Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (37 page)

I nodded.

Susan shut my folder and dropped it to the floor. She put her elbows on her knees and leaned close. I got a clear look at her eyes. They were a muddy brown and too small for her big face. They were also, although she looked boldly at me, somehow shy. “Here’s my problem. I have all this history about you and yet I haven’t heard it from you. I don’t really know if I should get your history again, assuming you’ll talk to me, or whether I should violate my training and tell you that, unfortunately, I’ve already reached a conclusion about you, maybe even a wrong conclusion, and that I’m interested in your story, very interested, and I want to talk to you although I think I’m too prejudiced to work with you.”

I groaned. “What are you talking about?” I croaked.

“You sound hoarse. Want something to drink?” I nodded. She poured a cup of water from supplies on the night table, put a straw in it and held it to my lips. When I was satisfied, she said, “I’ll just say it. I think you like being a victim. I think you like feeling guilty. From reading your letter, it seems as though you, not your parents, not your uncle, not the world, but
you
are responsible for everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me you think you started the war.”

Very quickly we were having a fight whose tone was an intimate argument between equals. Susan brought up the events in Tampa and Spain, insisting I was a child and had no responsibility for my actions, my inactions, my thoughts, or my desires. She didn’t touch the subject of incest, one way or another, whether it was fantasy or truth. I objected, throwing at her Dr. Halston’s (I thought they were mine) insights about my memories being projected fantasies from my id.

She finally cut me off. “What crap. Look. Did you get those Cubans to attack your mother?”

“No—”

“Did you make your father go to Cuba and desert her?”

“No—”

“Did you make your mother go crazy?”

“No—”

“What did you
do,
actually do, that was wrong?”

“I told you. I lied about my father.”

“Oh yeah, right.”

We had been talking forever it seemed to me. “Isn’t our time up?” I asked. My head hurt worse than ever, arguing with my arms literally tied was intensely frustrating.

She laughed. “Listen, I’m so out of the textbooks, stuff like that is beside the point. I told you. I can’t work with you. I’ve got all kinds of problems with your way of seeing things. Here’s what I mean. You told Dr. Halston you lied about your father because you were angry that he had left you and your mother?”

I nodded.

“So why did you go away with him in the first place?”

I had no answer, but I was sure that was because I felt ill and tired.

“Were you happy to go with him to Spain?”

I nodded.

“How come?”

“I loved him!”

“But you were so angry at him you lied and made him an exile from his own country? So why did you go in the first place?”

“I was testing him. Or really, testing myself, seeing if I could suppress my murderous impulses toward him.”

“You’re saying it was an elaborate plan of a frustrated ten-year-old’s ego? Not just a scared little boy who was glad to see and be with his Daddy?”

“Go away,” I said.

“You see. You’re losing this argument. That’s another thing about you. You don’t like to lose. You expect to win at everything. You think you can take care of everyone, fool everyone, and when you can’t, you don’t think you have a right to live. It makes me very angry.” To my amazement, she actually shook her fist at me, then released her grip and ran the hand through her tangled, dull brown hair, the same muddy color of her eyes. One mass of it was left stranded in the air as though a breeze were blowing, although the room was hot, its air stale. “I can’t treat you. Lookit, I know why you lied about your father. I’m supposed to lead you to it gradually, but you probably know that.”

I nodded.

“You say in your letter after Halston began treatment you read many books on psychology?”

“I read some.”

“Some. I bet you read plenty. So you know the technique?”

I nodded.

“You know why I think you did that?”

I shut my eyes.

“So you could win, so you could defeat Halston, even if winning meant beating yourself.”

I opened my eyes. She was right. I hadn’t liked being surprised about the Brown Bonnet. I smiled.

“But you’re not so smart. You know why? Because nobody is. Not even Freud. You aren’t smart enough to figure out why you testified against your father.”

I felt odd. For the first time, a little scared. What was there to be scared of? I was dead, really. I was furious and unhappy to be alive, but what could scare me?

“Think about it. What changed from when you arrived in Spain to when you decided to leave? What was new? It’s right here.” She tapped the folder, still on the floor, with her foot. “It’s not in your letter, it’s in Halston’s family history. Under the heading of siblings. It’s important to know, as I’m sure you found out from your reading, it’s important to know if a patient is an only child, and also what order.”

I stopped thinking. I shut my eyes and saw nothing, no past, present or future. I prayed for her to leave.

“Do you have a half-brother or a half-sister?”

I opened my eyes. The room was glazed pink for a moment before clearing to its hospital fluorescence.

“You don’t know and neither does Halston. Okay,” she bent over, got the folder, and stood up, straightening her white smock. “I’m going. But ask yourself, who did you send into exile? Your father or that sibling?”

The horror for me, at this revelation, was that I had forgotten completely about Carmelita’s pregnancy. Until Susan mentioned it, I would have said I was an only child. And, more shocking than that, I wanted to argue about it. I wanted to say: How do we know that child was ever born?

Susan moved toward the door and then, apparently irritated beyond all reason, turned back. “You blame yourself for all the world’s problems. You make yourself into the greatest villain in the history of the world, full of terrible feelings and fantasies. But the one, perfectly natural, unpleasant feeling, your sibling rivalry,
that,
oh no, not that, that you don’t remember, that you don’t even notice.” If someone had come in they might have assumed, from her passion and my passivity, that she was the patient and I the doctor. “You’re not a terrible person, Rafe. You’re not so great either. Here’s the awful secret, the thing you’ve been keeping even from yourself: you’re just like everybody else and there’s no escape from that. Not even suicide.” She waited for this to sink in and then she laughed. “I should be defrocked,” she said and walked out.

I was ready for her when she appeared next, late the following morning, bringing my lunch.

“You’re lying,” I said, while she maneuvered the tray’s legs so the boiled chicken, peas and mashed potatoes would levitate above my chest.

She untied my right hand and offered the spoon. I took it. “No kidding. What about?”

“You
do
think you can treat me. That’s just a lame trick.”

“No, you’re wrong.” She pushed the left side of her messy hair out and it stayed there again, signaling for something. A cab? A hairdresser? She was big and odd, like a clown. “I told them today to assign somebody else. You’ll be seeing Dr. Blaustein this afternoon. He’s very good.”

“You’re lying,” I said, my mouth full of peas. One of them fell onto my neck.

“That’s why I’m here. To tell you I’m out. Didn’t want you to think it had anything to do with our talk yesterday. It’s not your fault. You’ve read about countertransference, haven’t you?”

I shook my head no. She explained it. That the doctor’s personality and history could interact harmfully with the patient flabbergasted me. I ate less and less while she expounded on this theme.

“Well,” she said, standing up. “I’ll call the nurse and she’ll clear your meal. You know,” she moved to the other side of the bed and untied my other hand, “I don’t think we need these restraints.” She looked at me with an encouraging smile, her head hanging low between her broad shoulders. Her hunched posture was another habit born out of self-consciousness about her height.

“Do you think Halston did a bad job with me?”

“Horrendous,” she said with utter conviction. I had no idea at the time how outrageous this statement was, a complete violation of ethics and sensible procedure. It was also, I believe, a brilliant stroke, the very quality that makes Susan a gifted therapist. “And, on top of that, since he had treated your mother, he should never have treated you. There’s no excuse for it.”

“Why? Because she killed herself?”

“No. Because he wasn’t listening
to you,
only to you. He had heard another side. He had years of impressions and judgments about key events in your life that hadn’t come from you. There was no way for him to give what you told him proper weight. He was prejudiced before you walked into his office. And there was the relationship to your uncle, to someone who had given him so much money. He couldn’t be open to receive your signals without a lot of interference.”

I must have fallen into a trance thinking hard back to every session, every exchange with Halston. I was startled when Susan said, “What are you thinking?”

She had sat down again, elbows on her knees, hair still askew, peering at me with her small, shy and yet intent eyes.

“I’m thinking something you won’t like,” I said.

“Big deal.”

“Big deal?”

“Lookit. You gotta do me a favor.” She straightened, locking her fingers together, and stretching her long skinny arms. “You gotta stop paying attention to what everybody else thinks.” Done with her body-yawn, she sat up, head back, allowing herself to be tall. “You’re carrying too big a load. To hell with what the rest of us think. So—what were
you
thinking?”

“I was thinking, if Halston was a bad doctor, why didn’t I see it?”

Susan smiled. “Beautiful. He does a bad job and it’s your fault. You know what that is? That’s pride. Yeah, I know, you think it’s modesty, you think it’s being tough-minded, hard on yourself. It’s grandiose. You were upset and confused. You were vulnerable. You didn’t have a chance in hell with Halston. No one would.” Susan shook her fist at me. “Don’t you get it? You’re a kid. You’ve been nothing but a kid your whole life. You haven’t had a chance with any of these people, from your mother to your uncle. Yeah, yeah, I know. You’re smart.” She gestured to the dismal room, the barred window, my untied restraints. From the hall I heard the almost perpetual moan of a seventeen-year-old schizophrenic. “Look where it’s got you.”

I felt like crying. My head was still broken by the drugs and everything hurt, keenly, unrelentingly. “Please,” I said. Susan leaned forward and said softly, “What?”

“Please. I need you to be my …” I was about to sob so I stopped, shut my eyes, forced the emotion down, and sighed. When I opened them, Susan was rubbing her forehead. The violence of her motion left streaks on her flat brow. She was uneasy. “Please help me,” I finished the thought.

Susan stared at me solemnly. I pleaded for rescue with my eyes. I was no longer sure what I had turned my back on. What had I wanted to die to avoid? There were double images for everything: my mother the lunatic, my mother the prophet; my uncle the barbaric king, my uncle the lonely patriarch; my father the revolutionary, my father the coward; my nation, the richest and most free, my nation, greedy and murderous. Was there really a different truth, a life I had lived and never known?

Susan looked down at the backs of her hands. Like the rest of her, they were long and bony. She turned them over, as if studying her palms. She had parted the index and middle fingers from the ring and pinky, making V’s, the silly and mysterious Cohen sign. She closed and opened them like scissors and glanced at me.

She looked surprised. “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

“Do you know what my name means?” I said.

She looked confused.

“My name,” I said. “It’s a promise from God.”

Postscript

D
R.
B
RACKEN’S WORK WITH ME AS A PATIENT TOOK TWO YEARS.
T
HE
reader does not need to go through the laborious, frustrating and often confusing process of the reconstruction of the facts, feelings, fantasies and truth of my past that was Susan’s difficult job, a job she did, I think it’s fair to say, brilliantly. The narrative account you have read was what we discovered in our work. Susan used many unconventional techniques, including having me do research to confirm certain memories.

My uncle was patient and faithful to his guardianship of me. He paid for all that help. To be sure, he was often angry with me and for a time seemed to be permanently disappointed about my prospects. Susan got me back in school by the following term and, although I was not the compulsive student I had been, I did concentrate on the sciences. My uncle wasn’t thrilled that I chose psychiatry as my discipline, but he understood, as I assume anyone would, why I felt obliged to devote myself to the imperfect science that, finally, in the hands of a talented practitioner, had saved me. Susan helped me understand the danger of my illusions. I chose psychology knowing I was not a genius and that I could not rescue the world, but I confess I embarked on my career with the hope that I might return, in a small way, the gift of peace and forgiveness granted to me by all the men and women who had dared to attempt an answer to these child-like questions: Who are we? Why do we do what we do? And—most naive and beautiful of all—can we change?

P
ART
T
WO

Gene Kenny:
A Case History

C
HAPTER
O
NE
Countertransference