Her self-deception was particularly evident when she discussed Matthew. In another dream, her father gave her a horse called Shes a Lady. She had always wanted a horse from him, and in the dream not only was that childhood wish fulfilled but her father officially christened her a lady. He had also had enough experience on editorial boards to know that the journal editors were merely being polite: the article was beyond salvage unless he and Dr. K. put in massive amounts of time revising it. Large folds of overhanging flesh broke off and were washed away. An illustration of an audio speaker. Most of us, most of the time, live comfortably by uneasily avoiding the glance of death, by chuckling and agreeing with Woody Allen when he says, Im not afraid of death. But I had never known the real, the secret Jay; and, after his confession, I had to reconstruct my image of him and assign new meanings to past experiences. It would seem rational to read them first., Im not sure. Only when a patient feels deep emotion regarding the truth does it take root. I was on a high narrow ledge. You havent seen him for eight years. He was smooth. In spite of her age, Thelma is physically fit and had always driven herself to my office. Diving into deep water not uncommonly symbolizes the act of diving into the depths of ones unconscious. Looking back now on this interchange, I see much sophistry in my words. The Four Gives of Life I was also careful to avoid sounding as though I were minutely scrutinizing our relationship: this was a time to nurture its growth. I was becoming more convinced that my hunch about his behavior was correct: namely, that he had major psychosexual problems which he had acted out on Thelma (and probably other unfortunate patients). Together these two belief systems constitute a dialectictwo diametrically opposed responses to the human situation. Betty was horrified, and visions of her fathers baldnesshe had been shaven for his brain surgeryreturned to her. I remember the games of imagination I played as a child trying to invent the existence of someone she did not hate: A kindly aunt? You cannot re-create a state of shared romantic love, of the two of you being deeply in love with one another because it was never there in the first place.. I felt myself flushing. Or forcibly impose my will on a man who, incapable of acting in his best interests, allowed himself to be terrorized by three unopened letters? Another thing: if she was revealing more of herself to me than to anyone before, then what was the nature of her close relationships? She then notified the police about the threat (but not, of course, about the highway chase), and for the last week her house had been under constant police surveillance. I learned, at follow-up, that Penny was falling prey to this dynamic: she had grown fearful about her sons driving, was reluctant to lend them her pickup, and adamantly refused to allow either of them to buy a motorcycle. We talked for a while about the bad marriage she made in the dream. His accusation seemed particularly ironic because, if there were one conviction I had about him, it was that sex was not the source of his difficulty. Give me back my wife, Doctor, the old Thelmajust the way she used to be.. In a sense, I, too, had exploited this trait in Saul (but for his own good, I told myself): to please me, he had begun to charge a fair price for his services and to refuse many requests he did not want to grant. She worked sixty hours a week, had no friends, no social life, no activities in California. A moment later, I found myself thinking of the little fat woman cartoon figure in the movie Mary Poppinsthe one who sings Supercalifragilisticexpialidociousfor that was who Betty reminded me of. What would it be? Hes scrambling for diversions, I thought. 4.8 (674 ratings) Try for 0.00. Her sons had grown hard and distant, but once, before they sealed their feelings from her, they told her they had wanted more from her: they had wanted the hour a day she had spent, for four years, tending Chrissies gravesite. Then Id knock him offfast!, When, in our next individual session, we discussed the consultation, I asked her about the two smiles. It was wrong to talk to her about Marge. The head in the slidemy head, my vision, my memorygets in the way. Maybe Im a slow learner.. Students have told me they were more willing to plod through dry theory knowing there would likely be an interesting tale just around the bend. I havent a clue.. I phoned again and left a message irresistible to patients: to call me because I had something very important to tell him. Often everything disappeared then, me and everything else, there was just the dance and the moment. Unlimited listening to the Plus Catalogue - thousands of select Audible Originals, podcasts and audiobooks. But paradox can be effective in those instances where the therapeutic foundation is solid and the prescribed behavior explodes the meaning of the symptom. Whenever she compared herself with others, she invariably concluded that they were better informed and more clever, socially adept, self-confident, and interesting. . Before the invention of the stethoscope, a physician listened to the sounds of life with an ear pressed against a patients rib cage. She had perceived how critically important it was to me to succeed, to satisfy my intellectual curiosity, to follow everything through until the very end. I once saw a newspaper cartoon of a pudgy lost little man saying, Suddenly, one day in your forties or fifties, everything becomes clear. Pennys grief was stuck, gridlocked. Perhaps others would evaluate her very differently from the way I would. In Search of the Dreamer Afterword: On Rereading Lope's Executioner at Age Eighty My idea that keeping the letters would make it harder for Dave to terminate therapy was, I realized quickly, nonsense. And, of course, behind the scenes, I was subtly guiding her toward that decision. Over the first ten weeks I learned that, if we analyzed her feelings toward Matthew, her obsession tormented her for the next week. The singles world is impossible for obese people. I had liked him from the moment I met him. Im sure shes gone: that performance required great vital energy, and by now Marge and I have sucked all that juice out of her. I could feel it in the car with me. I loved the way he tangled with me. During this discussion I recalled one of the first patients I had been assigned during my residencya red- faced, sandy-haired, psychotic farmer who insisted that he had started the Third World War. There was a certain irony in my use of this intervention: an existential approach and a manipulative paradox ordinarily make bizarre bedfellows. Those things I used to dorefusing to look at my life; trying to control or intimidate others; trying to impress others with my intelligence, my charts, my thoroughnesstheyre gone. I was in this big horseshoe-shaped house, with lots of little rooms, trying one after the other to find the right room to change in. What should I do? There seemed much work for Penny to do on her relationships with the livingespecially with her sons and perhaps with her husband; and I assumed that would be how we would spend our remaining six hours. He had talked briefly to Ruth, who then excused herself because she had to go home. Most likely she would reconstruct the hour with Matthew so that her version of reality could once again support her fusion fantasy. I became aware of how little she had changed and how much depended on something dramatic happening the next session. Albert was a fixer. This woman, Sonia, entered on the scene, and I realized that a life with her was the proper way for me. The first call she made upon regaining consciousness was to Matthews tape machine. Somehow it all seemed so natural, as if they had shared meals like this countless times before. Individual therapy may help to alter dysfunctional mourning. His lover, Soraya? I wanted her to have everything she wanted in life. Instead, I sought for a way to connect with him. I called five former therapists and told them I was going to give therapy one last chance and asked them who I should see. . Where was his curiosity that his life had changed so dramatically, that his sense of direction, his happiness, even his desire to live was now entirely dictated by whether he could sustain tumescence in his penis? Your call would drop my chances to zero, or less.. They looked like my two boys, but they had long girls hair and were wearing dresses. But now what did she have to show for the past twenty years? Despite Matthews high-sounding ethics, I believe I am more honest than he. I asked Betty to talk about her first experiences and early conceptions of death. So what sense does it make to elevate him so? Dreams, like symptoms, have no single explanation: they are overdetermined and contain many levels of meaning. Now committed to being entirely present with Betty, I tried not to flinch from any of her questions. She finished him off in another dream: he squeezed into a crowded elevator into which she couldnt fit (because of her size). Its always damaging to a patient. Though there is something reassuring about an omniscient therapist who is always in control of every situation, there can be something powerfully engaging about a fumbling therapist, a therapist willing to flounder with the patient until they, together, stumble upon an enabling discovery. For the first five weeks, he had made excellent use of the group but, unless he changed his behavior dramatically, he would, I was certain, irreversibly alienate all the group membersif he hadnt done so already! If you want to help methen teach me how to hate armadillos!. When I first began to work as a therapist, I naively believed that the past was fixed and knowable; that if I were perspicacious enough, I could discover that first false turn, that fateful trail that has led to a life gone wrong; and that I could act on this discovery to set things right again. He was something else, something I had never anticipated. She hated everything. Why did he have to say letters of a certain relationship earlier in the meeting? She continued in a derisive, gloating manner: You could have her in therapy for thirty years, but Id still win. Ive been telling Phyllis what you and I talk about every hour. She had never allowed herself to believe that Chrissie would die. I tried the same approach with the letters, expecting that Saul, at my request, would open them immediately. To be dead! But I was to struggle with that question many times before the dnouement of this therapy, and could not have guessed then that, of all the riddles in the case of Thelma, it was the riddle of Matthew I was destined to solve most fully. What had happened in their lives that might have pushed them into the choices they made? With an effort I swept that away as well. Even though Saul, for seven years, turned over every penny of his earnings to his aunt, he never felt he contributed enough money, and began to set unattainable goals of how much he had to earn each day. I cannot alter the future because I am being overtaken by the past.. But that evening, for reasons Thelma, even now, cannot comprehend, she and Matthew slipped outside everyday reality. She had never done that before with me. The better I knew her, the less interesting she seemed. Even insurance forms had to be sent to his secret post office box number. You cant become intimate with friends lest you hurt them when you ultimately commit suicide. It seemed to me that if I were to keep the letters, I would be colluding, in a countertherapeutic way, with his penchant for secrecy. In fact, everything of importance was elsewhere. I took pains to inform her that therapy would undoubtedly be unsettling, and attempted to get her to promise to stick with it. This possibility occurred to her a couple of years later when, while taking an out-of-town guest sightseeing, she warily entered a gay bar on Castro Street and was astounded to see fifteen Matthews sitting at the barfifteen slim, attractive, neatly mustached young men. Saul suggested they offer a creative synthesis and identify the most promising directions for future research. Once, for example, when I inquired about why she had become inactive in her therapy group, she simply glared and refused to answer. Is that too much to ask?, Never had I encountered one person giving another more power. He proceeded, and now reproach entered his voice, to describe how Thelma had gotten progressively worse since she and I had started working together. Very few men (though there were some) were brave enough to love meeveryone was terrified of Harry. I remember her first words then: I think I need help. Im full of admiration for what youve overcome and what youve done in life.. Rather, love is a way of being, a giving to, not a falling for; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person. While I couldnt guess what would be set free, I anticipated considerable churning during the week and awaited her next visit with much curiosity. Last night, Marthashes a really fragile borderline young woman, who has been almost mute in the group started to talk about having been raped last year. Thank God I had avoided thatthe dawn meetings with the ward staff, the writing of orders, the public acknowledgment of my failure, the trudging over to the hospital every day. Sometimes death anxiety is dismissed as trivial in its universality. About five years before, when Chrissie was still alive but weakening, Penny signed a contract for an expensive cemetery plota plot large enough, she pointed out (as though this should make things self-evident) to keep the whole family together. Each family memberPenny, her husband, Jeff, and her two sonsagreed, after intense pressure from her, to contribute a share of the cost in payments spread over seven years. She immediately became conciliatory. That means youll be running late all day, doesnt it?. Men are willing to die for their families. She followed my advice to have a direct confrontation; and when the tenant refused to alter her cooking habits, Marie scarcely hesitated to ask the woman to move. Some of the topics shook me up, they apply more to me than to him., For example, regret. She was hit by a cable car and got a new face. She wept often and, at times, flashed into anger. Heart transplantwhat an inspired visual symbol for psychotherapy!] It looked like Christ but was wearing a flowing orange pastel dress. My intellectual curiosity? How did you decide to get into this field? In a conversation, the content consists of the actual words uttered, the substantive issues discussed; the process, however, is how the content is expressed and especially what this mode of expression reveals about the relationship between the participating individuals. A comment stating that the therapist has been thinking about the patient outside of their scheduled hour has never, in my experience, failed to galvanize the latters interest. Fascinating!, Theres a lot of fear of death there, Marvinin this dream and in all the other nightmares. Later that night she grew more agitated, slept poorly, and had this powerful dream:I was searching through rooms in an old institution. No, not reallywe were now speaking together but in parallel, not face to face. Could I possibly be serious? A grandfather who told her stories? Tears poured down upon her new blue dress until Matthew, outracing me, handed her the box of tissues. Your theory is that what I call sex is often not sexat least not good sexbut instead is a way of protecting myself against fear, especially fear of aging and death. Yet I am not without faith, my Hail Mary being the Socratic incantation, The unexamined life is not worth living. But that was not Daves faith. Could I see her doing that? Thankfully, times have changed. So how can I get down on you for feeling the same way?. Yesterday I was talking to Phyllis about all our friends who have died and also about a newspaper article about people who die immediately after retirement. 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. I asked her to describe the main feelings in the dream. My eating is out of control, Betty said, chuckling, and added, You could say my eating is always out of control, but now it is really out of control. Ive been watching you beat yourself up for months about this. Despite his offputting physical appearance, I felt very warm toward him, I imagined cradling him in my arms and found the idea agreeable. 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. Maybe I need a shrink whos lost a kid! Obviously, Thelma was responsible for her own life predicament. I'm told he's one of the greatest psychotherapists in all the land, but this book does nothing to illustrate that, as far as I can tell. Weve only got seven more sessions, unless you reconsider your decision to stopThelma shook her head firmly. His eyes pleaded with me: I cant go on. (The fact that I was a better prophet than therapist, however, gave me little solace.). Our two hours were drawing to a close. Reading Love's Executioner, you are given an inside view of someone who has made a successful career at trying to understand and categorize something that cannot ever be understood or explained: the human mind. It was ineffable. Maries view of psychiatry? But there were formidable obstacles. We might as well have been in separate rooms. As we grow older, we learn to put death out of mind; we distract ourselves; we transform it into something positive (passing on, going home, rejoining God, peace at last); we deny it with sustaining myths; we strive for immortality through imperishable works, by projecting our seed into the future through our children, or by embracing a religious system that offers spiritual perpetuation. The search for meaning, much like the search for pleasure, must be conducted obliquely. He remembered banging his fist on his desk, forcing himself to remember the chill of his mothers forehead when he kissed her as she lay in her casket. . I let it go. She often, despite my inner groans, described some particularly banal conversation by playing several of the rolesIve always hated that. (Later we were to explore, also with minimal impact, the reverse of that formulathat it was because of the impoverishment of her life that she embraced the obsession in the first place.). At one point I tried to get beneath the forced hale fellow heartiness. By the time the hour ended, she did not have to tell me how much better she felt: I could see it in her breathing, in her walk, and in her smile as she left the office. Over the past two years, as her depression lessened, she had arrived at the conclusion that her only possible salvation was to develop a new romantic relationship, but she was so proud and intimidating that men regarded her as unapproachable. I edged an inch or two closer. Think now, for a few minutes, about your daughter. Thelma, ever since that hour a couple of months ago when you role-played Matthew and spoke the words that would release you, Ive been deliberating about inviting him into my office and having a three-way sessionyou, me, and Matthew. Suddenly they come upon a carriage, ebony black, cradling a baby girl swaddled in black gauze. But I was currently funded by a research institute to study the psychotherapy of the elderly and could see Thelma for a minimal fee. I think my quarry is illusion. Your email address will not be published. That was how we began. First, I thought of Pennys desperate wish to keep everyone together, to create the stable family she never had as a child, and how that was manifested in her fierce resolve to own a house and a cemetery plot. She had, as she put it, played a lot of fantasy games. I had three childrenand the wrong one died., Penny gasped and put her hand to her mouth. That they foreshadow the type of relationship he will be able to establish with a patient. Love's Executioner Other Tales of Psychotherapy. Dont ask me any more questions about Dr. Z. I hope you dont know about whats going on between us.. We didnt make any decisions, everything just happened effortlessly and spontaneously. I have found reading this book very edifying and useful in my own practice. Could Marvin have possibly dreamed them? Maybe Ill give up science. You get what you deserve, depending on what youve done or the way youve lived your present life. That was a hell of a thing for her to have gone through, and I felt for her, but it seemed to me that she had erred by trying to bootleg therapy for herself in the group. It seemed the right thing to do. You want me to go on? I think he was overcome with pitypity for Phyllis, for himself, for all small, helpless people.
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