Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  At the time of sexual contact, the women’s ages ranged from twenty-two to forty-five. Their average age was thirty-one. Four women were married, four were separated or divorced, and three were single. The husbands of the four married women were in treatment with the same therapist at the time of sexual contact. The ten therapists were, on an average, fifteen years older than their patients. Their average age was forty-seven. Seven of the therapists were married, two were separated or divorced, and one was single. Seven were psychiatrists and three were psychologists. Two of the women saw the same therapist—and did not know about each other, or about his many other female patients similarly “contacted.”

  Nine of the ten therapists assumed a “missionary” position during sexual intercourse for the first time and in general throughout the sexual “treatment.” Seven of the women did not experience orgasm at this time; four women never did throughout the “treatment”; seven of the women eventually experienced orgasm, from within one to nine months. Four of the therapists had difficulty maintaining an erection throughout the sexual contact period. At the risk of superficiality, one might simply conclude from this information that “seductive” therapists are lousy lovers.

  As a group, these women were the most reluctant to talk with me. I did, however, manage to speak to every woman I contacted. They were indecisive about meeting times, broke appointments, set time limits, and forgot about time once we started talking. Their lives were filled with clamor and crises. They received many phone calls: their children needed them, their lovers were waiting, their lovers’ children needed them. And yet—a very quiet and despairing eye looked out at me from the center of this storm.

  Those women who were over thirty-five when the sexual encounter occurred seemed more “worldly”: sophistication was their body armor, compassion their shield. They were the most vocal advocates of “pity” and “understanding” for the therapists—and for all men.

  MELISSA: I have tremendous sympathy, compassion for men. I think from my experience that they need much more assurance and love and affection and sympathy.

  PHYLLIS: Even when they aren’t capable of giving it to you?

  MELISSA: Right. In fact, people are seldom capable of giving it, they’re so wrapped up in pain. He [the therapist] had trouble maintaining an erection. It had to do with his being sixty, I think. He fumbled around a lot, which was a little bit surprising. I began to feel a little anxious too. I began to fall into old patterns of reassuring him as I had been reassuring men all my life, that it didn’t matter [that I didn’t have an orgasm], that I was so happy with him but he wasn’t very skillful.

  PHYLLIS: Did you tell him?

  MELISSA: No, because it didn’t really matter. Now it would matter … but he said that I was so lovely, that I was a beautiful thing, and he was an old man that I was not a doll or a child but a charming, fully mature woman, intelligent and delightful.

  This somewhat sad and very “human” aging male therapist was married—and had also been treating Melissa’s husband for several years, for marital and sexual problems.

  Three of the over-thirty-five “sophisticated” women refused to reveal their therapists’ names (even before I asked), for fear of “harming his reputation.” They insisted that they were to blame; they were the real seducers.

  MELISSA: I think that he just finally couldn’t resist me any more. I think I just put too much pressure on him. I was making moves from the very beginning….

  DONNA: I had a fantastic tan and I was high, and I’m very attractive when I’m high. I’m irresistible. I wanted to look nice for my therapy sessions. I always took off my glasses and combed my hair before I went.

  ROSLYN: Actually, in a certain way, I was seducing him all along unconsciously. I wasn’t aware of it until one time he came to a party at my house. I always had to seduce every man.

  MARTHA: He was really attracted to me and I was attracted to him beforehand … the night he gave me flowers I was hoping he’d make love to me. But I wasn’t as conscious about those things then.

  And yet these women described as many fantasies of love and marriage about their therapists and felt as little-girl betrayed, as the younger, less “sophisticated” women did. Ellen had been in therapy for six years before the sexual affair began.

  ELLEN: I wanted him to marry me but he wouldn’t. His wife and children, his reputation, and his failing health made it hard for him. I haven’t been able to shake the relationship and it’s been eight months and he won’t see me at all now.

  MARTHA: I had just left my husband after twenty years and was I depressed! I was living alone for the first time in my life and needed everything: emotional support, solace, approval, friends, a better job—everything. I guess I really wanted another husband. I was still looking to romantic love for security. Do you know, I found out much later that he was involved with at least one other woman at the same time as me.

  ROSLYN: I thought, I fantasied, that he would leave his wife and marry me, that he was going to give up his other life and start a new life with me. I was so happy that my therapist loved me. Who cared about anything else? Look how worthy I am. I said to him, “You don’t have to leave your wife. You don’t have to do anything like that. Just see me.” But he couldn’t do that either he didn’t want to get involved.

  STEPHANIE: I finally asked him if he would marry me and he just laughed and said no. I thought, he’s going to be really old soon and needs someone to take care of him. I thought I loved him, that he had it within his power to make me happy, that he could do it if he only will but he was more interested in my typing for him than in talking about this.

  DONNA: I was enamored. I guess I would have been in love had I let myself think that at thirty an intelligent woman could fall in love with a man so fast. I left my husband. [The therapist] was a doorway to finding things out about myself. We haven’t slept apart since I moved in with him.

  JOYCE: I know I needed him very, very badly. It was like he was God. He was mistreating me, and I didn’t want to admit that, because I needed him badly. I loved him. Then he offered me a job as his typist but he wouldn’t sleep with me any more. I was so depressed and upset and I wanted some help and called up, hysterical, “Please talk to me on the phone,” and he said, “I can’t talk to you now, I’ll call you back.” And he never called back. I felt deserted and all alone and usually when I talk about this with my shrink [now] I’m just in tears.

  Although many of the women described being humiliated and frustrated by their therapists’ emotional and sexual coldness or ineptitude, it was the therapist, more often than the patient, who ended the “affair.” And in every case the woman was further hurt by the abandonment. Women are conditioned to “suffer”—as long as it keeps them in a relationship to a man. The “suffering” matters less than the “relationship.” After the therapist’s withdrawal, one woman tried to kill herself; two others lapsed into a severe depression; a fourth woman’s husband, who was also in treatment with the same therapist, killed himself shortly after if not because he found out about the affair. This particular therapist’s rather sadistic and grandiose attempt to cure this woman’s “frigidity” one night resulted in her developing a “headache” that wouldn’t subside for a year. This therapist systematically had “sex” with as many of his female patients as he could. He also “employed” them as baby sitters, secretaries, cooks, errand-runners, chauffeurs, etc. His behavior was depressingly typical.

  SHEILA: I got stoned on grass because I was so scared. And he never even took his clothes off. He just dropped his pants. I was up for having an affair, but this didn’t feel like an affair. He told me I was blocked, that there were things I had to work out with my father and that maybe we could solve it on a non-verbal level if I would just trust him. And that I was going to have to trust him. So maybe he’s bizarre and unattractive—I didn’t feel too straight myself. Oh, God. Then he got up, dropped his pants, said, “Take your pants down,” or something really insensiti
ve, unsensual, and he just got on top of me. He came, I didn’t come. And then I said, “I’d like to get on top of you.” And then he told me that that was my problem, that I wanted to be in control.

  CINDY: He’d interpret everything I said as “transference love” or sexual desire for him … but there was very little affection between us. We started having a drink after the session was over. Then one night he said he wanted to see what my place looked like. He got undressed all at the same time and we went to bed together—and it was a very strange thing, there was almost no tenderness or prelove play and I remember thinking afterwards when I said, “That was great,” or “That was very good”—some insane comment that I made, thinking that it wasn’t really. Then all of a sudden, “Excuse me, I have to make a train,” because his wife was sitting out in the Bronx with this kid. I’d never slept with a married man before. It was probably the coldest affair I’ve had in my life.

  STEPHANIE: It took ten minutes. He jumped up, washed in the bathroom, and was back at his typewriter. I thought we’d talk till four in the morning. If anyone should know what he’s doing a therapist does. If I don’t have an orgasm here, then it’s really my fault.

  JOYCE: He was always on top of me. And he said things to me, too. He’d say: “Cock. I want to put my cock in your cunt.” And he wanted me to say that back to him. I couldn’t handle it. It was extremely stimulating. I was being very whorey. I was depraved and he was a beast, he grunted and groaned louder than any animal I had ever heard. He asked, “Does the thought of having another couple watch stimulate you? Should I smack you on the behind?” He said he wouldn’t hurt me, not in the face, but on the behind. I was beginning to get terrified.

  Victims make us uncomfortable. We grow uneasy, guilty, finally annoyed by the sight of them. Our pity turns to anger. Their suffering, their mutilation, which we fear so much ourselves, must somehow be their own doing. That beggar in rags is to blame for his misfortune: pass him by without a backward glance. “Naive” women who are “taken advantage of”—how positively Victorian it all is: are there still shopgirls and serving-maids stupid enough to be seduced? Well, if they can’t learn to protect themselves, they, like Candy-Candide, deserve whatever they get…. With the exception of one woman, the earning capacity and educational level of these women was never more than a fraction of that of their therapists. At the time of sexual contact, two of the women were students, two were secretaries, two were housewives, one was a waitress, one a recreational counselor, one a saleswoman, one a private secretary, and one a sociologist. Yes, these women like most women, are tremendously “naive”: their naiveté proclaims their “helplessness,” which alone may earn them a Benefactor, a Savior, a Father.

  As I noted in Chapter Four, these eleven women were the most overtly or superficially unambivalent about being “feminine.” They were all conventionally and frantically “attractive”; they were all economically limited and intellectually insecure; they were both sexually fearful and sexually compulsive; they were paralyzed by real and feared loneliness and self-contempt; they all blamed themselves for any “mistreatment” by men; they all confused economic and selfhood needs with romantic “love”; and they were slow to express any anger. (Anger is a painful and dangerous display for those who feel and are relatively powerless.)

  At the beginning of one conversation with one of the “sophisticated” women, she described her therapist as a “really nice guy,” and her experience with him as “her fault” and as “not really important.” After about an hour (during which I was relatively silent), she described this period in her life as one in which she “went through the most severe pain.” Surprised by this memory, she suddenly grew angry:

  MARTHA: I was really very vulnerable and dependent upon him. How could he so miscalculate the situation and behave so selfishly? He was reinforcing my dependency needs without questioning them—or even satisfying them.

  Very quickly though, she moved on to another topic: her intense dislike for her next therapist—who was a woman.

  I was able to speak to two women who had “sex” with the same therapist, and to a number of women who were all sexually propositioned by another therapist—all but one of whom refused him. I also spoke with several other of this same therapist’s non-propositioned female and male patients. On the basis of these interviews, a certain composite portrait emerged. One of these psychiatrists had an office on Central Park West, the other on the Upper East Side in New York City. The New York psychiatrists and psychologists discussed in this chapter are all highly “reputable” professionals in terms of legitimate medical or doctoral training, some sort of psychoanalytic or clinical training, well-established practices, and office locations in expensive buildings on the Upper East side, the Upper West Side, and Greenwich Village.

  Both men were involved in creating primal patriarchal family-empires, consisting of one male guru (themselves) and many “wives” (female patients, legal wives, mistresses). (We may note that while Freud certainly never had “sex” with his patients—and, reportedly, not too frequently with his legal wife, he was nevertheless polygamous: according to Roazen, his wife and his wife’s sister both lived with him and took care of his domestic and emotional needs; and his many female disciples served him as Dutiful Daughters.)17 The two sexually seductive male therapists used their female patients as secretaries, typists, baby sitters, sexual partners, errand-runners, plant-dusters, therapy “assistants,” and all-round cheering squad. Both men kept very odd office hours, and even odder treatment hours. “Sessions” lasted from ten minutes to four hours, and no questioning of this arbitrary “spontaneity” was brooked—even from other patients who had to wait long beyond their scheduled appointment times. Both men were married. Both described their wives as “crazy,” “hopeless,” “dependent,” and “too old.” Both men were cold and/or inadequate sexual partners and lovers; both apparently had “sex” with as many of their female patients—simultaneously—as they could, often presenting it as either necessary for the “cure” or as a unique instance of “love.”

  Both of these therapists prescribed drugs for everyone for anything. Both were very authoritarian in directing and ordering their patients’ lives: they told their patients whom to sleep with and when; what jobs to leave and what jobs to take; where to live and with whom. Both thundered at sexually reluctant female patients about how “unhealthy” their sexual “repression” was and how they’d “better start fucking a lot” if they wanted to get rid of their “hangups.” Both therapists insisted that only they could “help” or “save” their patients—and warned their unhappy or rebellious female patients to leave only at their own risk. Both therapists were quite cruel to protectors or deserters. For example, one woman refused to sleep with one of these therapists—and told her husband, who was also in treatment with him, about the proposition. She also decided against continuing “treatment.”

  SANDRA: I decided, though, that I owe it to Mark [her husband] to go up with him and confront the group we’re all in together. So I go up and there’s Dr. X and his two assistants sitting there and I figure, well, the cards are stacked against me. Dr. X says, “Well, well, tell us what happened.” So I tell the story again and then he proceeds to tell the group how I was provocative to him, how I wore a miniskirt—which I always wear. He made it look as if I were coming up there to seduce him, not to have a session. Then he says I’m using this lie of a proposition to cop out of therapy. He reminded me that I didn’t quit a job I once had just because my boss made a pass at me. Then all of a sudden we’re sitting there and he’s starting to say things like, “Sandra, you know how dishonest you are, how dishonest you are with Mark, there are things you haven’t told him” [he was referring to a brief affair she’d had], and I started crying, “I’m getting out of here,” I mean it was like a kangaroo court and when we left, Mark said to me, “What haven’t you told me, what did you do?” He forgot all about what Dr. X did. Everything got twisted.

  Anothe
r woman who refused her therapist’s sexual advances told her group therapy mates about it. The therapist denied everything and told the group she was “crazy.” This woman—and her boy friend—were also both involved in “consciousness-raising” groups. The woman’s group sympathized with her outrage: the male group went together to confront the therapist and “beat him up.” The woman told me this anecdote proudly and couldn’t understand my crestfallen expression (the men were still engaged in protecting “their” female territory; the women were still incapable of defending themselves). When she understood, we laughed and moaned in unison.

  Both of these therapists exhibited another trait, one often found among certain “seductive” men over sixty, and traditionally attributed to “schizophrenogenic” mothers: they said something—and denied they’d said it; they made sexual advances—and then, half teasingly, half testingly, but totally seriously, denied having made them. The doctors were “guilty” and afraid of being rejected.

  JOYCE: And then I had a dream about going to bed with him. And he said, “Ah, transference at last”—in his accent. The week before he’d made me put my head on his lap just like I used to do with my father when I had a bad headache, and he’d stroked my hair. It was very warm; I was a little girl and he was my father. Then his hand slipped. The next session he helped me on with my coat, turned me around to him, and kissed me quite passionately. And I was quite shocked and then I burst into tears. I’m melodramatic anyway, but I was really upset. Because I didn’t know what to make of it. And I said, “Why did you do that?” It was a stupid question to ask, really, and he said, “What? Do what? What are you talking about?” And I said, “Kiss me.” “I don’t know what you mean,” he said. He was really playing into my hangup. Because my parents would do that to me. Whenever my mother did something or said something and I said: “Why did you do that?” she’d go “What? I didn’t do anything.”