Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  ‘Only if it’s so present you can taste it,’ he said bitterly. ‘The past is self. The past is an excuse. The past is why I can read you like a book.’ He sighed. ‘Not my strong suit, humility. But listen up.’ He fixed me with his eyes. ‘Any obsession is a turning away from really living your life.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So in therapy you gotta look at the life, not the obsession. If you’re really into living your life, in connection with others, living your life to the hilt – hey, you can’t obsess. Whatever obsession, it starts to look foolish, irrelevant, like when you’re totally in love, talkin’ on the phone all the time, the phone bill’s irrelevant. Think of your own obsessions, OK?’

  What came to mind first was Berry losing Berry losing Berry, but then it was Jill and her satiny underwear. I was wondering how this could be ‘a turning away from really living my life’ when suddenly I felt strong arms lock around my neck and a searing pain on the top of my head.

  Malik had jumped me from behind, grabbed my head, and was grinding his fist into my scalp, making it burn. I struggled to get away, but his arms were like steel bars, and he hung on, grinding harder. My scalp felt on fire. We fought, hard, until I was sweating and he was sneezing and he let go, laughing, sneezing, coughing, laughing.

  ‘What the hell are you doing, you jerk?’

  ‘Giving you a noogie. Remember noogies?’

  ‘Yeah, but why are you giving me a noogie?’

  ‘To get you in tune with the kids here. You did good today, you played a sport! The key concept, these three months, is: we stick together. Say it.’

  ‘I’m not gonna – don’t!’

  He was lunging at me again. ‘Say it.’

  ‘We stick together.’

  ‘’Cause the risk, now, with old A.K., is immense.’

  ‘Fascinating case, your Cherokee.’

  She was talking? A.K. was talking!

  It was later that afternoon in her office high up under the skylight in the dome of Thoreau. I was in supervision with her. As I’d talked about my work with Cherokee, up until that moment she had said nothing. A.K. was the kind of woman who, given the choice between being true to her gender or being true to her ambition, had jumped wholeheartedly into her ambition. She had outmanned men in a man’s world. She had learned the power of silence. Backed by her power over me and by the emblems of Freud placed strategically around her office – much as the CEO of a corporation might be backed by the company logo and slogan and sound byte and web site and, out the window behind the desk, the smokestacks – A.K. held silence like a stick. As in one of those grade-school games where you try to outstare the other guy, trying to make him blink first, she outsilenced me. Her cropped light brown hair was mannish, as were her high cheekbones and fixed nose and dark and unmade-up eyes. Her lips were the only feminine touch, plump, inviting, as if they were about to giggle at all this muscular silence, at the power suit and the tight, tall body, and shout out, ‘Hey, come on – lighten up!’

  Unable to hold her silent gaze, I had inspected every inch of her office. The decor seemed of the century past, reminding me of my immigrant grandparents’ apartment on Magaw Place in New York City. Heavy velvet drapes, weathered leather chairs with grandmotherly doilies, fringed lamp shades, and in the corner a massive analyst’s couch covered by a heavy multicolored drape reaching to the Persian carpet. Behind the couch was a high-backed leather chair, winged for a nodding head, and a fringed ottoman. My eye caught a black-and-white photo showing another draped couch, chair, carpet, ottoman – a replica of the office I was sitting in! The caption informed me that this was ‘S. Freud’s Office, 19 Bergasse, Vienna, the Birthplace of Psychoanalysis.’

  A small framed photo sat with its back to me on A.K.’s desk. In a locked glass cabinet behind A.K. was a row of leather-bound ledgers like you used to see in accountants’ offices, each with initials on its spine.

  As I told A.K. about my session with Cherokee, she wrote furiously in a crisp new ledger. Each page had a vertical line down the middle. On the left-hand side, A.K. wrote what I said Cherokee said and what I said back to him. For each phrase on the left-hand side, she wrote her own phrase on the right-hand side, as if doing a crossword puzzle.

  ‘Fascinating case,’ she repeated, and glanced at her watch. She lit her cigar. Then she reached to the left-hand side of her desk next to the small framed photo where there were two perfectly sharpened yellow number 2 pencils, grasped one in her sculpted hand, and slid it slowly across to the right-hand side of the desk, where it joined two other perfect yellow number 2 pencils, in strict alignment. This meant that we were now at the three-quarter mark of the supervisory session. When I had entered, there had been four number 2 pencils on the left. As I had sat down, she had slid number 2 number one left to right; at the fifteen-minute mark, number 2 number two; now, number 2 number three; when that sinewy forearm reached for number 2 number four, I gathered, the session would be over and I would be history.

  ‘Deep down it’s penis,’ she said, reading right to left.

  ‘Penis? But he’s obsessed with Schlomo fucking his wife.’

  ‘No, he’s paranoid.’

  ‘Suppose it’s true?’

  ‘Paranoia,’ she went on, as if I hadn’t asked what I’d just asked. ‘But paranoia is surface level, a defense against a deeper homosexuality …’ She paused, blowing out a diabolical silence.

  ‘Homosexuality?’ I said, as nonchalantly as possible, but all of a sudden seeing how attracted I was to Cherokee, how much I liked, even loved, him. I started to sweat, and said nothing more.

  ‘Homosexuality which is a defense against the Oedipal struggle, which is, at its deepest level, a defense against castration anxiety. Penis.’

  ‘Penis?’

  ‘Penis. Your patient Cherokee is a classic case of what Freud describes in his classic on cases like this, “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality.’” She nodded to a bookshelf on which were several feet of books in light blue dust jackets, as strictly aligned as the pencils. The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. ‘Read Freud. Cherokee is a classic case of homosexuality, disguised as paranoia.’ She then gave a brief rendition of the classic paper that sparkled and shone with clarity, even with a flicker of wit. It was not all that hard to understand, although my attention was split: part of me was listening to the content, part of me was astonished by the process – she was so damn chatty. She seemed to care about teaching me how to work with my patient. This, after Toshiba, seemed bizarre. She stopped, laying out silence.

  ‘But what about Schlomo fucking his wife? You don’t think it’s true?’

  ‘There is no truth, there is only the individual perception of experience.’

  ‘Wait a minute. The truth is that I’m taller than you.’

  ‘That’s not the truth, that’s your transference to me.’

  ‘We can measure it. To see who in fact is taller.’

  ‘You think “taller” can be “measured”?’

  I saw her point. She wasn’t only aware of the objective fact, she was also aware of the deeper meaning psychologically. ‘But I’m stuck,’ I said. ‘With Cherokee, I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘You’re not doing badly.’ This stunned me. Except for Malik, my supervisors at Misery were constantly telling me just how badly I was doing. ‘You even asked about the father-transference, his feeling ugly compared to you.’

  ‘Yeah but he wouldn’t talk about it.’

  ‘Of course not. He had resistance to it. You should have asked about the resistance, the defense. You say, “What gets in the way of your talking about your father?” In analysis there’s a correct response to every situation.’

  ‘A road map?’

  ‘With limited routes. Roots. Like a towering tree. They come into our consulting rooms with seams, we psychoanalyze them, they go out seamless.’

  They go out seamless. Ike White’s phrase. Her friend, classmate, and fellow Schlomo patient.
Was this some kind of secret Freudian password?

  A.K. lit her cigar, puffed, and stared at the shape. A banana, perhaps a cuke. Could, of course, be a penis too. ‘This hospital is a travesty of psychiatric care. Money, insurance, DSM diagnosis to five digits, drugs. No-one listens to patients. No-one gives them enough time to heal. Here on the Family Unit we are lucky. We have time, money, and Freud. Freud is the only complete, cohesive, scientific theory of human development, pathology, and treatment. In fact we today here are much like Freud in fin de siècle Vienna: radicals, rebels, even revolutionaries, trying to increase human knowledge in spite of the distortions of the biologists and the bankers. In the consulting chamber, we use the powerful tool of psychoanalysis to help people change and grow.’

  ‘Psychoanalysis cures people?’

  ‘No, no,’ she said with a smile. She actually smiled! ‘We wouldn’t stoop to cure. As Freud put it, “Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your neurotic misery into common unhappiness.’”

  ‘But Cherokee won’t talk to me about his feelings, or his past. He just talks about his obsession.’

  ‘You have to go deeper into his obsession, find the deeper meaning, the roots of it in his childhood, his past.’

  This was exactly what Malik had warned me against doing. Suspicious, I asked, ‘How?’

  ‘If he talks feeling, you talk thought. If he talks thought, you talk feeling. If he talks past, you talk present. If he talks present, you talk past. You the doctor talk constantly about what he the patient doesn’t want to talk about. This is the analysis of the resistance. Then, when he starts distorting his relationship with you and calling you a sonofabitch for not talking about what he wants to talk about, then you do the analysis of the transference, telling him he’s treating you like his father, his mother, his aunt Sally, whatever. On a deeper level still, you can analyze the resistance to the transference, and the transference to the resistance. Not to mention the countertransference to each – but that’s way beyond you at this point.’

  Finally I felt I was getting some concrete advice about what to do in therapy, and I scribbled this down on the back of a bank stub. ‘But how do I do that?’ I asked. ‘How do I get him to talk about his feelings?’

  ‘You use the Three Techniques of analysis. One, free association. You ask, “What’s the first thing that comes to mind?” Two, dream analysis. You analyze dreams. Three, fantasy analysis. “Tell me your fantasies about x.” You explore.’

  I saw her arm twitch. Fearing she was thinking number 2 number four, I felt an urgency to ask her about Christine, with whom I was also stuck.

  ‘Can I ask you quickly about Christine, the one who—’

  ‘You followed down to the tennis court.’

  ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘The one who gave you that sweater you are wearing.’

  ‘How … how …?’ I was stunned. ‘Who told you?’

  ‘If you were analyzed, you would no longer blush. Be careful, Dr Basch. All you have in this field is your reputation. You just raped that patient.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Seduced her. By taking her sweater as a gift. Gifts are never just gifts, but parameters – uncontrolled events influencing the analysis.’

  ‘But it’s just a sweater.’

  ‘A sweater is never just a sweater. You slip your “head” into it. What comes to mind?’

  ‘Penis into vagina. But I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Freud said, “Women’s strongest motive in coming for treatment is the hope that they might somehow still obtain a penis, the lack of which is so painful to them” – “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.’” Again she opened the new leather-bound ledger. ‘Go on.’

  I told her about my work with Christine, leaving out the meeting with Cherokee. Why ask for trouble?

  ‘She said, “You’re better than two Bayer aspirin”?’ A.K. shook her head. ‘“Two bare-ass prin”? And you don’t believe it’s all about the penis?’

  ‘At first maybe, but the last session, she said, “You’re turning out to be a real friend, helping me. I can see you helping people in your family. I see you rushing in, like the Red Cross, healing the cholera in your family.’”

  A.K. nodded and then seemed to grow larger, head larger, eyes larger, pupils dilating as if in astonishment, dark brown, even black. I felt transfixed by her, as if caught in headlights at night. Finally she said:

  ‘But deep down, with your family, you feel that you are the cholera.’

  Boom! A bomb went off in my gut. Boom! Shrapnel rained down. A vista opened up inside, a vista of me in my family, my feeling that I never satisfied them, that I was always disappointing them – those accusatory tears of my mother, those puzzled stares of my father from the dental chair – always bringing sadness to them and leaving them with sadness, like that last trip to Florida with Jill, the sadness of my aloofness, of Jill not being Berry – my father hadn’t written to me since! – the first time he hadn’t written in all the years since I left for Harvard. Feeling that I was always letting them down, I had tried harder and harder to achieve things, starting every conversation with my latest achievement, bringing prizes home – like my boyhood friends who hunted on the Polish Sportsmen’s hunting preserve out by the Lone Star and Universal Atlas quarries would bring home first squirrels and rabbits and then deer, first a doe and then, finally earning their manhood, a buck – as if, if I brought home big enough prizes my achievements could win their love, and yet gradually it dawned on me that no achievement can win love—

  ‘All you have in this field,’ A.K. was saying, grasping the fourth and final yellow number 2, ‘is—’

  ‘Your reputation.’

  ‘And your penis.’

  Boom! Shrapnel rained down.

  ‘Explore,’ she said firmly, the pencil almost aligned with the three others. ‘Listen in the material for the penis envy.’

  ‘I will,’ I said, trying to rise from my chair but suddenly feeling so weighted down that at first I failed. It was as if I’d been sitting on a planet of a lot greater gravity, say Jupiter. With immense second effort I hoisted my leaden bulk to my feet – which felt far away. ‘I will explore.’

  ‘You can’t, fully.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You haven’t been analyzed.’

  ‘I have to be analyzed to explore fully, to treat my patients fully?’

  But the four pencils were now strictly aligned. I was history. ‘Thanks,’ I said, feeling a strange gratitude of such bizarre intensity that it seemed to be controlling my mind and my legs, so that it was all I could do to resist the urge to make a slight bow of obeisance, like a slave to a kind pasha. I staggered out.

  ‘You’re so like into me tonight!’ Jill said that night as we lay on the rug in front of a dying fire in the house up the street, cuddling. She was back from a UFO conference in New Jersey. The couple who owned the house was away. Their dog Muffie, a big mutt, lay nearby. I was treating my heartbreak about Berry with alcohol and sex and love. If I thought of Berry with a man, my obsession with Jill helped me feel I had no right to be jealous, and if I thought of Berry with Chandra, my mind went round and round. At first I would feel happy for her for being with someone she described as so solid and sensual and spiritual, and then I would feel a panic of envy and wish I could find someone like that and sometimes with alarm I would realize that that someone might in fact have been Berry.

  ‘You have some fantasies about that?’ I asked. All evening long I had been trying out the Three Techniques A.K. had taught me.

  ‘Shhh!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shush!’ She looked around. Muffie whined pitifully.

  ‘Is someone there?’

  ‘Them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘From the UFO.’ Tail between her legs, Muffie waddled out.

  ‘They’re here?’

  ‘In a ring around the rug.’

  ‘Shit.’

 
‘I just knew they would follow me back from Newark.’

  I stared right and left and tried to struggle up. Nothing.

  ‘Don’t stare at them, dum-dum,’ she whispered. ‘Just act normal.’

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ I whispered back.

  ‘’Course not. You can’t see ’em. C’mon.’

  ‘With them watching?’

  ‘They’re here to learn. C’mon.’

  With a little coaxing, I did my part as an earthling to demonstrate the use of what A.K. had referred to as ‘the powerful tool of psychoanalysis.’

  At some point and to my alarm, as if implanted in my hetero head as an experiment by aliens, I found myself thinking of Cherokee.

  Eleven

  ‘IT’S NOT WORKING. This therapy’s not working. Let’s just forget it.’

  It was a week later, halfway through my session with Cherokee, and I was about to lose him. I had used the Malik approach, first trying to persuade him to bring Lily in with him for a meeting. No way. Then I had suggested that his obsession with Schlomo fucking her was a turning away from his life.

  ‘What life? I’ve got no life. You don’t get it. This overshadows everything. Focusing on it with you has made it worse. It’s there constantly now, just below the surface: “He’s fucking her in therapy.” Today, the only thing I’m looking forward to is seeing your patient Christine again after my session’s over. In fact, I might as well leave early. Spend some extra time talking to her.’ He started to rise from his chair. ‘Let’s just forget it. I guess I’m just a hopeless case.’

  My heart sank. And I’m just a hopeless case as a therapist.

  The past week had been a weird, conflicted time. There were only four patients on Thoreau, and so I had had time to read and think. And play basketball. Malik had organized a LAMBS game for the four adolescents, and I’d joined in. Even Oly Joe had uncurled once a day to play. But I had also started reading Freud, the papers A.K. had suggested: for Cherokee, paranoia; for Christine, penis envy during interminable analysis.

  The paranoia paper was incredible. In a scant twelve pages Freud managed to describe the neurotic mechanisms in the normal condition, jealousy, the pathological condition, paranoia, and the reason for both these conditions, ‘a defense against homosexuality.’ I’d been struck by how perfectly Cherokee fit Freud. I’d copied out a few quotes, which were now lying before me on my desk: