullivan: Interactions Between His Life, Clinical Work, and Theory,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 41, no. 4 (2005).

    4. Howard Bacal and Lucyann Carlton, “Kohut’s Last Words on Analytic Cure and How We Hear Them Now—A View from Specificity Theory,” International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 5 (2010): 132–143.

  7. The Tantalizing Mentor and the Passionate Protégé

    1. I am not referring here to “mentoring” as the term is used in the corporate world. Important as these relationships are—and they often share some of the same qualities as classic mentor/protégé ties—they tend to be more circumscribed and not as potent or interwoven in the lives of both participants.

    2. Transference is an unconscious reexperiencing of intense emotional aspects of a childhood relationship, usually with a parent, in a current relationship. It occurs universally in psychotherapy—the therapist’s transference to the patient is called “countertransference”—and in virtually every other significant relationship throughout life. Projection is the unconscious attribution to another of one’s own, usually unacceptable, emotions or personality traits. The person onto whom projections are “beamed” is called the “projective screen.” Mentors and their protégés project their own positive as well as negative characteristics onto each other and experience both positive and negative transferences toward one another.

    3. This is my speculation, based on his behavior, the comments Helen’s colleagues made about Nate to her later on, and her own subliminal awareness at the time, which became clearer to her in retrospect.

    4. Kohut’s resonant phrase is “the gleam in the mother’s eye,” but of course this refers to either parent.

    5. She had also been her father’s patient.

  8. Traumatic Friendship

    1. Along with Heinz Kohut’s self psychology, the British object relations perspective is probably the most potent influence on contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. This approach is based on the premise that human beings do not develop in isolation and that their relations with their original “objects” (parents) and the meanings they attribute to these experiences create the self. From the very beginning, contrary to Freudian orthodoxy, the people we love influence every aspect of our lives; inner conflicts and drives are not simply projected onto the outside world. Hence, parent-child and sibling-sibling relationships are the template for all subsequent ties—for good and for ill. Freudian orthodoxy in its original form held that inner conflicts and drives are innate, that they unfold autonomously and are then projected onto other people whose special characteristics are essentially irrelevant.

    2. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Paraphrasing him, I also believe, for good or ill, that every seeking is a re-seeking.

    3. Harlow summarized his results in “The Nature of Love,” his 1958 presidential address to the American Psychological Association.

    4. Balint, who worked in Britain, was a disciple and patient of the remarkable analyst Sandor Ferenczi, a fellow Hungarian, one of the most gifted, empathic therapists of all time. Freud, whom Ferenczi revered even though he disagreed radically with him, was reputed to have said, “If you send a sick horse to Ferenczi, it will get well.”

  Balint elaborated on his mentor’s work with two unusual and influential books, Thrills and Regressions and The Basic Fault. He taught that therapy works by offering the patient “a new beginning,” an opportunity to repair fundamental deficits in the s
elf caused by damaged bonds with the original caretakers.

  9. Late First Marriage: The Triumph of Hope over Resignation

    1. It is particularly dismaying that this ghastly oft-quoted comparison was not in the original research on which the story was based (D. E. Bloom and N. G. Bennett, “Marriage Patterns in the United States,” Journal of Family Issues [April 1985]) but was intended as a joke inserted into the article by the woman who wrote it—a baby boomer herself—who claimed that she assumed nobody would take it seriously. Of course, people did, because it fit their own pessimistic assumptions. Follow-up has demolished these dismal statistics; 68 percent of women who were forty years old when the original story ran have since married. The magazine’s tardy and unapologetic recantation, “Rethinking the Marriage Crunch,” was published in 2006.

    2. As a psychologist, Ted was familiar with attachment theory, the perspective articulated by British psychiatrist/psychoanalyst and child development researcher John Bowlby (1907–1990). Bowlby studied the way children (and the adults they become) relate to those they love and need based on the level of security in their earliest relationships. Ted saw that he was a textbook case of a subtype of what Bowlby called “insecure attachment.” The insecurely attached have difficulty forming deep bonds because they had no consistent source of solace available when they were anxious as children. Of course, Bowlby had experienced intense separation anxiety and its aftermath in his own childhood.

  Bowlby was an iconoclast who demonstrated the centrality of human connections in development from the very beginning of life. He coined the term “separation anxiety” and defined four types of attachment styles: secure attachment; and three types of insecure attachment—anxious-ambivalent (Ted’s), anxious-avoidant, and disorganized. His seminal works are the trilogy Attachment (London: Hogarth, 1969), Separation (London: Hogarth, 1973), and Loss (London: Hogarth, 1980) and A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory (London: Routledge, 1988).