Lying on the Couch (15 page)

"Not 'seen' her, Paul; I was her therapist. And it was ten years ago.

"Ten years, then. Because she was a member of your group for a few sessions ten years ago—a goddamned half-generation ago—you can't have a different relationship with her now. She's probably sex-starved, and the best thing you could have offered her was your cock."

"C'mon Paul, be serious. . . . Waiter! More focaccia, olive oil, and Chianti, please."

"I am serious," Paul continued. "You know the reason you never get laid? Ambivalence. An ocean, large ocean, of ambiva-

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lence. It's a different reason every time. With Myrna you were afraid she'd fall in love with you and get permanently hurt. With what's-her-name last month you were afraid she'd catch on that you were only interested in her big boobs and she'd feel used. With Marcie you were afraid one romp in bed with you would destroy her marriage. The lyrics are different but the music is always the same: the lady admires you, you act nobly, you don't get laid, the lady respects you even more, and then she goes home to bed with her vibrator."

"I can't turn it on and off. I can't be a paragon of responsibility during the day and join a gang-bang line at night."

"Gang-bang line? Listen to yourself! You can't believe that there are plenty of women as interested in casual sexual release as we are. All I'm saying is that you've worked yourself into a corner of pious horniness. You take so much 'therapeutic' responsibility for every woman, you won't give them what they might really want."

Paul's point struck home. In a curious way it was a close cousin to what Marshal had been saying for years: don't usurp everyone else's personal responsibihty. Don't aspire to be the universal breast. If you want people to grow, help them learn to become their own mother and father. Despite Paul's misanthropic crotchetiness, his insights were invariably incisive and creative.

"Paul, I don't exactly see you ministering to the needs of sexually deprived female pilgrims."

"But you don't see me complaining. I'm not the one who's being led around by his pecker. Not anymore—and I don't miss it. Aging isn't all bad. I've just finished an ode to 'gonadal tranquillity.'"

"Yuck! 'Gonadal tranquillity!' I can just see it inscribed on the tympanum of your mausoleum."

''Tympanumf Good word, Ernest." Paul jotted it down on his napkin and stuffed it in the pocket of his checkered flannel shirt. He had begun writing poetry to accompany each of his pieces of sculpture and collected arresting words. "But I'm not dead, just tranquil. Pacific. I'm also not the one who's running away from stuff tossed in my lap. That one in the bookstore who wants some shrink sex? Send her up to me. I guarantee I won't excavate some excuse not to lay her. Tell her she can count on a man both enlightened and engorged.

"I was serious about introducing you to Irene, that neat woman I met through the personal ads. Are you really interested?"

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"Just so long as she's grateful for what she gets, doesn't nosy around my house, and drives back home the same night. She can squeeze anything she wants as long as it's not orange juice in the morning."

Ernest looked up from his minestrone to engage Paul's smile. But there was no smile. Just Paul's magnified eyes peering through his thick spectacles. "Paul, we're going to have to deal with this—you're drifting into terminal misanthropy. Another year and you'll have moved into a mountain cave with a picture of Saint Jerome on the wall."

"Saint Anthony, you mean. Saint Jerome lived in the desert and consorted with beggars. I detest beggars. And what do you have against caves?"

"Not much, just insects, cold, dampness, darkness, cavernous-ness—oh, hell, this is too big a project for tonight, especially with no cooperation from the afflicted one."

The waiter approached, weighted down with Ernest's entree. "Let me guess who gets what. The osso bucco, fagioline, and side order of gnocci al pesto must go to you?" he asked, playfully putting it in front of Paul. "And you," turning to Ernest, "you're gonna love these cold dry vegetables."

Ernest laughed. "Too much zucchini—I can't eat all that!" He switched plates and dug in. "Talk to me seriously about my patient Justin," he said between mouthfuls, "and the direction I'm getting from Marshal. This is really agitating me, Paul. On the one hand, Marshal seems to know what he's doing—I mean, after all, there's a corpus of real knowledge in this business. The science of psychotherapy is almost a hundred years old. ..."

"Science? Are you kidding? Shit, about as scientific as alchemy. Maybe less!"

"Okay. The art of therapy ..." Ernest noted Paul's frown and tried to correct himself. "Oh, you know what I mean—the field, the endeavor—what I mean is that for a hundred years there have been a lot of bright people in this field. Freud was no slouch intellectually, you know—not many to match him. And all these analysts spending decades, thousands, tens of thousands, of hours listening to patients. That's Marshal's point: that it would be the height of arrogance to ignore all they have learned, to simply make it all up anew, to make it up as I go along."

Paul shook his head. "Don't accept this crap that listening invariably

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begets knowledge. There are such things as undiscipHned listening, as the concretization of error, as selective inattention, as self-fulfilling prophecies, as unconsciously prompting the patient to give you the material you want to hear. You want to do something interesting? Go to the library stacks, pick up a nineteenth-century text on hydrotherapy—not a historical overview but the original text. I've seen texts of a thousand pages with the most precise instructions—^you know, water temperature, length of immersion, force of spray, proper sequence of heat and cold—and all calibrated for each specific kind of diagnosis. Very impressive, very quantitative, very scientific—but it doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with reality. So I'm not impressed with 'tradition,' and you shouldn't be either. The other day some enneagram expert responded to a challenge by claiming that the enneagram had its roots in ancient sacred Sufi texts. As though that meant it should be taken seriously. All it probably meant, and he didn't appreciate my telling him so, was that at a bull session a long, long time ago some camel drivers, sitting on heaps of dried camel dung, poked their camel prods in the sand and drew diagrams of the personality."

"Strange—I wonder why he didn't appreciate that," said Ernest, as he wiped up the last of the pesto sauce with a hunk of focaccia.

Paul went on. "I know what you're thinking—terminal misanthropy, especially about experts. Did I tell you my New Year's resolution? To piss off an expert every day! This posturing of experts, it's all a charade. The truth is we often don't know what the fuck we're doing. Why not be real, why not admit it, why not be a human being with your patient?

"Have I ever told you," Paul continued, "about my analysis in Zurich? I saw a Dr. Feifer, an old-timer, who had been a close associate of Jung. Talk about therapist self-disclosure! This guy would tell me his dreams, especially if a dream involved me or even remotely involved some theme even remotely relevant to my therapy. You read Jung's Memories, Dreams and Reflections^'

Ernest nodded. "Yeah, bizarre book. Dishonest, too."

"Dishonest? Dishonest how? Put that on the agenda for next month. But, for now, do you remember his comments about the wounded healer?"

"That only the wounded healer can truly heal?"

"The old bird went further than that. He said the ideal therapeutic situation occurred when the patient brought the perfect plaster for the therapist's wound."

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"The patient ministers to the therapist's wound?" asked Ernest.

"Exactly! Just imagine the impUcations of that! It blows your fucking mind! And whatever else you think of Jung, Christ knows he was no dummy. Not in Freud's class, but close. Well, many of Jung's early circle took that idea quite literally and worked on their own issues as they arose in therapy. So not only did my analyst tell me his dreams; he went into some very personal material in his interpretations of them, including at one time his homosexual yearnings for me. I almost bolted from his office right then. I found out later he wasn't really interested in my hairy ass—he was too busy screwing two of his female patients."

"Learned that from the doyen, I'm sure," said Ernest.

"No doubt. Old Jung had no compunctions about hitting on his female patients. Those early analysts were absolutely predatory, almost every single one of them. Otto Rank was screwing Anai's Nin, Jung was screwing Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff, and Ernest Jones screwed everybody, had to leave at least two cities because of sexual scandal. And of course, Ferenczi had trouble keeping his hands off his patients. About the only one who didn't was Freud himself."

"Probably because he was too busy sticking it to Minna, his sister-in-law."

"No, I don't think so," Paul replied. "No real evidence for that. I think Freud had a premature arrival into gonadal tranquillity."

"Obviously you've got as strong feehngs as I do about preying on female patients. So how come you were on my case, a few minutes ago, when I told you about the ex-patient I met in the bookstore?"

"You know what that scene reminded me of? My orthodox Uncle Morris, who kept so kosher he wouldn't eat a cheese sandwich in a nonkosher sandwich shop: he feared it might have been cut with a knife that had previously cut a ham sandwich. There's responsibility and then there's fanaticism masquerading as responsibility. Hell, I remember our social hours at Hopkins with the student nurses: without fail you'd get out of there quickly and run back to your novel, or else go after the homeliest one there. Remember Mathilda Shore—we called her 'Mathilda Shorething'? That's who you'd pick! And that gorgeous one who used to follow you around, you avoided her like the plague. What was her name?"

"Betsy. She looked fragile as hell and, what's more, her boyfriend was a police detective."

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"See, that's what I mean! FragiHty, boyfriend—Ernest, those are her problems, not yours. Who appointed you world therapist laureate? But let me finish telling you about this Dr. Feifer. On several occasions he used to change chairs with me."

"Change chairs?"

"Literally. Sometimes right in the middle of the hour he'd get up and suggest that I sit in his chair and he in mine. He might start talking about his personal difficulties with the problem I was discussing. Or he might disclose some strong countertransference and work on it on the spot."

"This part of the Jungian canon?"

"In a way, yes. I've heard that Jung did some experimentation with this in collaboration with a strange bird named Otto Gross."

"Anything written on this?"

"Not sure. I know Ferenczi and Jung talked about changing chairs and experimented with it. I'm not even sure who got it from whom."

"So what did your analyst disclose to you? Give me an example."

"The one I remember best had to do with my being Jewish. Though he personally was not anti-Semitic, his father was a Swiss Nazi sympathizer and he carried a lot of shame about that. He told me that was his main reason for marrying a Jewish woman."

"And how'd it affect your analysis?"

"Well, look at me! Have you ever seen anyone more integrated?"

"Right. A couple more years with him and you'd have bricked up the entrance to your cave by now! Seriously, Paul, what did it do?"

"You know how difficult attribution is, but my best reading is that his disclosure never hurt the process. Generally it helped. It freed me up, allowed me to trust him. Remember that in Baltimore I saw three or four cold fish analysts and never went back for a second session."

"I was a lot more compliant than you. Olivia Smithers was the first analyst I saw, and I stuck with her for about six hundred hours. She was a training analyst, so I figured she's got to know what she's doing and if I didn't get it, then it was my problem. Big mistake. I wish I had those six hundred hours back. She shared nothing about herself. We never had an honest moment between us."

"Well, I don't want to give you the wrong idea about my relationship with Feifer. Revealing a la Suisse doesn't necessarily mean

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real. For the most part, he didn't relate to me. His self-revelation was punctated. He didn't look at me, sat about ten feet away, and then suddenly he'd snap open like a Jack-in-the-box and tell me how much he wanted to decapitate his father or fuck his sister. Then the next minute he'd snap back to his stiff, arrogant persona."

"I'm more interested in the ongoing realness of the relationship," said Ernest. "Think about that session I told you about with Justin. He's got to have realized that I was piqued at him, that I was being petty. Look at the paradox I put him in: first, I tell him the purpose of my therapy is to improve his mode of relating to others. Second, I try to form an authentic relationship with him. Third, along comes a situation in which he perceives, quite accurately, some problematic aspect of our relationship. Now I ask you, if I deny his accurate view, what else can you call it but antitherapy?"

"Jesus, Ernest, don't you think you might be perseverating on one minuscule event in the history of humankind? Do you know how many patients I saw today? Twenty-two! And that's with stopping early to drive down here. Give this guy a little Prozac and see him fifteen minutes every other week. You really think he'd be worse off?"

"Dammit, forget that, Paul, we've been through that discussion. Stay with me this one time."

"Well, just do it, then. Run the experiment; change chairs during the session and be a total truth teller. Start tomorrow. You say you see him three times a week. You want to wean him from you, to de-idealize you, so show him some of your limitations. What would the risks be?"

"Probably few risks with Justin, except that after so many years, he'd be bewildered by a radical change in technique. Idealization is tenacious. It might even backfire—knowing Justin, he'd probably idealize me even more for being so honest."