The Dream of the Broken Horses (23 page)

Yes, she told him, she remembered. "That was our turning point," she said. He agreed it had been and that he was sorry for any sorrow he may have caused her. He told her that, yes, he did like young women, found them beautiful, and that he knew he'd been wrong to touch them the way he had, and that he was grateful to her for having warned him off this admittedly unattractive practice. "I owe you a great deal for that," G said, "and yet there's something else I'd ask you to do for me." When she asked him what that was, he told her he would appreciate it very much if she would slap him hard once again.

She was astonished by his request, excited by it, too. "You really want that?" she asked. He said he did, that he needed it as a reminder to behave himself. Though she would be gone, he told her, he would still be instructing young girls, thus he wanted to carry the sting of her slap as a memory. She let him plead a while, then agreed.

"Again," she said, "I pulled back my arm and hit him as hard as I could. I was bigger then, stronger, able to hit much harder. In fact, I hit him so hard that this time he reeled back."

Again she felt the same slick warmth below, but much more powerfully than when she was fourteen. She was eighteen years old then, knew she was a beauty, had confidence, poise, was a fully sexual being. And this time G reacted differently. He fell to his knees before her, lowered his head, and slavishly kissed the uppers of her tall, black riding boots. Studying him as he did, she felt a great surge of power. She reached down, placed her fingers in G's hair, pulled his head toward her crotch. At this, he gently pulled down her jodhpurs, buried his head in her groin, and performed cunnilingus upon her. "I came within seconds," she said. It was the first time she'd ever had oral sex with a man. After her orgasm, she pushed him away, buttoned up her riding pants, and told him she had to go. Her last image of G was of him still on his knees, bent over, head turned toward the tack room floor. She never saw him again. {Various bits in this narrative, not recounted here, strongly suggest the possibility that G and Mrs. F's mother had an affair in the past and that Mrs. F somehow understood this.}

During the winter term of her first year in college, she received news of her father's death. He was training a horse while drunk, fell off, and suffered a mortal head injury. She was greatly upset by this news and went into what she termed "a deep depression."

Coming out of it that spring, she began a succession of brief sexual affairs with boys. Most were one or two-night stands, others continued for several weeks. She wanted to learn about men and male sexuality and felt the best way to do this was to have sex with as many boys as possible.

She said she found these sexual explorations enormously liberating, as she was now for the first time away from home and out of her mother's control. And she made an effort, she said, when breaking up with her lovers, not to replicate the cruel, dismissive manner of her mother. Rather, she said, she took pains "to show compassion, letting them down easy so as not to bruise their tender egos."

She soon developed a fondness for experienced, affectionate men, culminating in an affair with a graduate teaching assistant, H, who was ten years older, and which lasted through the winter and spring terms of her sophomore year.

When it came time to break off with H, his reaction was unexpected. Rather than accepting her decision, as others had, H took to stalking her, following her about campus, phoning her then hanging up when she answered, finding her in the college library when she was studying, sitting across the table from her then staring at her until she looked up, etc. Frightened, she confronted him. H told her he adored her and couldn't live without her, that he didn't want to stalk her but felt compelled to do so since the compulsion was beyond his control. Though unmoved by his professions of adoration, she felt thrilled for having inspired them. Describing the sensation, she said: "I felt enormously powerful and I believe the feeling was erotic."

She knew she was seductive and felt moved to test her seductive powers again and again. "I think I was searching for validation. If I could make men fall in love with me, bring them to their knees so to speak, then I would reaffirm my power as a woman. But once I conquered them, I quickly lost interest. For me the seductions were far more interesting than the relationships. Actually I found hanging out with these lovesick guys quite tiresome after a while."

Concerned that her sexual behavior was becoming obsessive, she sought out therapy at the student health services division of her college. Here, asked whether she had a gender preference in regard to a therapist, she specifically requested a male. Dr. L, the man to whom she was assigned, was a clinical psychologist in his forties, married with three children. Asked how she knew this, she replied that he displayed an array of family photographs on his office desk.

Immediately, she said, she set out to seduce him. All she had to do, she said, was recount her sexual adventures, including detailed descriptions of her lovemaking and the explosive power of her orgasms. "I had him panting for me before the end of our first hour," she said.

After two weeks, Dr. L yielded to her completely. "He was an easy score," she said. She described pulling off her panties, balling them up and throwing them at him, then perching on his desk and pulling up her skirt. Immediately, she said, he performed cunnilingus upon her. "I came so wildly," she said, "thrashing about, I swept all his family photos to the floor."

When asked if this gesture was deliberate, whether in retrospect she thought she was trying to displace Dr. L's loved ones, she answered in the affirmative. "I think I wanted to demolish his crummy little middle-class existence."

Afterwards, Dr. L expressed great remorse, declaring he'd acted unprofessionally and would probably be fired, perhaps even blacklisted, if she ever told anyone what they'd done.

She remembered holding Dr. L in her arms, assuring him she would never tell and assuming all blame for their "indiscretion." At the end of the session, Dr. L told her he could not treat her any longer, that she had "acted out" her problem on him and "I stupidly fell for the bait." He told her that in his opinion she needed intensive psychotherapy and recommended a female colleague. "But please," he begged, "don't tell Dr. D what we did." When she asked how she could
not
tell Dr. D since what they had done was a symptom of the problem she needed to work through, Dr. L placed his head in his arms on his desk and sobbed. {For further discussion of this incident and its relation to Mrs. F's psychoanalysis, see TRANSFERENCE ISSUES ARISING IN THERAPY below.}

Mrs. F decided not to pursue treatment with Dr. D. "For one thing, I'd lost confidence in the process. These psychologists, it seemed to me, were as weak or weaker than my fellow students. Also I had no desire to work with a woman. That would be too much like trying to get help from my mom."

Instead, Mrs. F threw herself into sports and extracurricular activities, trying out for and winning a place on the women's varsity tennis squad. She also joined the college drama society and played secondary roles in several school plays. {In the course of one of these productions, she began an affair with another student, M, a drama major, who wanted to pursue a professional career in the theater. Some years later, after she was married, she used her position as a board member of the professional theater company in her city to secure M an appointment there as associate director. Then, when M moved to her city to take up his new position, she resumed her affair with him even though she was still married.}

She met her future husband, A, her junior year at a horse-riding club dance when she was home for Christmas break. He was handsome, rich, smart, charming, and athletic, having all the qualities she felt a suitable husband should possess. He was clearly taken with her and she liked him too. "I don't know that I was actually in love with him, because, you see, I don't know if I'm really capable of love. But he was wonderful to be with. We had a lot of fun and the sex was great. So I decided 'Hey! This one's probably worth holding onto.'"

They became engaged and were married three years later. Meantime, after graduation, she'd moved back to her hometown, taking up a job with a local arts organization. She rented her own apartment far from her mother's and spent several nights a week with her fiancé.

During the period of her engagement, Mrs. F tried to work things out with her mother. They had a number of conversations in which each pledged to respect the choices of the other. They seemed to reach a modus
vivendi
, and she was pleased that her mother seemed to like and approve of her fiancé. For this reason, she was shocked when on her wedding day her mother accused her of being a whore. "It was as if she was trying to ruin the little happiness I'd managed to eke out."

A year or so into the marriage, her pleasure in having sex with A began to diminish. By the second year, each had discreetly taken on a lover, accepted practice in their circle. { "We weren't swingers or wife swappers or anything tacky as that," Mrs. F explained, "but in our crowd we all had covert affairs outside our marriages. This added spice and the sneaking around was fun, all the hushed phone calls and secret meetings in out-of-the-way places. My husband enjoyed it as much as I, and when he and I had sex, it was always in the background. I'm pretty sure it added to his excitement. I know it did to mine."}

Together she and A had three children, two sons and a daughter. Then, eight years into her marriage, her three-year-old-daughter, Belle, was snatched by her live-in au pair. The au pair turned up dead, and although the little girl was never seen again, Mrs. F was convinced she was still alive.

Mrs. F was frantic. She made immense efforts to find her missing daughter, including, when law-enforcement officials admitted they were stymied, hiring private investigators, fortune-tellers, psychics, anyone she thought could help. She was also wracked with guilt, blaming herself for Belle's abduction. "If I'd been home taking care of my children the way a decent mother should...if I hadn't been so spoiled by A's money that I entrusted my children to that horrible woman...if I hadn't been spending so much of my time screwing everything in trousers...." Resigned, she added: "Well, I guess I got what was coming to me. You know... punishment for my sins."

When asked whom she thought was punishing her in this way, she had no ready answer. "I don't know. God, I suppose." When asked if she genuinely believed that the tragedy of her daughter's disappearance (and presumed death) was commensurate with the sins she thought she'd committed, she shrugged off the query. "Rationally, no, of course not." But still, whenever she mentioned the event, which she termed "the central tragedy of my life," she spoke of it in such a way as to suggest she believed the crime had been directed personally against her. { In one session, Mrs. F related her fantasy that Belle, still alive, was working as a child sex slave in a whorehouse catering to sailors. "She could be paying for my sins even as we speak," she added tearfully.}

It was approximately six weeks after the abduction that Mrs. F had a certain vivid dream for the first time, a dream she described as "a sex dream" and which she came to call "The Dream of the Broken Horses." She dreamt this dream in several variations over a period of five years. It was the repetition of the dream, its haunting quality, and her belief that it contained an encoded message pertaining to the whereabouts of her abducted daughter that had, she said, brought on her decision to undergo psychoanalysis. It was her hope, she said, that analysis might lead to the decoding of her dream or at least to an interpretation that would free her from its terrifying power.

THE DREAM
: Mrs. F recounted the dream during her first session. Later she would recount it in other versions. In each case, though, the matrix would remain the same but certain particulars (such as genders, locales, colors, times of day) would be changed and even reversed. When asked about these variations, Mrs. F insisted that this was the way she dreamt, i.e., sometimes she would be wearing a red lower garment, at other times would be naked, etc.

This was so odd that the possibility had to be considered that Mrs. F was unconsciously inventing these variations to screen the essential dream and thus render it opaque. It also suggested a great richness of meanings, strata that would have to be explored level by level before the essential underlying meaning would be revealed.

In a footnote to the famous
The Case of the
Wolfman
, Freud wrote: "It is always a strict law of dream interpretation that an explanation must be found for every detail." But the founder offered no practical approach to interpretation of a dream such as the one under discussion here, in which the details appear to be in a state of flux. Thus taking both views into account, I determined that Mrs. F's first rendition was the most important, the die or mold, so to speak, from which all the later recounted variations were cast:

"It's dusk. I'm riding a black horse, a stallion. I'm wearing red jodhpurs with nothing underneath, feeling the warmth and muscularity of my horse in my sex. At first I'm riding alone on a prairie with mountains in the background. Then other riders join me from behind, hooded men in black garments whose faces I cannot see. We become a kind of posse, with me in the lead, though soon I notice two of the other riders gaining on my flanks. I try to escape them. All our horses are frothing from the exertion. I want to be the lead rider. Then suddenly I realize we are not a posse;
they
are the posse and I am their quarry. Terrified, I drive my heels into the flanks of my horse, slash at his shoulder with my crop, and surge ahead. Soon I'm flying fast. My horse is foaming at the mouth. When I touch him I can feel his sweat and can also feel my own wetness in my crotch. I turn to see the posse falling behind. Then, suddenly, the horses in the posse began to break up. Legs snap and crumble, heads fall off at the neck, riders are thrown to the ground as the horses, which now no longer appear to be living creatures but rather made of something hard and brittle like clay or bronze, tumble and crash, breaking apart like fallen statues. At last, free of the threat, I feel released and victorious. But then I discover that my own horse is breaking apart too. This is when I always wake up, sexually aroused, panting, heart beating rapidly, nightgown and sheets drenched with sweat."