Lying on the Couch

by Irvin D. Yalom

  ''Of course I don't feel good all the way down—I've got lots of feelings about leaving Carol and my family forever. Don't you know that? How could you not know? I've just walked away from everything: my home, my Toshiba laptop, my kids, my clothes, my bicycle, my racquetball racquets, my neckties, my Mitsubishi TV, my videotapes, my CD's. You know Carol—she'll give me nothing, she'll destroy everything I own. Owww ..." Justin grimaced, crossed his arms and crouched over as if he had just been slammed in the belly, "That pain's there—I can reach it—you see how close it is. But today, for one day, I wanted to forget, even for a few hours.

  Lying on the Couch r"^^ 41

  And you didn't want me to. You don't seem even pleased that I finally left Carol."

  Ernest was staggered. Had he given away so much? What would Marshal do in this spot? Hell, Marshal wouldn't be in this spot!

  "Are you?" Justin repeated.

  "Am I what?" Like a stunned boxer, Ernest clenched his opponent while his head cleared.

  "Pleased at what I've done?"

  "You think," Ernest weaseled, trying hard to regulate his voice, "I'm not pleased with your progress?"

  "Pleased? You don't act like it," Justin responded.

  "And what about you}" Ernest weaseled again. "Are you pleased?"

  Justin let up and ignored the weaseling this time. Enough was enough. He needed Ernest and he backed off: "Pleased? Yes. And scared. And resolved. And wavering. Everything all mixed up. The main thing now is for me never to go back. I've broken away and the important thing now is to stay away, to stay away forever."

  For the rest of the hour, Ernest tried to make amends by supporting and exhorting his patient: "Hold your ground . . . remember how long you yearned to make such a move . . . you've acted in your best interests . . . this may be the most important thing you've ever done."

  "Should I go back to discuss this with Carol? After nine years, don't I owe it to her?"

  "Let's play it out," Ernest suggested. "What would happen if you went back now to talk?"

  "Mayhem. You know what she's capable of doing. To me. To herself."

  Ernest didn't have to be reminded. He vividly remembered an incident Justin had described a year ago. Several of Carol's law partners were coming over for a Sunday brunch and, early in the morning, Justin, Carol, and the two children had gone out shopping. Justin, who did all the cooking, wanted to serve smoked fish, bagels, and leo (lox, scrambled eggs and onions). Too vulgar, Carol said. She wouldn't hear of it, even though, as Justin reminded her, half the partners were Jewish. Justin decided to take a stand and began to turn the car toward the delicatessen. "No, you don't, you son of a bitch," Carol shouted, and jerked at the steering wheel to turn it back. The struggle in moving traffic ended when she crashed the car into a parked motorcycle.

  4 2. '- ^ Lying on the Couch

  Carol was a wildcat, a wolverine, a madwoman who tyrannized through her irrationality. Ernest remembered another car adventure that Justin had described a couple of years ago. While driving on a warm summer night, she and Justin had argued about the choice of a movie—she for The Witches of Eastwick, he for Terminator II. Her voice rose, but Justin, who had been encouraged by Ernest that week to assert himself, refused to give in. Finally she opened the car door, again in moving traffic, and said, "You miserable fucker, I'm not going to spend another minute with you." Justin grabbed at her, but she sank her nails into his forearm and, as she jumped out into the traffic, plowed four violent red furrows into his flesh.

  Once out of the car, which had been moving about fifteen miles per hour, Carol lurched forward for three or four jolting steps and then slammed into and over the hood of a parked car. Justin stopped the car and rushed to her, parting the crowd that had already gathered. She lay on the street, dazed but serene—stockings ripped and bloodied at the knees, abrasions on her hands, elbows and cheeks, and an obviously fractured wrist. The rest of the evening was a nightmare: the ambulance, the emergency room, the humiliating interrogation by the police and the medical staff.

  Justin was badly shaken. He realized that even with Ernest's help he could not outbid Carol. No stakes were too high for her. That dive out of the moving car was the event that had broken Justin for good. He could not oppose her, nor could he leave her. She was a tyrant, but he had a need for tyranny. Even a single night away from her filled him with anxiety. Whenever Ernest had asked him, as a thought experiment, to imagine walking away from the marriage, Justin became filled with dread. Breaking his bond to Carol seemed inconceivable. Until Laura—nineteen, beautiful, ingenuous, brash, unafraid of tyrants—had come along.

  "What do you think?" Justin repeated. "Should I act like a man and try to talk this over with Carol?"

  Ernest reflected on his options. Justin needed a dominant woman: Was he merely exchanging one for another? Would his new relationship resemble, in a few years, his old one? Still, things had been so frozen with Carol. Perhaps, once pried away from her, Justin might be open, even briefly, for therapeutic work.

  "I really need some advice now."

  Ernest, like all therapists, hated to give direct advice—it was a no-

  Lying on the Couch ^ 4 3

  win situation: if it worked, you infantilized the patient; if it failed, you looked like a jerk. But in this instance he had no choice.

  "Justin, I don't think it's wise just yet to meet with her. Let some time pass. Let her collect herself. Or perhaps try seeing her with a therapist in the room. I'll make myself available or, better yet, give you the name of a marital therapist. I don't mean the ones you've seen already—I know they didn't work out. Someone new."

  Ernest knew that his advice would not be taken: Carol had always sabotaged marital couples therapy. But content —the precise advice he gave—was not the issue. What was important at this point was process: the relationship behind the words, his offering Justin support, his atoning for weaseling, his making the hour wholesome again.

  "And if you feel pressed and need to talk before our next session, call me," Ernest added.

  Good technique. Justin appeared soothed. Ernest regained his poise. He had salvaged the hour. He knew his supervisor would approve of his technique. But he himself did not approve. He felt soiled. Contaminated. He had not been truthful with Justin. They had not been real with each other. And that was what he valued about Seymour Trotter. Say what you will about him—and Lord knows a lot had been said—but Seymour knew how to be real. He still remembered Seymour's response to his question about technique: "My technique is to abandon technique. My technique is to tell the truth."'

  As the hour ended, something unusual transpired. Ernest had always made a point of physically touching each of his patients at every session. He and Justin customarily parted with a handshake. But not this day: Ernest opened the door and somberly bowed his head to Justin as he left.

  TWO

  /y/t was midnight, and Justin Astrid was less than four jr^"^ hours out of her house, when Carol Astrid began cutting ^__^ him out of the rest of her life. She began on the closet floor with Justin's shoelaces and a pair of pinking shears and ended four hours later in the attic cutting the big red R out of Justin's tennis sweater from Roosevelt High School. In between she went from room to room methodically destroying his clothes, his flannel sheets, his fur-lined slippers, his glass-covered beetle collection, his high school and college diplomas, his porno video library. Photos of his summer camp where he and his co-counselor posed with their group of eight-year-old campers, his high school tennis team, the senior prom with his horse-faced date—all were slashed to pieces. Then she turned to their wedding album. With the help of a razor- blade knife that her son used for model plane construction, she soon left no trace of Justin's presence at St. Marks, the favorite site of fashionable Episcopal weddings in Chicago.

  While she was at it, she carved out the faces of her in-laws from the wedding photos. If it hadn't been for them and their promises, empty promises, of big, big money, she'd probably never h
ave married Justin. A snowy day in hell before they would see their grandchildren again. And her brother Jeb, too. What was his picture still doing there? She slashed it. She had no use for him. And all the pictures of Justin's relatives, table after table of the cretins: fat, grinning, raising glasses to make idiotic toasts, pointing their lumpish children toward the camera, shambling over to the dance floor. To hell with them all! Soon every trace of Justin and his family smoldered in the fireplace. Now her wedding, as well as her marriage, had turned to ashes.

  All that remained in the album were a few pictures of herself, her mother, and a handful of friends, including her law partners. Norma and Heather, whom she would phone in the morning for help. She stared hard at her mother's picture, desperately craving her help. But her mother was gone, fifteen years in her grave. Gone even long before that. As her breast cancer slowly invaded all the crawl spaces of her body, her mother had become frozen with terror, and for years Carol had become her mother's mother. Carol tore out the pages with the pictures she wanted, ripped apart the album, and threw it into the fire as well. A minute later she thought better of it— the white plastic album covers might give off fumes toxic to her eight-year-old twins. She snatched it out of the fire and carried it to the garage. Later, with other debris, she'd make a package of it to return to Justin.

  Next, Justin's desk. She was in luck: it was the end of the month and Justin, who worked as the CPA for his father's chain of shoe stores, had brought work home. All his paper records—ledgers and payroll receipts—fell quickly to the scissors. The important stuff, Carol knew, was locked in his laptop. Her impulse was to take a hammer to it, but she thought better of it—she could make use of a five-thousand-dollar computer. File erasure was the proper technique. She tried to get into his documents, but Justin had encrypted them. Paranoid bastard! Later she would get some help on that. Meanwhile she locked the computer into her cedar chest and made a mental note to get all the house locks changed.

  Before dawn she fell into bed after checking on her twins for the third time. Their beds were crowded with dolls and stuffed animals. Deep, peaceful breathing. Such innocent, gentle sleep. God, she

  4 6 ^ Lying on the Couch

  envied them. She slept fitfully for three hours until awakened by an aching jaw. She had ground her teeth in her sleep. Cupping her face in her hands while slowly opening and closing her jaws, she could hear the crepitations.

  She looked across to Justin's vacant side of the bed and muttered, 'You son of a bitch. You aren't worth my teeth!' Then, shivering and holding her knees, she sat up in bed and wondered where he was. The tears running down her cheeks and onto her nightgown startled her. She dabbed at the tears and stared at her glistening fingertips. Carol was a woman of extraordinary energy and quick and decisive action. She had never found relief from looking within, and considered those who did, like Justin, pusillanimous.

  But no further action was possible: she had broken all that remained of Justin, and now she felt so heavy she could barely move. But she could still breathe and, remembering some breathing exercises from yoga class, she inhaled deeply and let out half the breath slowly. Then she exhaled half the remaining breath and half of that, and half again of that. It helped. She tried another exercise that her yoga teacher had suggested. She thought of her mind as a stage and sat back in the audience, dispassionately viewing the parade of her thoughts. Nothing came—only a progression of painful and inchoate feelings. But how to differentiate and grasp them? Everything seemed matted together.

  An image wafted into her mind—the face of a man she hated, a man whose betrayal had scarred her for life: Dr. Ralph Cooke, the psychiatrist she had seen at her college mental health service. A well-scrubbed pink face, round as a moon, topped with wispy blond hair. She had gone to him in her sophomore year because of Rusty, a boy she had dated since she was fourteen. Rusty had been her first boyfriend and, for the next four years, had served her well, permitting her to skip all the awkwardness of looking for dates and prom escorts and, later, sexual partners. She followed Rusty to Brown University, enrolled in every course he took, bartered her way into a dorm room close to his. But perhaps her grip was too tight: ultimately Rusty began dating a beautiful French-Vietnamese student.

  Never had Carol known such pain. At first she turned everything inward: wept every night, refused to eat, skipped classes, got hooked on speed. Later, rage erupted: she trashed Rusty's room, slashed his bicycle tires, stalked and harassed his new girlfriend. Once, she fol-

  lowed the two of them into a bar and overturned a pitcher of beer onto them.

  At first, Dr. Cooke helped. After winning her confidence, he helped her to mourn her loss. The reason her pain was so intense, he explained, was that the loss of Rusty tore open the big wound of her life: being abandoned by her father. Her father was a "Woodstock-ian MIA"; when she was eight, he went to the Woodstock concert and never returned. There were a few holiday cards at first from Vancouver, Sri Lanka, and San Francisco, but then he stopped even that contact. She remembered watching her mother tear and burn his pictures and clothes. After that, her mother never again spoke of him.

  Dr. Cooke insisted that Carol's loss of Rusty drew its power from her father's desertion. Carol resisted, claiming she had no positive memories of her father. Perhaps no conscious memories. Dr. Cooke responded, but may there not have been a host of forgotten nurturing episodes.^ And what about the father of her wishes and dreams— the loving, supporting, protecting father she never had? She mourned that father, too, and Rusty's abandonment opened the crypt of that pain as well.

  Dr. Cooke also comforted her by helping her to assume a different perspective—to consider the loss of Rusty in her entire life trajectory: she was only nineteen, memories of Rusty would fade away. A few months hence she would rarely think of him; in a few years she would have only a vague recollection of a nice young lad named Rusty. Other men would come along.

  In fact, another man was coming along for, as he spoke. Dr. Cooke insidiously edged his chair closer. He assured Carol that she was an attractive, a very attractive woman, held her hand when she wept, hugged her tightly at the end of the sessions, and assured her that a woman with her grace would have no difficulty attracting other men. He spoke for himself, he said, and told her that he was drawn toward her.

  Dr. Cooke rationalized his actions with theory. "Touch is necessary for your healing, Carol. Rusty's loss has fanned the embers of early, preverbal losses, and the treatment approach, too, has to be nonverbal. You can't talk to these kind of body memories—they have to be assuaged by physical comforting and cradling."

  Physical comforting soon progressed to sexual comforting, offered on the sad, worn Kashan rug that separated their two chairs.

  4 8 ^ Lying on the Couch

  Thereafter, sessions took on a prescribed ritual: a few minutes of checking in on her week's events, empathic "tch-tchs" from Dr. Cooke (she never called him by his first name), then an exploration of her symptoms—obsessive thinking about Rusty, insomnia, anorexia, problems concentrating—and then finally a reiteration of his interpretation that her catastrophic reaction to Rusty drew its strength from her father's desertion of the family.

  He was skillful. Carol felt calmer, cared for, and grateful. And then, about halfway through each hour. Dr. Cooke would move from words to action. It might be in the context of Carol's sexual fantasies: he'd say that it was important to make some of those fantasies come true; or, responding to Carol's anger at men, he'd say that his job was to prove that not all men were bastards; or when Carol talked about feeling ugly and unattractive to men, he'd say that he could personally prove that hypothesis wrong, that indeed Carol was stunningly attractive to him. Perhaps it might follow Carol's crying when he'd say, "There, there, it's good to let it out, but you need some holding."

  Whatever the transition, the remainder of the session was the same. He'd slip off his chair, down to the frayed Persian rug, crook his finger at her to follow him. After holding and c
aressing her for a few minutes, he'd hold out his hands, a different-colored condom in each, and ask her to choose. Perhaps her choosing allowed him to rationalize that she was in control of the act. Carol would then open the condom, slip it on his primed cock, the same color as his scrubbed pink cheeks. Dr. Cooke always took a passive position, lying on his back and allowing Carol to impale herself on him and to control the pace and depth of their sexual dance. Perhaps that, too, was to foster the illusion that she was in charge.

  Were these sessions helpful? Carol thought so. Each week for five months she left Dr. Cooke's office feeling cared for. And, precisely as Dr. Cooke had predicted, thoughts of Rusty did indeed fade from her mind, a sense of calm returned, and she resumed attending classes. All seemed well until, one day, after about twenty such sessions, Dr. Cooke declared her healed. His job was done, he told her, and it was time to terminate treatment.

  Terminate therapy! His desertion dumped her back to where she had begun. Though she had not regarded their relationship as permanent, she had never, not for a moment, anticipated being cast off in this fashion. She phoned Dr. Cooke daily. At first cordial and gen-

  tie, he grew sharper and more impatient as the calls continued. He reminded her that the student health service only provided brief therapy, and discouraged her from calling him again, Carol was convinced that he had found another patient to treat with sexual affirmation. So everything had been a lie: his concern, his caring for her, his calling her attractive. Everything had been manipulation, everything had been for his gratification, not for her benefit. She no longer knew what or whom to trust.

  The next few weeks were nightmarish. She desperately wanted Dr. Cooke and waited outside his office hoping for some glimpse, some scrap of his attention. Evening after evening was spent dialing his number or straining to see him through the wrought-iron fence of his enormous home on Prospect Street. Even now, almost twenty years later, she could still feel the impress of the twisted cold iron bars upon her cheeks as she watched his silhouette, and those of his family, moving from room to room. Soon her hurt turned to anger and to thoughts of retribution. She had been raped by Dr. Cooke— a nonviolent rape, but a rape just the same. She turned for help to a female teaching assistant, who advised her to drop it. "You have no case," she told her; "no one will take you seriously. And even if they do, think of the humiliation—having to describe the rape, especially your participation in it and why you freely returned for more rape, week after week."