Love's Executioner (5 page)

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Authors: Irvin D. Yalom

Tags: #Psychology, #Movements, #Psychoanalysis, #Research & Methodology, #Emotions

BOOK: Love's Executioner
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“Tell me some more about Harry.” I was struck by the vehemence in Thelma’s voice when she said that Harry would kill Matthew if he knew about what had happened.
“I met Harry in the thirties when I was dancing professionally on the Continent. I’ve always lived for two things only: making love and dancing. I refused to stop dancing to have children, but I was forced to stop thirty-one years ago because I got gout in my large toe—not a good disease for a ballerina. As for love, when I was younger I had many, many lovers. You saw that picture of me—be honest, tell the truth, was I not beautiful?” She continued, without waiting for my response. “But once I married Harry, love was over. Very few men (though there were some) were brave enough to love me—everyone was terrified of Harry. And Harry gave up sex twenty years ago (he’s good at giving things up). We hardly ever touch now—probably my fault as much as his.”
I was about to ask about Harry being good at giving things up, but Thelma raced on. She wanted to talk, yet still without seeming to be talking to me. She gave no evidence of wanting a response from me. Her gaze was averted. Usually she looked upward, as though lost in recollection.
“The other thing I think about, but can’t talk about, is suicide. Sooner or later I know that I will do it, it’s the only way out. But I never breathe a word of this to Harry. It almost killed him when I attempted suicide. He suffered a small stroke and aged ten years right before my eyes. When, to my surprise, I woke up alive in the hospital, I did a lot of thinking about what I had done to my family. Then and there I made some resolutions.”
“What sort of resolutions?” No real need for my question, since Thelma had been on the verge of describing the resolutions, but I had to have some exchange with her. I was getting plenty of information, but we were not making contact. We might as well have been in separate rooms.
“I resolved never to say or do anything which could possibly cause Harry pain. I resolved to give him everything, to give in to him on every issue. He wants to build a new room for his exercise equipment—O. K. He wants Mexico for vacation—O.K. He wants to meet people at church socials—O.K.”
Noticing my quizzical look about church socials, Thelma explained, “For the last three years, ever since I knew I would eventually commit suicide, I haven’t wanted to meet anyone new. New friends only mean more farewells to say and more people to hurt.”
I have worked with many people who have truly tried to kill themselves; but usually their experience is in some way transformational, and they ripen into new maturity and new wisdom. A real confrontation with death usually causes one to question with real seriousness the goals and conduct of one’s life up to then. So also with those who confront death through a fatal illness: how many people have lamented, “What a pity I had to wait till now, when my body is riddled with cancer, to know how to live!” Yet Thelma was different. Rarely have I encountered anyone who came so close to death yet learned so little from it. Those resolutions she made when she regained consciousness after her overdose: Could she really believe that she would make Harry happy by rubber-stamping his every request and keeping her own wishes and thoughts concealed? And what could be worse for Harry than for his wife to cry last week and share nothing with him? This was a woman steeped in self-deception.
Her self-deception was particularly evident when she discussed Matthew. “He has a gentleness about him that touches the life of everyone who comes into contact with him. The secretaries all loved him. He said something caring to each of them, he knew all their children’s names, he brought in doughnuts for them three or four mornings a week. Whenever we went out during the twenty-seven days, he never failed to say something that would make the waiter or the store clerk feel good. Do you know anything about Buddhist meditation practice?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I—” But Thelma didn’t wait to hear the rest of my sentence.
“Then you know about ‘loving-kindness’ meditation. He did that twice a day and taught me the practice as well. That’s exactly why I would never, not in a hundred years, dream that he would treat me like this. His silence is killing me. Sometimes when I get deep into thought, I feel that it would not be possible for him—the person who taught me to be open—to devise a more terrible punishment than total silence. More and more these days”—here Thelma lowered her voice almost to a whisper—“I believe he is intentionally trying to drive me to suicide. Does that sound like a crazy thought?”
“I don’t know if it’s crazy, but it sounds like a desperate and terribly painful thought.”
“He’s trying to drive me to suicide. I’d be out of his hair for good. It’s the only possible explanation!”
“Yes, thinking that, you have still protected him all these years. Why?”
“Because, more than anything in the world, I want Matthew to think well of me. I don’t want to jeopardize my only chance for some kind of happiness!”
“But Thelma, it’s been
eight
years. You haven’t heard from him for
eight years!
”
“But there’s a chance—a small one. But a two-percent or even a one-percent chance is better than no chance at all. I don’t expect Matthew to love me again, I just want him to care about my being on this planet. It’s not too much to ask—when we walked in Golden Gate Park, he almost sprained his ankle trying to avoid disturbing an anthill. Surely he can send some of that loving-kindness my way!”
So much inconsistency, so much anger, almost mockery, standing cheek by jowl with such reverence. Though I was gradually entering her experiential world and growing accustomed to hyperbolic assessments of Matthew, I was truly staggered by her next comment.
“If he would call me once a year, talk to me for even five minutes, ask about me, show me his concern, then I could live happily. Is that too much to ask?”
Never had I encountered one person giving another more power. Imagine—she claimed that one five-minute phone call a year would cure her. I wondered whether it would. I remember thinking that if everything else failed, I wasn’t beyond trying to set up that experiment! I recognized that the chances for success in therapy were not good: Thelma’s self-deception, her lack of psychological mindedness, her resistance to introspection, her suicidality—all signalled, “Be careful!”
Yet her problem fascinated me. Her love obsession—what else could one call it?—was powerful and tenacious, having dominated eight years of her life. Still, the roots of the obsession seemed extraordinarily friable. A little effort, a little ingenuity should suffice to yank the whole weed out. And then? Underneath obsession, what would I find? Would I discover the brutal facts of human experience that the enchantment concealed? Then I might really learn something about the function of love. Medical researchers discovered, in the early days of nineteenth-century medical research, that the best way to understand the purpose of an endocrine organ is to remove it and observe the subsequent physiological functioning of the laboratory animal. Though I was chilled by the inhumaneness of my metaphor, I wondered:
Might not the same principle hold here
? So far it was apparent that Thelma’s love for Matthew was, in reality, something else—perhaps an escape, a shield against aging and isolation. There was little of Matthew in it, nor—if love is a caring, giving, need-free relationship—much love.
Other prognostic signs clamored for my attention, but I chose to ignore them. I could have, for example, given more serious consideration to Thelma’s
twenty years
of psychiatric care! When I was a student at the Johns Hopkins Psychiatric Clinic, the staff had many “back room” indices of chronicity. One of the most irreverent of these was poundage: the heavier the patient’s clinical chart, the worse the prognosis. Thelma would have been a seventy-year-old “ten pounder” at least, and no one, absolutely no one, would have recommended psychotherapy.
As I look back on my state of mind at that time, I realize that I simply rationalized away these concerns.
Twenty years of therapy? Well, the last eight can’t be counted as therapy because of Thelma’s secretiveness. No therapy has a chance if the patient conceals the main issues.
The ten years of therapy before Matthew? Well, that was a long time ago! Besides, most of her therapists were young trainees. Surely, I could offer her more. Thelma and Harry, with limited financial means, had never been able to afford to see anyone other than student therapists. But I was currently funded by a research institute to study the psychotherapy of the elderly and could see Thelma for a minimal fee. Surely this was an unusual opportunity for her to obtain therapy from an experienced clinician.
My real reasons for taking on Thelma lay elsewhere: first, I was fascinated by encountering a love obsession at once deeply rooted and in a vulnerable, exposed state, and I was not to be swayed from digging it out and investigating it; second, I was afflicted by what I now recognize as hubris—I belived that I could help any patient, that no one was beyond my skills. The pre-Socratics defined
hubris
as “insubordination to divine law”; I was insubordinate, of course, not to divine law but to natural law, the laws that govern the flow of events in my professional field. I think I had a premonition at the time that, before my work with Thelma was over, I would be called to account for hubris.
At the end of our second hour, I discussed a treatment contract with Thelma. She had made it clear that she would not commit herself to long-term treatment; and, besides, I thought that I should know within six months whether I could help her. So we agreed to meet once a week for six months (with the possibility of a six-month extension, if we thought it necessary). Her commitment was to attend regularly and to participate in a psychotherapy research project, which entailed a research interview and a battery of psychological tests to measure outcome, to be completed twice, at the beginning of therapy and six months after termination.
I took pains to inform her that therapy would undoubtedly be unsettling, and attempted to get her to promise to stick with it.
“Thelma, this continual rumination about Matthew—for shorthand, let’s call it an obsession——”
“Those twenty-seven days were a great gift,” she said, bristling. “That’s one of the reasons I haven’t talked about them to other therapists—I don’t want them to be treated as a disease.”
“No, Thelma, I’m not talking about eight years ago. I’m talking about now and about how you cannot live life because you continually replay past history over and over. I thought you came to see me because you wanted to stop tormenting yourself.”
She sighed, closed her eyes, and nodded. She had given me the warning she wanted, and now she leaned back in her chair.
“What I was going to say was that this obsession—let’s find a better word if
obsession
offends you——”
“No, it’s O.K. I understand what you’re saying now.”
“Well, this obsession has been a central part of your mind for eight years. It’ll be difficult to dislodge it. I’ll need to challenge some of your beliefs, and therapy might be stressful. I need your commitment to hang in there with me.”
“You have it. When I make a resolution, I never go back on it.”
“Also, Thelma, I can’t work well with a suicide threat hanging overhead. I need a solemn promise from you that for the next six months you will do nothing physically self-destructive. If you feel on the verge, call me. Phone me at any time and I’ll be there for you. But if you make any attempt—no matter how slight—then our contract is broken, and I will not continue to work with you. Often I put this down on paper and ask for a signature, but I respect your claim to always honor your resolutions.”
To my surprise, Thelma shook her head. “There is no way I can promise you this. I get into moods when I know it’s the only way out. I’m not going to close off this option.”
“I’m talking about the next six months only. I’m not asking for any longer commitment, but I won’t start without this. Do you want to think some more about it, Thelma, and we’ll schedule another meeting next week?”
She immediately became conciliatory. I don’t think she had expected me to take such a firm stand. Even though she gave no evidence of it, I believe she was relieved.
“I can’t wait another week. I want us to make a decision now and to start therapy right away. I’ll agree to do my best.”
“Do my best”—I didn’t feel that this was enough, yet hesitated to get into a control struggle so quickly. So I said nothing but simply raised my eyebrows.
After a minute or a minute and a half (a long silence in therapy), Thelma stood up, offered me her hand, and said, “You have my promise.”
Next week we commenced our work. I decided to maintain a sharp focus on relevant and immediate issues. Thelma had had sufficient time (twenty years of therapy!) to explore her developmental years; and the last thing I wanted to focus on were events dating back sixty years.
She was highly ambivalent about therapy: although she regarded it as her only hope, she never had a satisfying session. Over the first ten weeks I learned that, if we analyzed her feelings toward Matthew, her obsession tormented her for the next week. If, on the other hand, we explored other themes, even such important issues as her relationship with Harry, she considered the session a waste of time because we had ignored the major problem of Matthew.

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