The Dream of The Broken Horses

by William Bayer

  This analytic dilemma was made all the more acute by the possibility that real harm could come upon Mrs. F on account of her risky engagements-back-to-back affairs with a naive, young man disarmed by her guile, and an insanely jealous lover with underworld connections and a reputation for violence. And I

  *19 At this point, it would be disingenuous not to mention certain difficult countertransference issues that arose in the course of this analysis. Mrs. F, it should be remembered, was a woman of stunning attractiveness with well-honed and well-practiced techniques of seduction at her command. Though I, an experienced analyst, understood exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it, I nevertheless felt it incumbent to seek special counseling from my former training analyst in order to forestall reactions on my part that could hinder the analysis of this anguished and highly vulnerable patient.

  I recommend such counseling to colleagues who find themselves facing a similar dilemma. The stresses of such situations, normal analytic techniques may be insufficient to deflect the patient's fantasies, and the strain upon the analyst's professional demeanor, not to mention his/her ego, can be crushingly intense.

  For me to have yielded in any fashion to her campaign (and it truly was a campaign, waged by her the way a military commander marshals resources while waging war) would not only have vitiated any gains made during the analysis, but also would likely have served to hasten the breakdown toward which this astonishing patient appeared to be heading. She was spinning her web around me the way the predatory black widow spider spins a web about its sexual mate, with the purpose of luring me into an affair or even a single sexual act that would ‘break’ me just as it had broken the unfortunate Dr. L. Such breaking, I believed, was akin to the ‘breaking’ of the horses in her dream. had to take seriously my own role should a tragedy occur: that her provocation (i.e., taking on T as a lover), though clearly directed at me, might also provoke C into a violent response.*20

  For these reasons, I decided to embark upon a new approach.*21

  At our next session, anticipating the usual sexual provocations, I told Mrs. F, the moment she lay down on the couch, that I'd been thinking of her a great deal lately and not only in an analytic way.

  "Perhaps," I told her, "my regard for you is not so cool as you think."

  At this, just as anticipated, she twisted around so she could meet my eyes. “God! What are you telling me?” she asked.

  "Look, we've agreed you've been trying to seduce me. I'm telling you that you've succeeded. Consider me seduced. Think of me dreaming about you, getting horny thinking of you, masturbating with you in mind. Think about that. How does that make you feel?"

  Still staring at me, she started to blink. Clearly I'd taken her by surprise. “Well, I don't know,” she said. “I mean… how should I feel?”

  "Victorious?"

  “A little maybe.”

  "Satisfied?"

  “We'd have to make love for me to feel that.”

  "Ambushed?"

  “Yes,” she smiled, “a little.” She peered at me. “Are you putting me on, or is this for real?”

  "Sounds like you're confused."

  “Yes… yes I'm confused,” she admitted.

  At this point, I urged her to assume her normal position on the couch. We were, I reminded her, still in session and our exchanges were part of her therapy.

  “Doesn't sound very orthodox to me,” she opined.

  I told her that even in so rigorous a discipline as psychoanalysis, extraordinary situations may require extraordinary methods. I'd decided, I told her, to depart from normative technique because I felt hat was the best way to access the unconscious processes inherent in her dream.

  "What I want you to do," I told her, "is to imagine you've been successful, that I've been thoroughly seduced. With that as a given, I'm hopeful you'll dispense with further efforts along those lines and proceed into fresh territory, territory that may by truly fearful but which for your own good we must

  *20 As I put it to my former training analyst: To what extent was I obliged to step out of my role as analyst and directly warn Mrs. F of the danger she was courting?

  The answer was not so obvious. By stepping out of my analytic role, I could, by that single stroke, dismantle the entire substructure of the analysis. But by maintaining ‘analytic distance,’ I might not only be acquiescing but also contributing toward a possible tragic denouement.

  Left with such a difficult choice, I set upon a course of action (see following) that, though unorthodox in the extreme, I believed was the only course open to me in what I considered to be urgent circumstances. Having received counseling against this course from my most respected colleague, I undertook it nonetheless and take full responsibility for all its consequences, foreseen and unforeseen.

  I raise the matter here not as a mea culpa nor to anticipate criticism of my handling of the case, but simply to suggest the complexities that may arise in an analysis in which the transference / countertransference phenomenon reaches proportions beyond the normal range.

  *21 My first step was to quickly determine whether Mrs. F was telling the truth, whether, in fact, she really was conducting two simultaneous affairs or whether this was a fantasy or a claim contrived to arouse me. Though I believed her story was real, I needed to know for certain in order to evaluate the hazards inherent in her situation.

  Using information she'd given me, I staked out the motel where she'd told me, she and T met for their afternoon rendezvous. (I hope colleagues will forgive my use of a word normally associated with detective fiction; in fact, as Freud himself pointed out numerous times, much of what we do in our profession is akin to detective work.)

  While doing this, I was careful not to be seen, well aware of the risks both to my professional reputation and to the analysis itself. Confirming by sight that indeed she was meeting T at the motel, I put my plan into play. explore.

  “Okay, I get it now,” she said. “It's like a game, isn't it?”

  "What's your fantasy about us?" I asked.

  “Oh, Doctor, we're being prurient again!” she said. But launching into her sex fantasy, she quickly gave up her sarcastic tone as highly charged descriptions of the most lascivious acts spewed from her mouth.

  I won't record the whole gamut here. In our practices, many of us have experienced similar onslaughts. Of course what was important was not the particular content of Mrs. F's fantasies but the fact that she was finally able to let loose with them in a manner at odds with all her earlier braggadocio. Now, at last, with her feelings out of control, she was involved in true associative work. She was, so to speak, ‘clearing the air,’ or, perhaps better put, cleaning the cobwebs from her id. When, finally, she stopped, it was clear this outpouring had been cathartic. Her forehead was moist, her blouse was soaked, her body was trembling on the couch.

  “Guess what, Doctor?” she said. “I think I've… well, can you believe it? I've been touching myself all this time while I've been talking and… I believe I've had… an orgasm.”

  By this latest display, Mrs. F, it seemed, had, at least in her own mind, successfully trumped my new approach to her treatment. But I quickly countered with a ploy of my own, which, I admit, under the duress of her provocation, I improvised on the spot. I told her: "What you've just done is try to sabotage our

  At this point, in mid-sentence, Dad's draft case study suddenly breaks off.

  10

  "It's all in the final footnotes, David. His madness is in those footnotes."

  Dr. Isadore Mendoza gazes at me intently. We're sitting in the living room of his house on Taschen Drive, a house he and his late wife built in the 1950s, one of only a dozen private residences designed by Eric Lindstrom, Calista's famous mid-century architect.

  Izzy, as my father called him, is eighty now. His hair still hangs across his forehead, but now the bangs are white, giving him the appearance of a Roman senator. His blue eyes sparkle fire no less than on those evenings when he and Mrs.
Mendoza would come to our house for Sunday dinner. Founder of the Calista Psychoanalytic Institute, he had been my father's mentor and training analyst.

  "Of course Tom had Freud's The Case of the Wolfman in mind," Izzy continues, "the most famous case study in psychoanalytic literature. He believed that with Mrs. Fulraine he'd latched onto a case of equal importance that would propel him into the top rank of our profession. Was that grandiose? I think so… though the case was certainly interesting. I told him as gently as I could that I thought his draft was promising, but his enormous countertransference problems were standing in his way. I loved him as a son. I wanted desperately to help. But I believe he was beyond any kind of help I could give.

  After Mrs. Fulraine was killed, he completely fell apart, fell into a deep depression."

  As Izzy peers at me, I detect traces of an old grief. Perplexity too, for even after so many years he still hasn't reconciled himself to Dad's suicide.

  I wrote him, as I did to my old art teacher, Hilda Tucker, to say I'd be back in Calista over the summer and hoped he'd find time to meet with me and talk. Izzy answered right away. He remembered me well, he wrote, was sorry to hear of my mother's passing. My father, he wrote, had been his most promising protege, the man he'd hoped would build upon his legacy.

  Izzy's gaze is kindly. "You look so much like him, David. Uncannily so. Even your gestures and the way you hold your head. I understand why you changed your name, but to me you'll always be Tom Rubin's boy."

  There's only one piece of art in the room. It hangs above the fireplace: a large black and white etching of six wolves' heads peering out of the branches of a tree, with the words "The Wolfman's Dream" inscribed across the bottom in brilliant red.

  As we talk, my eyes keep wandering to this picture. What is it, I wonder, about the Wolfman Case that so intrigued Dad? Izzy notes my interest.

  "The etching's by Jim Dine, a gift from colleagues when I gave up directorship of the Institute. Perhaps you know that the patient Freud called The Wolfman made his own sketch of the wolves he saw in his famous dream. Here Dine reinterprets that vision, matching, I think, the artistry one finds in Freud's case study. Freud, of course, wrote many great papers, but in certain ways for us in the profession, The Case of the Wolfman is the holy grail." Izzy pauses. "How arrogant of Tom to think his analysis of Mrs. Fulraine could match such a dazzling penetration."

  Izzy, I know, is a generous man. And he truly loved Dad as he said. But in his last remark, he shows his ambivalence. Dad, it seemed, had overreached, dared to fly too close to the sun, and so he had fallen – literally, in fact, from the window of his office into a snow-covered doctor's parking lot below.

  "Let me tell you about that dream," Izzy says. "Tom thought he had it figured out. You probably saw where he was heading – toward a father/infant daughter seduction interpretation. As a child, Mrs. Fulraine was sexually touched by her father. Her ‘Dream of the Broken Horses’ was a vision of that trauma triggered by a deep sense of guilt and loss brought on by her own daughter's abduction. Tom felt that a good interpretation along those lines would help her overcome her erotomania. I had my own ideas. I still remember Tom coming to me after their first session. He was so excited. ‘Izzy, this is what I've been waiting for my entire professional life, a multilayered dream with rich erotic content that cries out to be solved and written up.’"

  Izzy smiles. "Of course, I encouraged him. No question he'd lucked into a glamorous patient. So many of our patients are tiresome. Listening to their drivel three and four hours a week – you can imagine what a drain that is. Now, of course, there aren't enough patients, with psychoanalysis so out of fashion."

  Izzy's sharp eyes tear up. His voice, soothing till now, starts to break.

  "For all Tom's hopes, things didn't work out. He had this screwy idea he should ‘enter in,’ step inside her neurosis, work on it from the interior. He wasn't the first to try a move like that. But before you attempt something so extreme, you must closely examine your motives. Are you in love with the patient? In lust with her? Has she so entranced you that you're looking to therapeutically justify an affair? If she hadn't been murdered – God knows how it might have ended!"

  He excuses himself, returns with two bottles of German beer, then suggests we sit outside.

  His garden is subtly beautiful, a medley of muted greens and grays. A lively creek, winding through the property, creates a soothing sound. We sit on an old wooden bench, stick out our legs, and listen to the water running over smooth stones.

  The garden, he tells me, was crucial to Lindstrom's concept for the house.

  "I explained how my work involved me in turmoil. ‘Give me a safe haven,’ I said, ‘a place to escape from other peoples' craziness.’ Lindstrom liked that. It was a way to create a contrast to the clean, sharp lines of the building."

  He turns to me. "Martha loved this place. That final summer, when she knew she was dying, she'd have me wheel her out here, then we'd sit for hours just listening to the water."

  I remember Martha Mendoza, a quiet, sad-eyed lady, a talented art weaver who'd had several successful shows in New York. We had one of her strange, dark yarn sculptures hanging in our house.

  "Listen, David, you have every right to look into your father's life. But I must advise you that the deeper you delve, the greater the possibility you'll become upset and depressed. So… as long as you're aware…"

  I assure him I am.

  "Well, then, I'll tell you what I know. As I said, Tom was devastated when Mrs. Fulraine was killed. In his paper, he tells us proudly how he parried her seductions. In fact, I believe, he was seduced. It was the most sever case of countertransference reaction I'd ever seen."

  Izzy shakes his head. "He knew what was happening. At first he tried to convince himself it was just sex. She aroused him – simple as that. But it was so much more. He wanted her, needed her, lived for their sessions. When he came to me for help and I put him back on the couch, he told me his fantasy: that he'd solve her dream, show her how she could be happy, then, after a decent interval, divorce your mother and marry her. They'd become this great romantic couple, the rich girl and the shrink who'd cured her. I told him that was pretty much the story Scott Fitzgerald had written in Tender Is the Night, except the marriage in that novel turns out badly and in the end the shrink finds himself used up and destroyed."

  Izzy takes a deep breath. "Then something happened, a clue to what she was up to. There was this columnist-"

  "Waldo Channing?"

  Izzy nods. "Nasty man, but he could turn a phrase. One day that summer Channing ran what they call a blind item. Knowing you were coming today, I dug it out."

  He pulls a yellowed clipping from his breast pocket, puts on his glasses, reads the item out loud:

  "‘A little birdie tells us a certain well-known divorcee, one of Our Happy Few, has lately been making whoopee-do with her shrink. We know those weird guys use couches and get their patients to yap about sex, but this is the first we've heard of one getting down and dirty in the office. Guess all that sex talk can stir the bodily juices… so to speak.’"

  Listening, I'm struck by Channing's viciousness.

  Izzy takes a sip of beer. "It hit Tom and your mother very hard. The giveaway was Channing's ‘Happy Few.’ Since his crowd consisted of a couple dozen people, it was obvious whom he meant. So was Tom making ‘whoopee-do’ with the lady? I asked him point-blank. That's when he told me she'd masturbated in his office. ‘For God's sake,’ I told him, ‘you've got to get out of this! She's unstable. She'll end up suing you for malpractice!’

  "Tom assured me that wouldn't happen, that he and Barbara were on the verge of a breakthrough." Izzy shakes his head. "For me it was clear. The woman was malicious. Her relationship with the gangster was part and parcel of her fantasy that she was some kind of femme fatale in a real-life film noir. Most likely she'd planted the item with Channing. Now she was pulling Tom into her vortex, and he was so besotted he didn't see it. ‘She
'll destroy you,’ I told him. ‘That column item's just a taste. Turn her over to someone else. If you like, I'll take her on myself.’

  "Tom, I can tell you, was not at all happy to hear that. This was going to be his Great Case, and he wasn't turning it over to anybody, least of all me." Izzy looks at me. "You know about the condom?"

  I shake my head.

  Izzy gives me a quick glance. Over the last weeks of her life, Mrs. Fulraine received a number of enveloped addressed in block capitals. No writing inside, just artifacts, including, in one case, a condom."

  I stare at him. "In what condition? I mean, was-?"

  "-it used?" Izzy shrugs. "It was filled with some sort of substance, then tied off at the top. Today, of course, with DNA testing, a semen sample, if indeed it was semen, would make powerful forensic evidence. But it was the sequence of those envelopes that was so disturbing, the ascending expression of rage. To Tom it looked like a cleverly contrived campaign of intimidation and terror."

  "That's so vile! Why didn't Mrs. Fulraine go to the cops?"

  "Tom urged her to, but she refused. She told him she believed the letters came from someone with whom she'd had a major falling out, that they were some sort of complex message about her daughter, money, and sex. I didn't believe that. I thought it was much too pat. I suggested to Tom that the letters were bogus, that she may have sent them to herself. He insisted tat wasn't true, too adamantly, I thought. Then I wondered if Tom had gone off the deep end and sent them to her himself."

  "Why? What could he have gained?"