Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy

by Irvin D. Yalom

  Every once in a while I looked up and saw Paul’s eves riveted on me, taking in my every reaction, signaling me to go on reading. But, finally, when I saw there were only ten minutes left, I closed the folder and firmly took charge.

  “Paul, we’ve little time left, and I have several things I want to discuss with you. I’m uncomfortable because we’re coming to the end of our session, and I’ve not really addressed the very reason you contacted me—your major complaint, your writing block.”

  “I never said that.”

  “But in your email to me you said . . . here, I have it printed out . . . ” I opened my folder, but before I could locate it, Paul responded:

  “I know my words: ‘I would like a consultation. I’ve read your novel, When Nietzsche Wept, and wonder if you’d be willing to see a fellow writer with a writing block.’”

  I looked up at him expecting a grin, but he was entirely serious. He had said he had a writing block but had not explicitly labeled it as the problem for which he wanted help. It was a word trap, and I fought back irritation at being trifled with. “I’m accustomed to helping folks with problems. That’s what therapists do. So one can easily see why I made that assumption.”

  “I understand entirely.”

  “Well then, let’s make a fresh start. Tell me, how can I be of help to you?”

  “Your reflections on the correspondence?”

  “Can you be more explicit? It would help me frame my comments.”

  “Any and every observation would be most helpful to me.”

  “All right.” I opened the notebook and flipped through the pages. “As you know, I had time to read only a small portion, but overall I was captivated by it, Paul, and found it brimming with intelligence and erudition at the highest level. I was struck by the shift in roles. At first you were the student and he the teacher. But obviously you were a very special student, and within a few months this young student and this renowned professor corresponded as equals. There was no doubt he had the greatest respect for your comments and your judgments. He admired your prose, valued your critique of his work, and I can only imagine that the time and energy he gave to you must have far exceeded what he could possibly have provided the typical student. And, of course, given that the correspondence continued long after your tenure as a student, there is no doubt that you and he were immensely important to one another.”

  I looked at Paul. He sat motionless, his eyes filling with tears, eagerly drinking in all that I said, obviously thirsting for yet more. Finally, finally, we had had an encounter. Finally, I had given him something. I could bear witness to an event of extraordinary importance to Paul. I, and I alone, could testify that a great man deemed Paul Andrews to be significant. But the great man had died years ago, and Paul had now grown too frail to bear this fact alone. He needed a witness, someone of stature, and I had been selected to fill that role. Yes, I had no doubt of this. This explanation had the aroma of truth.

  Now to convey some of these thoughts that would be of value to Paul. As I looked back on all my many insights and at the few minutes remaining to us, I was uncertain where to begin and ultimately decided to start with the most obvious: “Paul, what struck me most strongly about your correspondence was the intensity and the tenderness of the bond between you and Professor Mueller. It struck me as a deep love. His death must have been terrible for you. I wonder if that painful loss still lingers and that is the reason you desired a consultation. What do you think?”

  Paul did not answer. Instead he held out his hand for the manuscript, and I returned it to him. He opened his briefcase, packed the binder of correspondence away, and zippered it shut.

  “Am I right, Paul?”

  “I desired a consultation with you because I desired it. And now I’ve had the consultation, and I obtained precisely what I wished for. You’ve been helpful, exceedingly helpful. I expected nothing less. Thank you.”

  “Before you leave, Paul, one more moment, please. I’ve always found it important to understand what helps. Could you expound for a moment on what you received from me? I believe that some greater clarification of this will serve you well in the future, and might be useful for me and my future clients.”

  “Irv, I regret having to leave you with so many riddles, but I’m afraid our time is up.” He tottered as he tried to rise. I reached out and grabbed his elbow to steady him. Then he straightened himself, reached to shake my hand, and, with an invigorated gait, strode out of my office.

  ~ 2 ~

  On Being Real

  Charles, a personable business executive, had the right stuff behind him: a sterling education at Andover, Harvard, and Harvard Business School; a grandfather and father who were successful bankers; and a mother who was head of the board of trustees of an eminent women’s college. And the right stuff around him: a San Francisco condo with a panoramic view from Golden Gate to the Bay Bridge; a lovely, socially prominent wife; a mid-six-figure salary; and a Jaguar XKE Convertible. And all of this at the advanced age of thirty-seven.

  Yet he had no right stuff inside. Choked by self-doubts, recriminations, and guilt, Charles always perspired when he saw a police car on the highway. “Free-floating guilt searching for a sin—that’s me,” he joked. Moreover his dreams were relentlessly self-denigrating: he saw himself with large weeping wounds, cowering in a cellar or cave; he was a low-life, a lout, a criminal, a fake. But even as he demeaned himself in dreams, his quirky sense of humor shone through.

  “I was waiting in a group of people who were auditioning for a role in a film,” he told me, describing a dream in one of our early sessions. “I waited my turn and then performed my lines quite well. Sure enough, the director called me back from the waiting area and complimented me. He then asked about my previous film roles, and I told him I had never acted in a film. He slammed his hands on the table, stood up, and shouted as he walked out, ‘You’re no actor. You’re impersonating an actor.’ I ran after him shouting, ‘If you impersonate an actor, you are an actor.’ But he kept on walking and was now far in the distance. I screamed as loudly as I could, ‘Actors impersonate people. That’s what actors do!’ But it was pointless. He had vanished, and I was alone.”

  Charles’s insecurity seemed fixed and unaffected by any sign of worthiness. All positive things—accomplishments, promotions, and messages of love from wife, children, and friends; great feedback from clients or employees—passed quickly through him like water through a sieve. Even though we had, in my view, a good working relationship, he persisted in believing that I was impatient or bored with him. I once commented that he had holes in his pockets, and that phrase resonated so much that he repeated it often during our work. After hours of examining the sources of his self-contempt and scrutinizing all the usual suspects—lackluster IQ and SAT scores, failure to fight the elementary school bully, adolescent acne, awkwardness on the dance floor, occasional premature ejaculations, worries about the small size of his penis—we eventually arrived at the primal source of darkness.

  “Everything bad began,” Charles told me, “one morning when I was eight years old. My father, an Olympic sailor, set out on a gray windy day on his regular morning sail in a small boat from Bar Harbor, Maine, and never returned. That day is fixed in my mind: the horrendous family vigil, the growing angry storm, my mother’s relentless pacing, our calls to friends and Coast Guard, our fixation on the telephone resting on the kitchen table with a red-checkered tablecloth, and our growing fear of the shrieking wind as nightfall approached. And worst of all was my mother’s wailing early the next morning when the Coast Guard phoned with the news that they had found his empty boat floating upside down. My father’s body was never found.”

  Tears streamed down Charles’s cheeks, and emotion choked his voice as if the event had happened yesterday, rather than twenty-eight years ago. “That was the end of the good days, the end of my father’s warm bear hugs and our games of h
orseshoes and Chinese checkers and Monopoly. I think I realized at the time that nothing would ever be the same.”

  Charles’s mother mourned the rest of her life, and no one ever came along to replace his father. In his view, he became his own parent. Yes, being a self-made person had its good points: self-creation can be powerfully reaffirming. But it is lonely work, and often, in the dead of night, Charles ached for the warm hearth that had grown cold so long ago.

  A year ago, at a charity event, Charles met James Perry, a high-tech entrepreneur. The two became friendly, and after several meetings, James offered Charles an attractive executive position in his new start-up. James, twenty years older, possessed the Silicon Valley golden touch, and though he had accumulated a vast fortune, he could not, as he put it, get out of the game, so he continued to launch new companies. Although their relationship—friends, employer and employee, mentor and protégé—was complex, Charles and James negotiated it with grace. Their work required considerable travel, but whenever they were both in town, they never failed to meet at the end of the day for drinks and conversation. They talked about everything: the company, the competition, new products, personnel problems, their families, investments, current movies, vacation plans, whatever crossed their minds. Charles cherished those intimate meetings.

  It was then, soon after meeting James, that Charles first contacted me. Paradoxical though it might seem to seek therapy during a halcyon time of nurture and mentorship, there was a ready explanation. The caring and fathering he received from James stoked Charles’s memory of his father’s death and made him more aware of what he had missed.

  During our fourth month of therapy, Charles called to request an urgent meeting. He appeared in my office with an ashen face. Walking slowly to his chair and lowering himself carefully, he managed to utter two words, “He’s dead.”

  “Charles, what happened?”

  “James is dead. Massive stroke. Instant death. His widow told me she’d had a dinner meeting with her board and came home to find him slumped in a living room chair. Christ, he hadn’t even been sick! Totally, totally unexpected.”

  “How awful. What a shock this must be for you.”

  “How to describe it? I can’t find the words. He was such a good man, so kind to me. I was so privileged to know him. I knew it! I knew all the while it was too good to last! Boy, I really feel for his wife and kids.”

  “And I feel for you.”

  Over the next two weeks Charles and I met two to three times a week. He couldn’t work, slept poorly, and wept often during our sessions. Again and again he expressed his respect for Perry and his deep gratitude for the time they had shared. The pain of past losses resurfaced, not only for his father but also his mother, now three years and one month dead. And for Michael, a childhood friend who died in the seventh grade, and for Cliff, a camp counselor, who died of a ruptured aneurism. Over and again Charles spoke of shock.

  “Let’s investigate your shock,” I suggested. “What are its ingredients?”

  “Death is always a shock.”

  “Keep going. Tell me about it.”

  “It’s self-evident.”

  “Put it into words.”

  “Snap, life is gone. Just like that. There’s no place to hide. There’s no such thing as safety. Transiency . . . life is transient . . . I knew that. . . . Who doesn’t? But I never thought much about it. Never wanted to think about it. But James’s death makes me think of it. Forces me to, all the time. He was older, and I knew he’d die before me. It’s just making me face things.”

  “Say more. What things?”

  “About my own life. About my death that lies ahead. About the permanence of death. About being dead forever. Somehow that thought, being dead forever, has gotten stuck in my mind. Oh, I envy my Catholic friends and their afterlife stuff. I wish I could buy into that.” He took a deep breath and looked up at me. “So that’s what I’ve been thinking about. And also lots of questions about what’s really important.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “I think about the pointlessness of spending all my life at work and of making more money than I need. I’ve got enough now, but I keep on going. Just like James. I feel sad about the way I’ve lived. I could’ve been a better husband, a better father. Thank God there’s still time.”

  Thank God there’s still time. I welcomed that thought. I’ve known many who have managed to respond to grief in this positive fashion. The confrontation with the brute facts of life awakened them and catalyzed some major life changes. It looked as though that might be true for Charles, and I hoped to help him take that direction.

  About three weeks after James Perry’s death, however, Charles entered my office in a highly agitated state. He was breathing fast, and to calm himself, he put his hand to his chest and exhaled deeply as he slowly sank into his seat.

  “I’m really glad we’re meeting today. If we hadn’t had this time scheduled, I probably would have phoned last night. I’ve just had one of the biggest shocks of my life.”

  “What happened?”

  “Margot Perry, James’s widow, phoned me yesterday to invite me over because she had something she wanted to talk about. I visited her last evening and . . . well, I’ll get right to the point. Here’s what she said: ‘I didn’t want to tell you this, Charles, but too many people know now, and I’d rather you hear it from me than from someone else. James did not die from a stroke. He committed suicide.’ And since then I can’t see straight. The world’s turned upside down.”

  “How terrible for you! Tell me all that’s going on inside.”

  “So much. A cyclone of feelings. It’s hard to track.”

  “Start anywhere.”

  “Well, one of the first things that flashed in my mind is that if he can commit suicide, then so can I. I can’t explain this any further except that I knew him so well and we were so close and he was like me and I was like him and, if he could do that, if he could kill himself, then I can too. That possibility shook the hell out of me. Don’t worry—I’m not suicidal—but the thought lingers. If he could, then so can I. Death, suicide: they aren’t abstract thoughts. Not any longer. They’re real. And why? Why did he kill himself? I’ll never find out. His wife is clueless, or pretends to be. She said she was totally caught by surprise. I’ll have to get used to never knowing.”

  “Keep going, Charles. Tell me everything.”

  “The world is upside down. I don’t know what’s real anymore. He was so strong, so capable, so supportive of me. So caring, so thoughtful, and yet, think about it, at the same time he was making a cozy nest for me, he must have been so agonized he didn’t want to exist any longer. What’s real? What can you believe? All those times he was giving me support, giving me loving advice, at the same time he must have been contemplating killing himself. You see what I mean? Those wonderful blissful times when he and I sat talking, those intimate moments we shared—well, now I know those times didn’t exist. I felt connected, I shared everything, but it was a one-man show. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t blissful. He was thinking of offing himself. I don’t know what’s real anymore. I’ve fabricated my reality.”

  “How about this reality? This room? You and me? The way we are together?”

  “I don’t know what to trust, who to trust. There’s no such thing as a ‘we.’ I’m truly alone. I doubt very much that you and I are experiencing the same thing this very moment, right now as we speak.”

  “I want us to be a ‘we’ as much as possible. There’s always an unbridgeable gap between two people, but I want to make that gap as small as possible here in this room.”

  “But Irv, I’m only guessing what you think and feel. And look how wrong I was about James. I guessed we were doing a duet, but it was a solo number. I’ve no doubt I’m doing the same here, guessing wrong about you.” Charles hesitated and then suddenly asked, “What are you thinking
right now?”

  Twenty or thirty years ago such a question would have truly rattled me. But as I’ve matured as a therapist, I’ve grown to trust my unconscious to behave in a professionally responsible manner, and I know full well that it is not so much what I say about my thoughts that is important but rather that I am willing to express them. So I said the first thing that came into my mind.

  “My thought at the moment you asked that question was very odd. It was something I saw recently posted on an anonymous website for secrets. It read, ‘I work at Starbucks and when customers are rude I give them decaf.’”

  Charles looked up at me, stunned, and then suddenly erupted into laughter. “What? What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You asked what I was thinking, and that’s what popped into my mind: that everyone has secrets. Let me try to track it. That train of thought started a couple of minutes earlier, when you spoke of the nature of reality and how you fabricate it. And then I started thinking of how right you are. Reality is not just something out there but something each of us constructs, or fabricates, to a significant degree. Then, for a moment—bear with me; you asked what I was thinking—I thought of the German philosopher, Kant, and how he taught us that the structure of our minds actively influences the nature of the reality we experience. And then I started thinking of all the deep secrets I’ve heard over my half century of practice as a therapist and reflecting that, however much we crave to merge with another, there will always remain distance. Then I started to think of how your experience of the color red or the taste of coffee and my experience of ‘red’ and ‘coffee’ will be very different in ways we can never really know. Coffee—that’s it; that’s the link to the Starbucks secret. But sorry, sorry Charles, I’m afraid I’m wandering far from where you may be.”

  “No, no, not at all.”

  “Tell me what passed through your mind as I spoke.”

  “I thought, ‘Right on.’ I like your speaking like this. I like your sharing your thoughts.”