In the end she came back and sat next to me on the sofa.
I put my hand on her knee. But I couldn’t speak.
“You know, Hagar, I thought about something, and I wanted to tell you. Some people have this habit of checking their diaries every Sunday night, to see what’s coming up in the next week. And if they don’t like it too much, they get really depressed.”
“I know, it happens to us all.”
“So this Yoav is a human being like the rest of us. And his profession isn’t any different from other professions. Sometimes people work with real interest, enthusiasm. But sometimes they don’t, they get bored. It’s the law of averages. If their average is OK, then they think they’re doing fine. Only, in Yoav’s profession you’re alone facing him, and it’s about you and your life. And then there’s a problem.”
“What problem? I’ve already told you for the umpteenth time that I can’t blame him. He didn’t have to read that article. He meant to but it didn’t work out for him. So what, he doesn’t owe me anything.”
That smile in his eyes. That politeness of his. That deep baritone voice. All tranquillity. There are some people you just can’t be angry with.
“So he doesn’t owe you anything, but look how important he’s become. A few months ago you hardly knew who he was, and now you almost didn’t run the marathon because he didn’t know and didn’t call to wish you good luck.”
“Yael, I’m happy that you came round, and thank you for all the tidying up that you’ve done, but I don’t want to talk about it.”
Yael got up, put on some music, and went back to last week’s newspaper. Then she started to unload the dishwasher. I tried to tell her to stop it and I couldn’t. “I have no energy to argue with you, do whatever you want.” I finally threw out at her, and went back to lounging on the sofa.
Yael’s problem is that she can never keep quiet.
“Hagar, try to picture Yoav looking in his diary on a Sunday evening. Imagine there’s this hidden camera in his home and you can see him. Then, when he looks in his diary and sees that you’re booked in for the next day, there’s a kind of smile on his face, ‘Nice, I’m looking forward to seeing her.’ What would you think then?”
“I’d be glad,” I replied.
And I’d be glad that he finds it pleasant to be with me, that maybe he even respects me a bit, despite what he knows about me.
And that it’s not that he can’t stand me.
And I’d also find it easier to talk to him when I’m there.
Much, much easier, I thought, though I didn’t say that to her.
“OK, so now imagine you see him going over the names in his diary, coming across a Yoram Cohen. And with that hidden camera you would see him sighing, ‘Not that Yoram again, with those anxieties of his, those complexes, I’m not in the mood to see him.’
What then?”
God.
Is that what happened?
I’m so not in the mood to see Hagar.
What is this thing that people call therapy?
Intimacy without caring. That’s what it was.
Paying for intimacy.
***
But I couldn’t let her off, “Yael, I really can’t understand it, he’s actually not supposed to feel like this at all, to be glad or not to be glad, that’s just the thing – he’s only there to help, like a technician.”
“Sorry, that’s mythology, I don’t buy that crap. He’s not God. And he doesn’t have to be. It’s an interaction between people. If you go to someone and you off-load things on him that you may be hiding even from yourself, and perhaps it’s years that you’ve been hiding them, you have to feel that he’s happy to see you. The way that a child in kindergarten knows if the kindergarten teacher likes him or not.”
“You know what their answer is,” I said. “If the therapist is fed up with the client, he’s supposed to work it out with his own therapist.”
“Brilliant,” she replied. “That’s another way they turn this into something that goes on forever. You can’t solve anything with more of the same.”
“You know what it reminds me of,” Yael said, thinking out loud. “This story with Yoav reminds me of my mother’s eye doctor, the one from Jerusalem, you remember?”
I remembered, of course I remembered. It was some time after we had moved into the new house, and they had discovered that Yael’s mother had a severe eye disease, and that she would need a complicated operation. “You don’t play around with eyes; you’ve got to convince her to go to a top specialist,” I said to Yael.
Someone suggested Dr. Yogev, and Yael started to check him out. The head of a department, the director of The Yogev Institute for Sight, invited to lectures abroad, with a weekly column in some newspaper. And recently appearing as a guest on a morning TV chat show.
“I’ve managed to make an appointment for my mother in another three months’ time. And we’re going to use some of our savings for the operation,” Yael told us one evening.
After a few minutes Yaron asked, “Are you sure it’s worth it?”
“In a case like this, you must go to a specialist,” I said. Yaron didn’t reply.
After Yael and Jerry had gone, he said to me, “Hagar, I really don’t want to worry or put any doubts into Yael’s mind, I know how hard it was for her to get that appointment. But something doesn’t feel right to me.”
“Why not?” I was annoyed.
“Either someone is a doctor, a real one, with his whole heart in medicine, or what he likes doing is basking in the limelight on TV. The two don’t go together.”
“But he’s the best. It’s a fact that he’s always on TV. And they don’t give just anyone a column in the newspaper.” I attempted to argue with him.
“The best at what, Hagari?”
Dr. Yogev really did do the operation. Three months later, Yael had to take her mother to him for a check-up. It was only at that check-up that it would be possible to assess whether the operation had been a success. They drove there together, and later that evening she told me what had happened.
“In the morning I collected her from her home, and we drove to his clinic in Jerusalem. Such tension, almost unbearable. Had the operation been a success or not? Did he save her eyesight? The whole way, a full two hours, I was switching radio stations, we barely exchanged a word.
We arrived, we went in. He asked my mother to sit down, I sat down in a small chair in the corner. He began to check her. There was utter silence in the room, I could barely breathe, and neither could she. And then, as he had the instrument poised against her eye, he suddenly said, ‘Mrs. Levin, I see that you’ve had an operation. Who operated on you?’”
***
Another wasted day. I’d planned to do so many things, I don’t feel like doing anything.
Maybe I never should have gone to him in the first place.
When will I be able to walk away from it?
And now she’s bringing me books
“Hagar, I found something,” Yael said to me. For weeks she’s been devouring all the books at the library, the psychology shelves, psychotherapy, Freud, Klein, Winnicott — everything in sight.
“I found a book by someone who was a psychotherapist and then left the profession. In the introduction she writes about what happened to her. She studied, started working, she was successful. More and more clients. Then the doubts began creeping in. After fifteen years she left the profession and wrote a book about it. Listen to this.”
Yael began quoting from it.
Psychotherapy is quite similar to medicine. Sometimes you deal with day-to-day things, and sometimes it’s real life-and-death issues, it’s about the happiness of the person who has landed on your doorstep. With your help, the client makes crucial decisions. He has to know that there is something there beyond pure functionality, beyond you making your living. So they decided to set the rules according to time; and they started a barter system – your time against his money. So the scales would b
e even. The client’s payment is weighted against fifty minutes of your attention. And beyond this, you supposedly don’t owe him anything, and that’s so incredibly ‘correct’. But after he’s started, and has talked to you, and become attached to you, how can he put that on the scales, measure for measure, his joy of life against those measured moments of yours?
People go into this profession because they want to make a difference, they want to help. During the early years of our studies, we were filled with motivation. We learned, we invested. But the moment it became a profession, it turned into work. Sometimes one gets worn down by the day-to- day; that’s what it’s like in every kind of work. But to that person, after he’s brought his life to you, without either one of you intending it, you might become one of the most important people in his life. He is incapable of feeling that all this is for you, the therapist, is work. Together with him, you are holding his life in your hands. So how can it possibly be that you do this solely for the money that he’s paying you? How can he not feel that, perhaps, what he pays is precisely what he’s worth?
All the things that I had been speaking with Yoav about. How Yaron was with me then. How we are now. How everything was so different for him with Aya, how could it have been like that for them. I could barely speak, I so wanted to hear what he thought about it all. And he just said, “It’s good that you’re telling me. That’s our work here, yours and mine.” And I broke down at his place. Glued to my chair, couldn’t get up, he had to keep telling me that the time was over, as if the time had run out in the middle of an operation, an operating room with a stopwatch, my limbs all over the place, rolling onto the carpet, right there in his clinic in front of his eyes.
How can all this be possible if all I am is work for him?
Yael went on reading.
And me as well. During my internship, I had to have psycho-therapy myself. We students had to, it was part of our training. I was fortunate to have a good therapist. For five years I would go to her, three times a week. She became one of the most important people in my life, a kind of surrogate mother. And then I started work, filled with conviction. My clients infiltrated my life, they stayed in my thoughts way beyond the time allotted to them. There were successes filling me with satisfaction. As the years went by, I understood more and more how much power there is in this profession, and for just that reason, I understand today how dangerous it can be. What would happen if, one day, you realised that your adoptive parent took you in just for the money? What would you do then? How would you put your life back together? Would you go back to therapy? How many years, and on how many therapists’ doors, would you find yourself knocking, so that they would ‘therapise’ you, so that you would experience, with the help of the new therapist, or the one after him, a ‘corrective experience’? For we, in our profession, have become specialists in corrective experiences.
“So can you explain to me,” I burst out at Yael, “who approves or does not approve this adoption, and how many children are they allowed to take on, and how come you know nothing at all of this adoptive parent of yours, and what’s more, your therapist is not even supposed to interest you! And then, if you can’t relate to him or her as a technician or as someone who’s going to fix the human soul, if you can’t bear to be considered a ‘case study’, straight away they’ll find what else is wrong with you.”
What luck, what luck that I never asked him how many children he had, or what his wife did. “I can answer, it’s not a secret,” he would certainly have answered me, smiling at me, that smile in his eyes, “but there’s a reason that you’re asking. So why are you asking?”
Yael ignored me and continued quoting from the book.
You work for years, you see more people, more stuff, and you have your own life to carry along as well. So you become adept at keeping to the rules, sanctifying the boundaries. Your client is not your friend, not a relative, you say. He’s just a client, a patient, you say. And you’re only his therapist. You’ve become so used to saying this to yourself. And in the professional jargon that you’ve espoused – he, the client, is a ‘therapy case’. You preserve the hermetic nature of the relationship, keep it sealed off, so that not a single drop of friendliness can seep in, and you keep scrupulously to the fifty minutes, it’s within those fifty minutes that you do your work. You extend your hand to him, you feel professional. But it’s all for payment and the payment is for time. When the fifty minutes are up that person leaves your room and leaves your mind as well. As for your heart – he doesn’t get a look in there from the get-go, no way can he get in there. ‘Do not get emotionally involved’ – you remember what they taught you at university. If a client gets under your skin, into your heart, you’ll collapse and the profession with it. It’s so convenient, making Teflon into a religion.
I didn’t say to her that sometimes the client is the one who collapses.
Hello, Hagar, won’t you come in. What would you like to talk about today? When he had something to say – he would say it. And when he didn’t – he would keep quiet. And when the time was up – We need to finish up now, till our next session. It feels like I didn’t exist for him between our sessions.
His diary, that thick blue diary with the hard cover, closed, right next to the corner of his desk. From far off I could always see it, the pages full, a little dog-eared. Crossings out with cancellations and changes. Hour after hour. How many secrets did it hold, how many secrets was it possible to stuff into one diary, one person’s diary? What did it weigh, that diary, with its infinity of life contained within it? And the door, opening and closing. Invisible people carrying backpacks, backpacks full of secrets, leaving and entering. One goes out, a heavy backpack on legs, and another one comes in. On no account should they meet one another, bump into one another. The head is temporarily missing. The sink filling up with empty glasses; boxes of tissues emptying out, the waste bin filling up.
And now I’m not there. I don’t exist. How can it be that I just do not exist?
Maybe I did not really exist even then.
Not only I was deep in my own thoughts; Yael also seemed to be wading around there as well.
“Hagar, what’s utterly mind-blowing is that Yoav has no idea that you’re in this depression as a result of his therapy. Perhaps he still thinks everything’s all right, perhaps you’re a success story for him.”
“How could he have an inkling? I told him that I thought we’d finish, that the problem which I had come for was no longer bothering me. He said, ‘I’m very happy, Hagar. I don’t know if it’s because of the therapy or not, and in any case it’s you that did the work, I was only a catalyst. But it’s excellent that it no longer troubles you, I’m happy about it,’ and he smiled at me. He has these kind eyes. I’m sure that he really meant it. I paid him and said, ‘Thank you, goodbye,’ and I left.”
“Just think what it’s like for us at university. Every term I give out examinations and the students in the Masters programme check the exams and grade them. Just imagine if I thought that all my students are getting between eighty and a hundred, and that I hadn’t a clue about the ones who fail. And that’s how I would work, year after year, on my own. What kind of profession is it when you don’t have to follow up on the results of your work, or at least attempt to? Over and over again, all you’re seeing are the success stories.”
And then she found another passage:
And the responsibility. How come we’ve managed to shift it to the client? Have we done this because it sat too heavily on our own shoulders? So we set rules. Quite convenient, those rules. The client is the one who decides what will be discussed, he directs the content. And the pace. And it’s he who sets the aims. Fine, we say to him, those are our joint goals, and we set off together holding hands. And months go by, or years. This is his life. And along the way, how often do we try to check if we’re actually succeeding in those aims? It’s true that it’s hard to check. But the main reason that we don’t check is that no one is forcing u
s to, because no one is watching. Your client can come to you every single week, for years. No one is going to ask you if it would have been possible to get it done within a year. And you’d still call it a success. For, after all, you tell yourself, the client has undergone a process, and his aims have shifted. It’s obvious that they’ll shift, for time has passed. So what is reasonable success in this profession, and what would rapid, incredible success look like? What is failure, and on whose part? It’s so convenient not to have to think about all this.
An important profession, it ranks alongside Medicine. But whose responsibility is it? When therapy is successful, they teach you to be modest: it’s the client who did the work, and you were just the catalyst. You’re modest, and you take their money. And when it doesn’t work, what do we say about our client? He wasn’t ready to change, not really and truly; he wasn’t open to it. There is no magic or hocus-pocus here, he needs to go through a process. The excuses are well camouflaged within the method. Why haven’t we heard of a therapist who took responsibility? Who gave the client back his money, or at least part of it, compensating for his lost time? Why has no one ever dared to do this?
***
So We Said Goodbye: A Contemporary Fiction Novel Page 16
