And that was the way he saw even a case so extreme: that here was a man for whom sexual release depended on inflicting terror and torture, a man who had, in effect, restrained himself except for those eight times, those eight acts of primal gratification—such a tiny fraction of the number that most adults seek and find.
“Ultimately,” Berlin went on, thinking about the period of the killings, “there was a man in there struggling to do right. He says he tried to talk himself out of leaving the house, fought with himself not to leave, so he wouldn’t kill. People want not to believe this. People can’t deal with the humanity within a man like Ross. He never wanted to be this kind of person. We can all say, ‘Well, he should have turned himself in.’ But people,” Berlin’s voice rose as he addressed an invisible outraged throng, “let’s take even something as simple as getting a traffic ticket. You don’t say to the policeman, ‘Oh, and by the way, I do speed frequently.’ And you don’t turn yourself in for something that will get you executed. What he would tell himself is, ‘I’m never going to do it again, and if I turn myself in it doesn’t bring back the people who are dead.’”
Berlin’s brown eyes glanced abruptly almost straight upward. Then he hunched forward, tight fists held half an inch from his lowered forehead. “I know this all must sound insane to the families of the victims, but to say that Michael Ross is evil just is not accurate, given my knowledge of sexual disorders and the impairment of both cognition and volition. Society can’t consider the complexity. You might read about a sexually sadistic serial killer, and the neighbors say, ‘Gee, we knew him, we can’t believe he’s someone who could do that. If you had a flat tire he was going to come over and help you change it.’ But the criminal behavior never was a reflection of the personality, the visible aspects of it—it was part of the privacy of the sexual makeup. You and I could sit next to each other, and I don’t ask you about your sexuality and you don’t ask me about mine, so if the only thing that makes me dangerous is what’s driving me sexually, you could be the next-door neighbor, you could be the wife, and never know. I had a patient, a serial rapist, who’d had a girlfriend he wanted to marry. But the urge to engage in coercive sex was so much stronger than the arousal by consenting sex that he would leave the consenting relationship to go out and engage in the coercive. And the girlfriend had no idea until he was arrested.”
On death row, with Berlin counseling and encouraging him, Ross had begun injections of Depo Lupron, an anti-androgen. For most patients, at a sufficient dose, the drug cuts the production of testosterone to the degree that desire is severely attenuated; the effect, though reversible if the drug is stopped, is known as chemical castration. Before taking “the medicine,” Berlin said, Ross was contrite about his crimes, but there was something robotic about his compunction. “He confessed everything, but he himself described that he knew how he should feel about what he’d done, and that the emotions simply wouldn’t well up inside. Intellectually he was sorry, intellectually he felt for the families, but he knew he should be overwhelmed.”
With the Lupron in his system, thwarted, compulsive lust was replaced by storms and floods of regret. It was as though desire, so rarely satisfied, had stymied everything else. Now, Berlin said, “He is no longer sitting in prison masturbating to fantasies about strangling someone.” The medication, in the psychiatrist’s mind, allowed the self to emerge, permitting Ross his own humanity. Sorrow drowned him. He couldn’t bear what he had done, couldn’t endure the thought of the mothers and fathers of the dead being put through more waiting, more testimony, more memory, so he had started the campaign to quicken his execution. With sex eliminated, Ross became who he truly was.
BERLIN seemed, at times, to see Ross’s new resolve as proof that sex and the self existed in opposition. Erotic desire wasn’t the essence of the self; eros wasn’t even essential to the self; Freud was far in the past. In expunging the libido, Lupron had liberated Ross’s very being, his soul, and granted him excruciating guilt and the expiation of choosing death. It was at once a medical and religious vision, and Berlin was both a medical and religious man. The paraphilias were diseases, almost surely rooted in biology. He felt that the treatment he often prescribed—Depo Lupron or another anti-androgen, Depo Provera—was horribly imprecise. “It’s a club,” he said. The anti-androgens bludgeoned the hormonal foundation of desire rather than addressing specific aberrance. But he believed that, for now, until the brain was better understood and more delicate drugs were found, there was frequently no other choice. And once the medication spread through the system, redemption came quickly. The sexual sadist could become—purely—the good Samaritan who helped to change flat tires, and Michael Ross could become a man seeking his own sacrifice, asking to die for what he’d done.
“I pray to a god I cannot see; I depend on a god who may not be,” Berlin said, smiling a bit sheepishly. He attributed the line to a patient from long in the past; he could not remember who. But the words had always stayed with him, and had become a credo of his own. The moment of uneasiness, as he acknowledged his measure of belief, seemed to arise from a feeling of unbelonging, an awareness that both the strictly religious and the devoutly scientific would scorn his statement of faith, the religious because he was far too tentative and the scientific because he depended on anything at all that was beyond the reach of proof and disproof. “I want there to be a higher power. I don’t see that as a threat or alternative to science. I’m not going to be able to find a god, but as a human being I yearn. I desperately would like to believe, but if I’m really honest with myself, I’m just hoping that he’s there.”
Berlin affirmed what he could, proved what he could. The most depraved people were moral beings. With the aid of medicine, God, through a patient like Michael Ross, nearly came into view. Berlin worked with a necrophiliac who had a job at a funeral parlor; he treated a gynecologist voyeur. He welcomed uncountable pedophiles and child molesters into his office, invited them to his group therapy sessions, offered them—calmly urged upon them—medication. These, the most reviled of sex offenders, were the majority of his patients. Testifying in the state legislature, he fought against a mandatory reporting law that would require psychiatric professionals to notify the police if patients who came for treatment voluntarily, with no record of sexual offenses, confided incidents of abuse. Berlin didn’t want a law that would deter the undetected from approaching him for help. In this way, he guarded his role as confessor, his ability to redeem, his immersion in the chaos of eros.
From that chaos he needed refuge. A huge and majestic saltwater aquarium was mounted in his office, dominating the room, the brilliant colors of the fish overwhelming the deep red of the antique furniture. A sea apple, like a purple and yellow balloon with white tentacles sprouting from the top, migrated slowly, searching for invisible particles of food. A surgeonfish, its blue scales set off by streaks of ebony, glided above pink coral. A yellow tang darted around a flaming red angel. Cow-fish, with their strange horns and broad gray bellies, hovered above a crab, a clam. “Even that clam has an existence there,” Berlin said, at once marveling at the thought of a clam’s reality and laughing at his own wonderment. “And that sea apple—he moves to the front of the tank, where he can get the best nutrition. I don’t know what in nonhumans constitutes a feeling or thought, but it would be very presumptuous of us to believe we’re the only living entities capable of having some sort of subjective existence. To watch something like that, that almost looks like a balloon, and to see that it makes purposeful movements and has a life, it makes you think, it makes you wonder, and I find it very relaxing and very fascinating.”
He liked simply to sit and stare into the tank, and to imagine a world of subjective experience that included no torment. He was mesmerized, too, by the compatibility of the underwater beings, the coral and crabs, the lone clam and all the species of fish. “Everything in there is alive, there’s nothing artificial, and there’s a symbiotic way in which they all survive together.
”
Within each creature, and for all of them combined, he perceived a tranquility denied to humans. “These species,” he added, “rarely mate in captivity.”
WHEN Jacob arrived, Berlin gave him the “Multiphasic Sex Inventory” and the “Million Clinical Multiaxial Inventory,” two long questionnaires designed to elicit a patient’s sexual preferences and his disorders of mind or mood. There were three hundred items on the sexual test, each requiring an answer of true or false: “Occasionally I think of things too bad to talk to others about…. I have exposed myself one hundred times…. It does not interest me to learn that a woman may not be wearing panties…. It would peak my interest to learn that a child is curious about sex…. I would like to be tied up and made to have sex.” And there were one hundred and seventy-five more on the multiaxial. With his labored reading, Jacob took several hours to get through. “I can remember one of the questions was about interest in animals,” he recalled. “And I’m thinking, What? That’s disgusting. That’s ridiculous. And then I thought, I’m a hypocrite.”
He felt a degree of comfort in Berlin’s mansion, partly because the façade bore no name, nothing to broadcast the perversions that brought people here; partly because he was now, for the first time in his life, ensconced within a world constructed for deviants like himself; and partly because he admired and trusted Berlin, though as Jacob struggled through the questionnaires the two men had scarcely talked. Jacob had formed an opinion based on the only thing he’d ever read about foot fetishism, a short article he’d come across in Psychology Today. The writer quoted Berlin saying that without attention to the feet the fetishist “usually can’t get aroused”—from these and a few other words, Jacob felt that the psychiatrist was able to stare into his soul. Soon he would think of Berlin “like a god.” And soon he would renounce going to synagogue, because he felt so betrayed by a god who could make him so alien. Berlin became his deity, soothingly Jewish, with a torah scroll sitting atop one of the bookcases in his office. The psychiatrist seemed all-knowing. He seemed unconditional in his forgiveness and sympathy. His mansion felt like Toronto, a haven.
Berlin reviewed the tests and called Jacob into his office to talk. Jacob showed him the copy he’d kept of the article from Psychology Today: an offering. The snow boots and socks and first memories of desire at the age of seven, the phone surveys taken sometimes several times in a day, the electric effect of the feet on the dashboard, the terror of late spring, the unendurable mortification—Jacob gave his history.
“I think I can help you,” Berlin said.
“You do?”
The doctor talked of a patient drawn to earlobes, assuring Jacob that he was not so strange. “I think I can help,” he repeated.
“I don’t,” Jacob said.
“I can’t cure you. I don’t want you to have false expectations, because this will always be there. But I can help.” Berlin explained the anti-androgens, their effect on the sex drive, on physical arousal, and, too, their side effects, the possibility of developing breasts, the chance that his bone structure would weaken and warp.
Jacob was too desperate to take pause. “You might be able to control the physical, but not the mental,” he insisted, trying not to hope, straining to protect himself against disappointment. “You can’t control my thoughts.” And it was his thoughts, as much as anything, that he wanted to purge. He wanted to poison their source in what felt like the center of his hideous being.
“You’re wrong,” Berlin said.
“I hope I’m wrong.”
“You are. There will be a difference mentally.”
Jacob thought, You’re full of crap. You don’t know how strong this is. He said, “I’ll do whatever you tell me to do. I’ll pay you whatever it is. I just can’t take this anymore, I just can’t be this way anymore. Just tell me what to do.”
“I’ve never met someone so agreeable.” Berlin laughed gently.
“Usually I have to fight with people.”
“You’re not going to have to fight with me.”
BERLIN hardly knew why he’d begun to steer, in college in the 1960s, from psychology to psychiatry—and toward a vision that focused on the biological, that saw nature as a more promising area than nurture in which to search for understanding of the sexual mind. He recalled learning, as an undergraduate, about a scientist who was altering drives like thirst by implanting electrodes in the brain, and he remembered studying the Heinrich Kluver and Paul Bucy experiment on the brains of monkeys: the surgical lesions inflicted on the monkeys’ temporal lobes, followed by the eruption of crazed sexual activity, not only with other monkeys but with an array of inanimate objects. And injury to the same region in the human brain could lead to the same sort of indiscriminate and unrestrained desire.
But in Berlin’s own telling, there was no moment, or series of moments, of decision or inspiration that had formed his vision. He didn’t seem to think in such terms. It was as though his way of seeing had happened to him for reasons impossible to know—exactly as he thought about the erotic directions of his patients. All the talk and introspection in the world couldn’t unbury the causes. When Jacob asked, during their first meeting, “Why am I like this?” Berlin answered, “It’s the way you’re wired.” When Jacob asked, at every meeting afterward, “Why? Why? I want an answer why. I need an answer why,” Berlin gave the same response, sometimes adding rhetorically, “Why are people gay?” When Jacob tried Berlin with a theory offered by his first therapist, that back in the second grade, frantic to avoid being called on because he couldn’t read, he’d kept his eyes on the floor, and that somehow, in those highly charged moments of yearning for escape, he’d started to eroticize his classmates’ feet, Berlin dismissed it.
And probably most in his field had grown doubtful of experiential explanations. But his sexologist colleague at Hopkins and at the mansion, Greg Lehne, told me that the link to Jacob’s second-grade classroom made “perfect sense. People’s sexual interests are very specific. Scientists now are inclined to look at genetic or prenatal issues, but why people become lovestruck at certain qualities, why we’re taken with a body type, or a shape of mouth or what a person’s nose looks like, or an aspect of warmth or a sadistic side—where do these interests come from? They must come through experience, through the senses.”
Lehne, with graying hair combed tightly back from a padded face, talked about how the prevalence of certain fetishes shifted with changes in the prevailing culture. Rubber fetishes had faded after the era of rubber training pants; hair fetishes had become less common as mothers and older sisters no longer made a ritual of letting down their tresses and brushing a prescribed number of times. It was impossible to quantify such shifts precisely, impossible to cite numbers for particular paraphilias, he said, but the changes could be traced by studying pornography and the hungers it catered to.
Lehne didn’t fully discount the genetic, the prenatal, but the physiology of the brain was, he suspected, profoundly affected by what the mind took in. He studied paraphilias as a way to peer in at the workings of all desire, and mostly he saw the directions of eros as learned, not inborn. “The lovemap cartographic system,” he had written, borrowing language from the legendary Hopkins psychologist John Money, “may operate like a multi-sensory camera that episodically takes photos of the immediate environment and stores them as depictions of the sexual terrain.”
A young married couple had led Berlin to his career in sex. When he’d been a general psychiatric resident-in-training at Hopkins in the mid-seventies, a husband and wife had walked onto his ward. The husband carried a wooden club, about a foot long, with a heavy chain attached to it. They told of a guillotine-like hole he’d cut in their bedroom door. No permanent injury had been inflicted yet, but his fantasies were brutal, and their fear, Berlin remembered, was that “this was about to get very out of hand. He was afraid he would kill his wife, and she was afraid it could happen. They were simple people. She wasn’t even sure how many couples
did or didn’t do this kind of thing.”
When he tried to discuss the case with his supervisors and fellow residents, Berlin ran into trouble. They seemed repelled by the subject, and Berlin was criticized merely for quoting the man’s crude language from his case notes, for reciting the phrase “jerk off.” Acutely he sensed the particular taint that attached itself, even amid a group of psychologists and psychiatrists, “to anyone who acknowledged something different about their sexual makeup.” He sensed a visceral unease with sex in general.
And hearing Berlin relate this story reminded me of an interview I’d done with a couples’ counselor in Manhattan. She told me that she and a group of colleagues spoke often about the fact that not only in individual but in marital counseling sex is frequently the last thing the therapist asks about—and that the subject may never be raised at all.
Berlin still kept the club the husband had turned over. It lay in a hulking antique safe in the basement of his mansion. He’d treated the man with an anti-androgen, and, he said, the patient reported that his sadistic fantasies had faded away but that he could still become erect and function sexually. It was a long time ago, and it was impossible to know to what extent this had been true. That anti-androgens could attack the sex drive in such a way as to neutralize a paraphilia while leaving some degree of conventional desire and potency intact was unusual but known to happen. Nothing about the brain’s and body’s system of arousal was understood well enough, then or now, to predict when it would. No one could explain it. Understanding of the forces of eros was as crude as the original comprehension of testosterone itself, a hundred and fifty years ago, when a German zoologist had snipped off the testes of young roosters and watched their bright red combs atrophy along with their interest in nearby hens. If he took the severed balls and implanted them in a rooster’s belly, all returned to normal, suggesting that the testes secreted a substance crucial to sexuality—a hormone that was discovered ninety years later by a Dutch scientist, who used almost a ton of bulls’ testicles in isolating less than a third of a gram of testosterone.
The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing Page 3