Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (41 page)

Harry gestured to Susan, like an emcee turning over the stage to a guest.

“You’re contradicting yourself,” she said. “You said before you believe he really needs treatment.”

“I’m talking triage. We’ve turned away people on the verge of nervous breakdowns. And he’s boring. Even a mediocre therapist could help him.”

“Rafe!” Susan said, ringing Pavlov’s bell.

“Yes?” I answered dutifully.

“Do you really think his problem is boring?”

It didn’t take long to see through myself on that one. “No. Somehow he’s too close to me, to my unresolved father issues. He’s a simple case for anyone but me. You should be his doctor.
You
could help him.”

“Not better than you can. And what’s more,” Susan put her long-fingered hand on my arm. Her grip was both insistent and reassuring. “He can help you.”

C
HAPTER
T
WO
Defending the Ego

I
CANNOT RECONSTRUCT THE NEXT TWO MONTHS OF
G
ENE’S THERAPY
with the kind of exact details I’ve given of our first meeting. I took meticulous notes that night after discussing it with Susan and Harry, for one thing, and for another, my work with Gene proceeded typically for a while. Getting his history was an easy process. He was forthcoming. Even his denials and repressions were, from a therapist’s point of view, straightforward.

At first, what attracted my attention was the unusual emphasis, for those days, on the father as a caregiver. Gene’s mother was really the family’s main financial support. Perhaps this was about to change thanks to his father’s successful exhibition, but certainly during Gene’s childhood she had the steady job; his father, at least in Gene’s memory, was the comforter, the nursemaid and cook, the mother-object. Not that Carol reversed sexual or emotional roles with her husband or he with her: she was clearly feminine, he clearly masculine. Thus the Oedipal dynamic was in place: Gene vied all the more for his mother’s attention because her work made it precious. However, he didn’t have to strive hard. Once she came home, Gene’s father abandoned the field to his son, vanishing into his darkroom. This led to an emotionally incestuous intimacy between Gene and his mother, hitting the Object Relations school’s central button: improper separation from the mother. [I was already distrustful of diagnosis and treatment based on theoretical constructs. I had had success—admittedly little at that time—by keeping to the specifics of my patients’ lives. For Gene, whether Freud or Horney or Sullivan or Erikson or Mahler would have been able to fit him neatly into their systems, the drama was the rivalry both mother and son felt with the father’s photography. His problem, I believed, was that this drama was entirely performed in his unconscious, his role as thoroughly repressed as if he had been locked out of the theater before curtain.]

Gene drew this picture of his childhood: during the week he spent most of his free time with Daddy, on the carpentry jobs or in the park or at home; when he lost his father, it was not to the mother, but to photography. That distinction was clearly defined in Gene’s mind from the beginning and continued to this day. He was allowed on the carpentry jobs before he could walk; as an adolescent, he was still forbidden from his father’s darkroom. The reasons given masked the real meaning of the distinction for Gene, reasons he couldn’t argue with, namely the dangerous chemicals, the lack of space, the fact that darkness had to be maintained. His father was unwilling to allow Gene to play with his expensive camera or his lenses and Gene didn’t care for substitutes, such as a Polaroid they gave him for his sixth birthday. It was far easier to let him hammer a nail into a spare piece of wood than allow him to waste a roll of film. And, in my mind, there was also the possibility that Gene simply hadn’t inherited a feeling for photography. This last consideration is heresy to most psychological theories. Gene’s lack of interest in photography has to be emotional, a rejection based on psychodynamics, rather than a matter of personal taste. I was unwilling to make that assumption. After all, the untouchable cameras, the forbidden darkroom, the unsuccessful rivalry for his father’s attention when it came to photography, could just as easily produce a profound affinity for it, rather than indifference. My instincts told me that Gene merely happened to prefer carpentry to photography. There are natural gaps between people: that a gulf isn’t self-manufactured doesn’t make it any less potent for the psyche. Indeed, it might be more painful to feel an incapacity for something that is so beloved by the beloved.

I didn’t make an effort to uncover this conflict for weeks, allowing Gene to paint as complete a “neurotic” picture of his life as he liked. I began to probe only when he completed his distorted canvas. (His condition didn’t seem urgent: after two sessions, Gene reported his anxiety attacks had diminished and he finished the English and science projects, late, but soon enough to get “passes” from his teachers for the first term.) It was a month into the therapy before I asked a provocative question. Did Gene remember the first time he was forbidden to enter the darkroom?

There was the usual denial, typical not only of Gene, but most patients. He said he had no memory of the first time. Therapy’s conjuring trick—it never fails to amaze me—happened a session later. Gene came in with a clear recollection from age four, not of his father barring the darkroom’s door, but his mother. Evidently he had wandered in and she found him opening a toxic fluid. From then on she insisted his father lock the darkroom at all times.

“Mom always worries about me being safe,” he commented and continued with a long diversion about her overprotectiveness in general. Gene portrayed her as a cartoon of fearful motherhood. But none of his anecdotes showed her to be excessive or unusually nervous, except with respect to the father’s photographic equipment. I didn’t confront this illusion right away. I disagreed with Susan’s impatient methods, in spite of their success with me. Gene wasn’t a suicide lying in a ward. I agreed with Freud: Gene needed to unearth his feelings with his own hands. I asked repeatedly about these early memories: his mother’s injunctions against the darkroom; her shrieks if he touched one of his father’s cameras; her insistence that Gene not accompany his father when he went out to take photographs. I allowed Gene to walk past the truth blindly over and over and instead explain Carol’s guarding of his father’s art as overprotectiveness of Gene. This was obviously false. She made no objections to Gene using saws, hammers, drills and the like, all potentially dangerous. She allowed Gene to swim in rough surf when they visited friends at the beach, to take the subway to school alone at age nine, and many other minor freedoms that a neurotic mother would not permit—or a normal but careful mother, for that matter. Gene, however, could recite those contradictory facts and continue to insist his mother’s sole concern in making rules against entering the darkroom or touching the photographic equipment was to protect him.

“How about today?” I finally asked him. “Do you think your mother is still worried you’ll accidentally poison yourself?”

Gene was silent. He pushed his lips in and out—a persistent manifestation of resistance.

I waited. I trusted that Gene’s desire to please, or perhaps to get well, would eventually overcome these quiet rebellions. He was silent for a long time and then said, “What did you ask? I forgot.”

I repeated the question exactly.

He snorted, “No.” Then he mumbled, “Well … She’s worried I’ll mess something up and Dad’ll get angry.”

“What would happen if your father got angry?”

“What!” he said. Symptoms of alarm appeared: his right leg rose up, his head twisted to look in my direction, the expressive eyebrows lowered, his voice cracked. In our sessions so far, there had been no mention of anger from his father. I made a note of it, remembering Carol’s fear of her husband’s reaction to learning of the therapy. Until then I had assumed Carol barred Gene from contact with the photographer-husband out of rivalry, her own unresolved Oedipal conflict, since she wasn’t permitted in the darkroom either, or invited on picture-taking walks. Why should Gene be allowed to share in what she was denied? Maybe that was wrong. Maybe she was afraid that if Gene entered the forbidden darkroom, the father would hurt Gene. It could be she was shielding Gene from encountering a man she genuinely feared, preserving the fiction of the benign carpenter working in the light of day and banishing the dangerous artist to his lair.

“What would happen if your father got angry at you?” I asked again.

Gene remained frozen in his startled pose, hardly breathing.

“What’s your father’s name?” I asked. My instinct was: let’s make him a man. Let’s bring him into the room as a person, not an archetype.

[I was green when I treated Gene, making mistakes left and right. The above, however, is a foreshadowing of my later methods. How can we ask a patient to look realistically at his own life if we only mirror the distorted images of his neurosis? Susan was right to abandon the dogma of uncritical listening, although I think she was sometimes too quick to intervene. There’s a middle ground, a way of being neither a mirror nor a cop, but a signpost pointing to a new direction when the patient can see only the well-worn dead end.]

“Uh …” Gene’s right leg dropped. “Um …” He let out an embarrassed laugh. “I can’t think of anything but Daddy.”

“You can’t think of your father’s name?” I said gently.

“It’s crazy,” Gene said, wonderingly, impressed.

I made a note of this, learning something for myself, as well as about him. It may seem trivial to the reader, but I was struck by how this simple technique helped make Gene aware of his own awe, the mythic quality of his father.

Gene slapped the couch and the name came out: “Don. His name is Don.”

“People call him Don or Donny?”

“Donny?” Gene was amused. “No.”

“Don,” I said in a deep voice, giving the name grandeur and power.

Gene laughed again. “Yeah, right.”

“So what happens when Don gets angry?”

“Huh?” His leg went up again and he twisted his head. I waited. “Well, he gets angry,” Gene said, annoyed.

“Does he yell?”

“Of course he yells.” Then silence.

“Does he curse?”

“Curse?” I waited. “Yeah, he uses bad words.”

Bad words, indeed. “What bad words?”

Gene snorted. “You know …” His legs moved up and down. He shifted his torso also, squirming. He wanted out of this: it was so much more comfortable in his fantasy of a mother protecting him from dangerous chemicals.

“Tell me anyway.”

“He says—shit.”

“That’s it?”

“You know.” Gene moaned. He turned toward the back of the couch, hiding.

“Does it embarrass you to repeat them?”

No answer. I waited. Gene talked to the cushions in a monotone, “He says, shit, fuck, motherfucker, asshole.”

“To you?”

“Not often.” Gene’s voice was low. “He says it more to himself. ‘I’m an asshole,’ he says. ‘That motherfucker wants me to fail.’ Dad thinks his friends want him to fail. He always—”

“What does he say to
you
when he’s angry at you?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“How is that stupid?”

“No. He says to me, ‘Don’t be stupid.’” Gene didn’t laugh at my mistake. Am I feeling stupid? I wondered. Pay closer attention, I wrote in my notes.

“Does he call you a motherfucker?” I asked. Talk about a loaded question, I thought to myself.

“No,” Gene said. “He once called me a stupid shit.”

“What about?”

“Huh?”

“When did he call you a stupid shit?”

“I don’t remember when. I was a kid. I don’t know how old.”

The resistance was, for Gene, quite strong. “I mean, what provoked Don to call you a stupid shit?”

“Oh. I dropped a box of nails in an elevator.” At last Gene shifted onto his back, no longer speaking to the cushions. “You know, an open one in a loft building. They all spilled down to the bottom.” Gene wasn’t happy about this memory, of course, but there didn’t seem to be much tension. His legs had relaxed, his face was smooth. I noted that the incident recalled involved the good father, the loving carpenter.

[With some amusement, I see now, looking over my notes from that session, that I jotted down: “Good father—Jesus. Photographer—Satan?” Since Gene’s father was raised Catholic and his mother Episcopalian, presumably I was considering the symbolic quality of the good father as carpenter. I hope professionals will forgive me for my disorganized and pretentious thinking—I was twenty-five after all.]

“Did Don
get angry
at you about handling his camera or being in his darkroom?”

“No way.” Gene’s defensive annoyance had returned. He brought up both legs and hugged his knees.

“Why not?”

Gene yawned. More tension. He let go of his legs and they flopped on the couch. “I never touched him.”

“Him?”

“Them. I never touched them.”

“You said, him.”

“No, I didn’t.”

To this day the beauty of a Freudian slip never fails to amaze and delight. I feel it’s his most elegant and profound observation. If that had been Freud’s only accomplishment he would deserve to be honored. Gene never touched
him,
the photographer, the real father hidden in his darkroom.

“What do you think would have happened if you had touched Don’s camera?”

“He would have told me to leave it alone.”

“Leave it alone?”

“Not touch it.” Gene was angry. His tone was grim, and he was fidgeting, rubbing his face, feet restless.

“Has your mother ever touched his camera?”

“No,” Gene said.

“Never?”

Gene shook his head. “She’s scared shell break them.”

“So he’s never gotten angry at her either?”

“He gets angry at her. Just not about his stuff. We don’t mess with it.”

I was ready to wind this down. There was so much material here, including the phallic implications, it was pathetic and almost funny. Gene and his mother abandoned every night by Don, disappearing with his long lenses that they couldn’t “touch” into a darkroom with toxic fluids, living in so much fear of his anger if they intruded that neither dared to test it. Besides, Gene had had enough of this troubling exploration. He was exhausted and still resisted mightily. He had done plenty of digging for one session. I tried what I thought—here with a beautifully unconscious move of my own—was a safe way out for both of us.