I know he hopes I’ll go to grad school, get married someday, and have children. I know he worries I’ll end up alone, an alcoholic, an addict, or dead long before the good things he wants for me can catch up. I know the flaws he sees in me and always reminds me to be conscious of: how sensitive I am to rejection; how angry I get deep in; how I endlessly question authenticity; how much I hate sadness and all the things I’ll do to avoid it. He worries about what I will tell my children when they see the scars on my arm. He recognizes my strange attachment to destroying myself that might never go away, but by saying it, knowing it together, we weaken its valence ever so slightly.
When I say, “My life feels really useless to me,” he takes the statement more seriously than I do. However confused I might be, there isn’t all fake and all authentic, mean or kind, worthless or valuable. I am not divided in two but too often I get confused about what is what—I live in two realities but they’re of my making. Developing and walking around with a false/bad and real/good self makes the parts of me and their corresponding worlds opposites by definition. As the famous psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott notes, “No human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality.” Failing to do so results in psychosis. I can only pray I don’t have that—but it certainly feels like it when objects are animated in ways I have no control over or when the silent magic rules my actions or when I mistake waking for dreaming or when my birthdate isn’t 9/20/65 but 9 + 2 and 6 + 5, otherwise known as 11/11. Or that “Cree,” when numbers are assigned to letters, is 3, 18, 5, 5 or 3 (hold the 1) + 8 = 11 and 5 + 5 plus the held 1 = 11, 11.
“It’s either you or the crazy spirits. Both of them are a strand of you and I accept that,” Dr. Kohl tells me one day.
This feels important, as if suddenly there’s room for the magic and me. I don’t have to execute, banish, or even try to stop dividing myself. It’s—I am—all of a piece.
Although I continue to pack my already sizable arsenal with evidence of his indifference and the incompatibility of money, love, happiness, and all the fucking rules of therapy, I try keeping and tasting kindness. By sparing and applying to myself some of the limited empathy and compassion I once expended keeping people at a distance, I’m less resentful of human contact. Pleasing, praising, reassuring, offering insights, and listening without actually exchanging anything leave me hollow. No wonder I want to be alone.
Dr. Kohl says, “You’ve spent your whole life trying to be a good person because you’ve been so certain, for so long, that you’re not.” Fighting to prove myself worthy is a thankless, exhausting task I’ve yet to learn to believe in, much less complete. Given my background and innate character, the idea that I come by my symptoms and behaviors honestly doesn’t let me off the hook for who I am or what I’ve done. But it does thin my contempt with a spritz of compassion.
Delusions complicate the business of claiming an identity—and all delusions are really just the uncertainty of sticking to the agreed-upon version of reality. But as Breuer explained in the case of Anna O.:
Nevertheless, though her two states were thus sharply separated, not only did the secondary state intrude into the first one, but—and this was at all events frequently true, and even when she was in a very bad condition—a clear-sighted and calm observer sat, as she put it, in a corner of her brain and looked on at all the mad business.
Like Anna, as Breuer describes her, I have a consciousness, stronger at certain moments than others, that keeps an eye on me.
“Tuck me in your back pocket,” Dr. Kohl advises, to hold on to the good feelings.
When I try to bluff myself using this pocket trick I have limited success reconnecting to the feeling I have in his presence, where burning never seems like a good idea. But I keep practicing. There’s nowhere good to go. I tried that: white walls filled with anonymous witnesses made the hours pass too easily. Henry James knew the feeling, describing Isabel Archer sitting “in her corner, so motionless, so passive, simply with the sense of being carried, so detached from hope and regret, that if her spirit was haunted with sudden pictures, it might have been the spirit disembarrassed of the flesh.” The quiet release of disappearing to a hospital tempts me still.
“We’re back to the painful loneliness,” he says when I question the possibility that I can change.
When I wonder where my thoughts begin and end, the bit doing the observing tries to locate a center. It’s liquid. Who I am is far from fixed but I’m learning to remember to look for it. To experience sadness is to approach the rabbit hole and when I edge too close the fear kicks in and I think less rationally. That’s when I convince myself that a remote part of me has the real control, whether it’s my crazy obsession with 11s or the sobering fact that I never quite know how I’ll feel when I wake up in the morning or if by noon I’ll wish I were dead. Maybe by getting used to this unevenness, by tracing it to its source, I can edge closer to normal—whatever that might feel like.
CHAPTER 44
Lights On, Rats Out
“She’s confused about the caregiving and sexuality of Rx [treatment],” he writes in a note to himself.
Of course I am! That’s the idea, isn’t it? Even if the love for him isn’t meant to find expression between us, it’s a sketchy outline for a relationship that will eventually, if we can do this right, be full of all the texture of touch, shared experience, mutual understanding, and commitment I want so badly to feel now with and for him. He does his job by striking a precarious balance between my feelings for him and how he positions himself in relation to me.
In August he wrote in my file:
Countertransference time: Is my concern about violating therapeutic neutrality of us being sexual (that being destructive in the long run) a burden of “us,” (I’m eager to be relieved by her working on forming her sexuality in other relationship), or just a “figment” of my fears projected onto her. Develop this with her. 1. Therapy is an aloneness. 2. ⚥ 3. Possibilities—the “object.”
He was putting his training into practice, checking the possibility that to avoid the hint of sexual contamination in treatment coming from him he might be subconsciously distancing me more than was fair, appropriate, or beneficial to me. By sedulously avoiding bringing his own sexual feelings into the mix (even if he wants to be rid of me, I guess he’s human), he was concerned he might be overcompensating by pushing me away too forcefully. He was eager, as he readily admits, to be relieved of my erotic transference. It’s complicated. I don’t doubt he’s been doing his best to get it right—if there is such a thing. He’s rigorously policing his emotional response to me, alert to his own potential for transgressing the therapeutic boundaries. The idea that he might be overcompensating to avoid such a transgression seems to be nagging him.
Even when I’ve tried to seduce him by dressing up, flirting, being witty, or explicitly stating my desire, I doubt I posed a real danger to Dr. Kohl. Even were these veiled offers coming from someone more enticing, he’s likely never been in danger from these simple ploys. What Freud calls “crudely sensual desires” are “more likely to repel and will call for the doctor’s tolerance.” This is borne out in his note to himself regarding countertransference; it reveals more weariness with the situation than a valiant struggle to resist my fabulous allure. Not surprisingly, part of him is “eager to be relieved” of the burden of my desire and its continual pressure on him to “violate therapeutic neutrality” by bringing any latent or overt sexual feeling into the mix. No, the real danger is in what Freud called “a woman’s subtler and aim-inhibited wishes which bring with them the danger of making a man forget his technique and his medical task for the sake of a fine experience.”
Dr. Kohl has conceded to return my regard to a degree—I believe he has made me special, set me above his other patients, as I so wished he would. Has this created what Freud calls “a fine experience” for Dr. Kohl? Has Dr. Kohl chosen Freud’s “middle course”: accepting and returning the patient’s fond feelings but with
holding any physical expression of them? Freud writes, “My objection to this expedient is that psychoanalytical treatment is founded on truthfulness. In this fact lies a great part of its educative effect and its ethical value.” To return the patient’s feelings while knowing that it is a calculated half measure fails the honesty test. “Besides,” as Freud notes, “the experiment of letting oneself go a little way in tender feelings for the patient is not without danger. Our control over ourselves is not so complete that we may not suddenly one day go further than we had intended.”
I take Freud’s meaning of “go further than we had intended” as warning against emotional and physical excesses. Perhaps, as Dr. Kohl’s note suggests, he is overcompensating now for an earlier failure to keep the countertransference in check; maybe he once made errors, sending me signals that he was attracted to me or available sexually. Maybe the craziness that’s practically strangled me with desire for him isn’t all my doing but actually our doing. After all, you can’t have transference without countertransference. Given all the ways he has tried to make me feel connected, secure, and attached over the years, it’s practically inevitable that at some point he miscommunicated or maybe even simply communicated a sexual response I picked up.
If his countertransference hasn’t been as regulated as it might have been, then what I’ve experienced as the therapeutic relationship’s seemingly one-sided intimacy hasn’t been entirely my doing. And yet, despite the resistance to be read into my transference—falling in love being my way of diverting attention from the real work at hand—Dr. Kohl did succeed in allowing my longing for him to persist. This, as Freud notes, is the only way, short of stopping treatment, to impel the treatment forward, to get past the resistance.
“Maybe I make too good a mother because not only do you feel taken care of here, you feel sexual feelings here,” he suggests.
“Oh … oh?” is all I can say.
The psychoanalyst H. W. Loewald writes that the therapeutic process helps “to lift unconscious processes onto a new level of integration” so over time they can be consciously attended to—“to turn our ghosts into ancestors.” It’s one of the most basic Freudian principles. The material I’ve been digging up and rooting around in at 112 Church Street over the years may have been preverbal or simply part of a narrative that, though unremembered and unconscious, has integrated itself into who I am and why I react to the world the way I do.
One ungainly piece I’ve been gluing together is my natural impulse toward masochism. It’s a pervasive part of me, right at the core, imprinted there from my baby days of comforting myself with vague sexual humiliation, from walking mile upon mile in subzero temperatures with my sister, from competitive cross-country skiing kilometer upon kilometer, from lengthy bouts of self-imposed isolation, and, most spectacularly, from holding cigarettes to my skin until every nerve dies and the pain and the pleasure have had their way with me.
A core dynamic attracts me to self-punishment, humiliation, and destruction as a means to power and safety. Maybe that, too, explains why I’ve helped create such an impossible situation with Dr. Kohl. I’ve enjoyed the denial, which, as Freud knew, only fueled the transference love.
More disturbing than the idea that I seek humiliation through rejection is the possibility that I harbor a masochistic desire to submit to Dr. Kohl sexually, what Kernberg calls the “price to pay” for his “love and protection.” This might be what Dr. Kohl is referring to when he notes to himself my “willingness to sell myself down the river for a smidgen of affection.” And yet, the causes and effects of what passes between us, in my mind and in Dr. Kohl’s, are overdetermined—there can be no single, no right answer.
I’ve never doubted the integrity of Dr. Kohl’s effort to instill hope and compassion in me and to direct my desire for him outward. He has expressed its importance repeatedly, most recently by telling me, “I am really worried you will end up so cemented to me as to become cynical about intimacy.” In his effort to pry me loose he’s been up against my will to self-destruct, the gamble I undertook to at once keep him close and keep parts of myself separate from him. He has been to me what Kernberg calls “an unconsciously hated or envied helping figure.” Burning has served “the purpose of ‘triumphing’ over the envied object,” or at least it felt as if it served that purpose when I pressed cigarettes to my skin.
As Dr. Kohl sticks with me, remaining consistent in his care, determined not to abandon me, he may have experienced what Kernberg describes as “phases of almost masochistic submission” to my demands, along with “disproportionate doubts” in his own abilities. I think he doubted himself at times, as is evidenced in part by his comment that he felt “responsible” for the final posthospital burn.
Whatever he felt for me amid the messy mix of paternal, professional, and sexual impulses, he has passed every test I put to him. However much he has done for me—and it’s more than I can measure—his greatest gift has been the essential experience of mattering to him. This is the magic I’ve felt in his presence and the experience of it transcends any of the negative effects the relationship has had on me. By burning and vomiting I may have trivialized the real essence of my struggle to find meaning in my life, but he didn’t let that get in the way of the real work of imparting faith, hope, and a sense I could control my future. That’s what mattered. If my erotic transference and burning have gotten in the way—if their expression is a decoy for raw pain and the far more shameful need to simply be loved and cared for—he has passed through the obstacles of our entanglement.
I think back to a pre-hospital session with him when he said my effort to get myself together, my promise not to leave or die, was “just the old you trying to give me presents.” At the time he said, “It doesn’t work that way.” What I didn’t understand then comes to me now: I need to give myself that present. I need to promise myself to live.
He’s an example of human behavior, compassion, and steadiness I can aspire to even if I still, perversely, long to possess him in his entirety. If more or less putting me in the hospital was based on his fantasy of a “life-threatening infection” rather than the reality of one, if our bargain was a strange one with its “if I go to the hospital then the prize I get is him” logic, I don’t care. Maybe he did what he did, struck that bargain, because, as Kernberg writes, we were “interlocked in a stable, insoluble, transference-countertransference bind” that could end only in a place where “the transference acting out” (burning) could be controlled (the hospital). I have no regrets, even though part of my identity now includes a stint in a psychiatric hospital. I’m now forever inside the crude line drawn around the “mentally ill.” The line demarcates those inside from those outside who remain within the norm. The history carries considerable baggage. Being locked up taught me it’s entirely up to me to get on with life—or not. It’s a choice I make again and again but one I’d undervalued, never quite recognizing it as a true choice that belongs entirely to me.
Dr. Kohl assures me again, “I don’t take it for granted that you’re alive.”
Not rationalizing or not acting on self-destructive desires, resisting them no matter what the reason has slowly built my self-determination. It’s time to locate the most forgiving, kind, gentle threads I possess and press them to my skin. It’s time to act as humble as I feel. I’ve been learning to manage anxiety, rage, sadness, and even lust by writing, reading, drawing, walking, and talking to people outside 112 Church Street. I want badly to burn myself and I think about it every day, many times a day. The inescapable agency of being spreads slow and splotchy as lichen on granite, but it’s there. I’ve tapped what he sees in me. It’s a version of myself that sneaks up on me when I’m effortlessly kind or generous, grab hold of an exciting idea, finish a book I can’t believe I’ve never read, or write a sentence I admire. I’m trying to trust my senses and breathe slowly. I see flashes of peaceful attentiveness delivering the understated rewards I’m trying to hold on to. I want to cool my brain.
Rather than burning away the pressure, I dream of dabbing Tiger Balm there, the mentholated icy ointment soothing away the combustion.
As exhausted as I am by month upon month of rules; the endless internal turbulence; the routine of sleep, therapy, and waitressing, I want to make enough noise to chase away the false expectations, memories, lies, secrets, and illusions—now, here, when I can briefly see them for what they are. Whatever has been scurrying around in the dark too long, blighting every pleasure with doubt, poisoning assurances of present and future happiness—it needs to go. Lights on, rats out. It’s finally time to assess what I’m left with in the absence of secrets known and unknowable while taking care to guard the switch to keep the cruelty, cowardice, weakness, fear, sadness, and arrogance that put me in this unholy mess from slinking back in the minute it goes dark again. Because it will. Every one of my habits of mind will return, but while briefly cowed by the light I have a chance, maybe, of figuring out where I belong, what I want, and how to forgive myself.
Too bad rat urine is so loaded with information. The markings rodents leave wherever they’ve been are a form of communication. Maybe that’s why the struggle to come clean and learn to hold happiness never ends; all the residue of sadness and self-loathing remains behind. Where there’s an infestation, a black light reveals markings on nearly every surface; to get rid of it you practically have to burn the house down. Even when the rats scurry away from bright light to protect their big, sensitive pupils from the glare, even when you can’t see them, they’re there in the walls, behind the baseboard, on the skin, just waiting to revisit all they wrote, to remember, read, and reread the past. There’s no escape. But “the rat has an excuse” for its failure to escape the past. As Hans Zinsser writes in Rats, Lice and History, “As far as we know, it does not appear to have developed a soul, or that intangible quality of justice, mercy, and reason that psychic evolution has bestowed upon man.”
Lights On, Rats Out Page 23
