Mount Misery

by Samuel Shem

  ‘I’m worried about this guy Cherokee,’ Malik said. ‘You try his wife?’

  ‘She won’t come in.’

  ‘He’s depressed. Think he’s suicidal?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You asked?’

  ‘Not recently.’

  ‘Ask. You gotta ask. Maybe he needs meds, a little Prozac?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like meds.’

  ‘I don’t, but I use ’em. How ’bout we see him together?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Don’t be a hero, Basch.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘Ask for help, OK?’

  ‘OK.’ He coughed and blew his nose. ‘But right now,’ I went on, ‘hearing myself talk this way to you, all this Freud stuff seems, I don’t know, kinda silly.’

  ‘It’s bullshit. Worse – it’s abusive. It’s driving your patients away.’

  ‘But Zoe came back. And it fits. Perfectly.’

  ‘That’s why it’s bullshit – because it fits. Human beings are so complex, any theory fits. By fitting, the theory excludes the complexity, so you lose what’s “human.” Theories that fit exclude other theories, and so don’t fit. Like religions excluding other religions, preaching peace, leading to war. What fits can’t fit. The “perfect-fits” fit the worst.’

  ‘That’s crazy.’

  ‘Nope, that’s Gödel. Kurt Gödel, Gödel’s Theorem. Paradigm shift, 1931.’

  ‘But the things A.K. is teaching me allow me to go deeper.’

  ‘You think people are like holes, where there’s a deeper, and deeper is better?’

  ‘You’re the one always talking about “understanding.”’

  ‘In the present, not in the past.’

  ‘But the thing is, I feel it in myself! If I could only drill down to the roots of my behavior, in my past, I’d understand what I’m doing, and I’d be better. All of a sudden my mind is buzzing with the past!’

  ‘See? That’s it. A.K. gets you to think that if only you were good enough to see through the present to the past, you’d be really good, maybe almost as good as her. Analysis reduces one thing to another – this is not this, but that; the real is not real, but fantasy; the present isn’t present, but the past. Kid, I got news for you: healing happens now. Nobody’s healed in the past.’

  ‘Freud did it in the “now.” In his cases, when the unconscious is made conscious, it’s like a flash of light – a catharsis. Bingo. Better!’

  ‘Never happens, catharsis. Never seen one yet, in three years here. And I don’t know anybody who’s seen one yet either. Freud lied, you know. A lot.’

  ‘Isn’t it possible, Malik, that you’re so anti-Freud because you’ve never been analyzed?’

  ‘Whaddaya mean not analyzed? I tried it, OK? With an all-star analyst.’

  ‘Really?’ This was a surprise. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Stopped in the nick of time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘My jump shot tailed off. And then someone I admired told me to stop.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ike White.’

  ‘Ike?’ I said. ‘But he was an analyst himself.’

  ‘Right. So he knew. He lived it, he died it. With his brand-new analyst at his deathbed.’ He sighed. ‘Look, kid, I’ll put it to you simple: analysis says that the way out of the old is the old. But it doesn’t work. Going back over the old just grinds that needle down deeper into that groove. Round and round we go.’

  ‘What’s the alternative?’

  ‘The way out of the old is the new.’

  ‘I don’t need aphorisms, Malik, I need help! I’m losing control! Down in the swamp of my mind my old man is drilling away on my molars, muttering curses, and my mother is throwing knives and crying her heart out and it’s all there, right in front of my eyes, all the fucking time! I constantly feel I’m not good enough! Compared to you, I’m one sick puppy!’

  He squeezed my shoulder, like he used to do. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, kid. You’re fine.’ I felt a warmth, under his hand.

  ‘But I feel sick, Malik. And you’re not with me in it!’

  ‘OK. You’re right. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Talk.’

  ‘Look – all I want now is to learn to use psychology to help people.’

  ‘Psychology doesn’t help people.’

  ‘I’m outta here.’

  ‘Wait!’ He clutched my shoulder. ‘What helps people has nothing to do with psychology. It’s not what theory you use, or what words you say.’

  ‘What helps people, then?’

  ‘When a person feels seen, and you sense them feeling seen, and you feel seen by them. Right then, in that moment, there’s a touch of the spirit. That’s it, that’s all. Spirit. Healing in psychotherapy is an act of spirit.’

  ‘I don’t know from “spirit.” I know you can’t prove it, but I still—’

  ‘Of course I can prove it. Psychology you can’t prove, but spirit’s easy to prove.’ He smiled. ‘Want me to prove it?’ I nodded. ‘You’re breathing, OK?’

  ‘You want me to answer that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes, I am breathing.’

  ‘Good. So’m I. Now, next step: stop breathing.’

  I held my breath, as long as I could, and then breathed out.

  ‘No, no,’ Malik said, ‘I said, “Stop breathing.”’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I mean stop breathing period.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Try ’n’ stop breathing, see how far you get. Are you doing the breathing? Or is the life-breath something beyond you, something we call “spirit”?’

  ‘But I’m not there, Malik, I’m on real shaky ground. I need some real, concrete guidance. Freud and A.K. have it. Why are you bugging me, why?’

  ‘’Cause I care, kid, and I feel like I’m losin’ you, fast.’

  His words hit home. A warmth spread through me, over me, all the way up to my ears. No matter what, he had stuck with me, through the year. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I care too. It’s just that I’m feeling a little lost.’

  ‘I’m with you, Roy.’

  ‘Lost?’

  ‘Feeling a little lost too, yop.’ He smiled, sadly, those dark eyes glistening. He coughed back tears, once, twice.

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Just life,’ he said quietly. ‘Life as it is, life as it could be?’

  The rest of the afternoon I was in a funk, a gloom so murky that I was barely functioning, tripping over waste-baskets and bumping into doorjambs. On the way out I passed A.K.’s secretary, who’d once been my secretary, Nancy.

  ‘So long, Nance, see you tomorrow. If I’m still alive.’

  ‘Look at you! Your clothes are all rumpled, your eyes look like, I don’t know, black eyes or something. You look terrible.’

  ‘You should see it from this side.’

  ‘Remember, Roy, you’re not crazy.’

  ‘From where I am, crazy’s a step up. At least it’s a definite.’

  ‘Hey, you’ll make it. She likes you, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dr Lowell.’

  ‘Me? She told you that?’

  ‘She’d never say it, but I can tell. She like really likes you. G’night.’

  Enlivened by this, I walked out. As I bundled up to meet the cold, suddenly there she was beside me. If I looked terrible, she looked terrific, the soft fur collar of her stylish black coat pulled tightly up to her cheeks, framing her closely cropped head of light brown hair, which at that moment shone like a corona against the golden happenstance of a fake gas lamp. Hearing me, she turned. The gold light made her face look bright and fresh.

  ‘I don’t get it, Dr Lowell,’ I said. ‘I listen to one or two patients a day and wind up a total wreck, while you listen to patients and supervisees all day long and you look as fresh as ever. How do you do it?’

  ‘So who listens?’

  I
stared at her.

  She laughed. She actually laughed! ‘That was a joke. Don’t be so stiff all the time, Roy. Laugh a little.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Good evening.’

  ‘Good night. Yes, yes.’

  I watched her disappear into a sexy black Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. The door closed with a powerful thunk. Despite the inhuman cold, I felt a glow in my chest, a warmth. Might I just be good enough, after all?

  Twelve

  WAS IT CYNICAL of me, or idealistic, to give Freud a chance with Cherokee, Christine, and Zoe?

  Despite myself, despite everything I had learned about what was crucial to being with other people, as the deepfreeze of January was iced over by the cruelty of February, I tried it. How could I not? If I resisted, A.K. told me I was resisting because of my neurotic, unanalyzed resistance. And what alternative was there? Heiler’s SELF-psychology? Toshiba’s imbecilic Diagnostic and Statistical Manual? The druglords, Errol and Win? Which left Malik – Leonard A. Malik with his buddy system and his humble power of example of how to connect. But day by day in the virtual Vienna of Thoreau, Malik seemed to be fading, his voltage dimming down. I loved him and was in awe of his gifts, but I had started to feel a niggling suspicion that he was just that: a gifted man, one of a kind who, despite his scorn for theory of any kind, was able, through sheer bigness of heart, to work magic with the suffering of others.

  Compared to him, I wasn’t much gifted. It was a relief to stop trying to be Malik and to realize that I, not great at this and maybe not even all that good, had to rely on a theory. Much like my father who, realizing that compared to other golfers he was no pro and would never be, scoured Golf Digest every month for theories – ‘The Waggle at Address,’ ‘Freeing up the Left,’ ‘What Not to Think About on the Backswing,’ ‘Three Lessons on Bad Lies’ – and then bought the latest equipment, the Big Berthas and Miracle Wedges that promised long balls and exquisite touch.

  Was my reliance on theory an act of cynicism or idealism? Working my way around the world the year before, I’d met many men and women who at first seemed cynical or idealistic, but who, as I’d gotten to know them, had confounded categorization. In July in the Dordogne, the cynical farmer next door turned out to be a Resistance fighter who had held the line against the Germans, the line being the very farmhouse we were getting drunk in as he told me. Eleven months later in Changsha, China, the idealistic young woman working nonstop to rescue the rows of girl babies from the rising floodwaters threatening the orphanage in Social Welfare Center Number One, when asked about the neglect of fifty less hardy newborns in a back room, shrugged and said, ‘Bad luck.’ Telling the faithful from the nihilistic was as hard as telling the truthful from the liar. Ike White, who had seemed so authentic and humble, had all the while I knew him been living the arrogance of a lie.

  Just that month Consumer Reports, having surveyed thousands of great Americans about psychotherapy in much the same way they surveyed them about vacuum cleaners, announced that talk therapy worked – worked whether or not drugs also were given, eat your heart out, Win – and the more therapy, the better it worked. Freudian analysis, the most, was by implication the best.

  And so, in this, the most vain season – dark when I awoke for work and dark when I left Misery for home – whether from resignation or brave hope, I started the psychoanalysis of my patients. A.K., upon hearing that Cherokee was rich, had worked the entrails and said, ‘Regress him. Take him up to five sessions a week. Deepen his transference to you, as I’m doing with Oly Joe Olaf.’ Oly Joe, the teenager who had been carried into Thoreau all curled up in Oral Stage Arrest, under the five-times-a-week onslaught of A.K. had now regressed even further into orality. Sometimes he lay curled up in bed with his ‘blankie,’ sucking his thumb, chewing gum, babbling baby talk and sipping a Mountain Dew – all at the same time. While regression didn’t seem much like progress to me, I knew that I didn’t know enough to know that for sure.

  Seeing Cherokee Putnam five times a week was making a profound difference. Suddenly things started happening just as A.K. had predicted. In late January I had bought my first bound ledger with a line down the middle of each page, and a supply of yellow number 2 pencils and an electric pencil sharpener that honed them to perfect points. This was my ledger entry for the end of a session in early February:

  ‘I dreamed I was lying in Father’s arms – ah, forget it.’

  ‘Yes, and what comes to mind?’

  ‘He was squeezing the life out of me. That’s all I remember.’

  ‘And what is your fantasy, hmm?’

  ‘He’s fucking her in therapy. I feel horrible.’

  ‘And what are your thoughts about her fucking him in therapy?’

  ‘I think it’s true.’

  OK, this is the Oedipus Complex. God I’m hungry! Maybe tonight I’ll do takeout Chinese?

  Technique 1: The Free Association.

  Castration anxiety and unconscious resistance to talking about it.

  Technique 2: Fantasy. I’m starving!

  His Oedipal wish to ‘fuck’ his Mother/wife is being projected onto his ‘fucking’ his Father/Schlomo.

  Technique 4: Ask the Opposite: if he talks feeling, you talk thought.

  Projective Identification. Hey, could this be the Oscillator?

  ‘Hrummpht!’

  ‘Last night we went out to dinner and afterward in her purse I—’

  ‘Where’d you go?’

  ‘The Gandhi, but afterward—’

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘It was good, but afterward I found a pack of condoms in her purse. And I’ve had a vasectomy.’

  ‘Yes, and what are your feelings about your thoughts that he’s fucking her in therapy?’

  ‘I still hear that voice inside, but ever since I started my affair with Christine, it doesn’t bother me as much. I worry about getting in too deep with her, but …’

  ‘And so you feel better?’

  ‘I feel like crap and it’s your fault! Now, not only am I paranoid, but you’ve got me cheating on my wife!’

  Technique 5: The Psychoanalytic Grunt. But I feel a little like Thai. Hm, wonder why I associated Thai?

  Dinner? Now you’re talkin’.

  Oh yeah, that new Indian place yeah.

  Maybe I’ll try it?

  Hm. Maybe she is fucking somebody after all.

  Technique 4: Ask the Opposite You Just Asked. No, better stick with Chinese.

  God I love hearing the sexy bits of their affair! More!

  Fear of his Engulfing/Intrusive Mother.

  Shit – a mistake. Erase it.

  His Oedipal rage at my mistake. Erase this too.

  He thinks I’m his Father.

  ‘I’ve got you cheating?’

  ‘She’s your patient, isn’t she? It’s so embarrasing! I’m acting just like Father – all of his slimy affairs. And now I’m hearing his voice all the time too: “Don’t be a puff Cher’!” I’m so depressed I could scream!’

  ‘Ahem.’

  ‘Time’s up already? Please, Doc, don’t hit me too hard today, OK?’

  ‘Hey, it hurts to have your cock cut off.’

  Silence. Stunned look in eyes.

  ‘You are hungry for your Father’s love and starve yourself to get it and Christine can’t feed the hurt of feeling “I am not good enough.”’

  Father-transference interpretation.

  You mean your Mother.

  Identification with Father.

  Projection of his homosexual wish. Oh, such a punim! – why do I sound so much like Schlomo? A sign that I’m comfy with my own homosexual wishes. And hey it hurts to have your cock cut off.

  Thirty seconds left. Hit him with a final interpretation, one to grow on.

  Castration Anxiety. He sees me as his Distant/Sadistic Father, great.

  Got him. Great! Go for it again.

  Not bad, but why all these ‘ands’? Just like my father, and why do all my Freudian interpre
tations sound like his letters? And why has he stopped writing me letters?

  Silence. Panicked look in his eyes.

  More silence. His look changes to gratitude and admiration.

  ‘Gotta hand it to you, Doc, you’re good. You beat me again.’

  He staggers out, closes the door.

  Maybe tonight I’ll order chicken with cashews?

  And Szechaun spicy pork.

  Oedipal Rivalry: I, the Father, win, he, the Son, loses.

  Chow down!

  Cherokee’s Father-transference to me now was so intense it was almost palpable: his hunger for my approval, his identifying with me, trying to be friends with me, asking about my car, my wife, my house, my kids, fearing my wrath, complying with whatever I said, putting himself down – all because he wanted to kill me.

  It was incredible to see, in Cherokee’s childhood Genital-Stage arrest, how well he fit Freud: at age five his unresolved castration anxiety had back-flipped into a killer Superego now perched on his skull like a hawk, peering down at the dove of his Ego in his brain, both dove and hawk pecking at the lizard in his groin, his Id. The unconscious forces behind his behavior were being made conscious. His affair was, deep down, a way both of identifying with his distant/sadistic Father and of making love to his intrusive/engulfing Mother (to whom he had a strong attachment, the root of his homosexuality). His trying to ‘kill’ Father by shunning Wall Street for Walt Disney deep down was a way of loving Father homosexually. He’d been afraid to ‘be bigger’ than Father and had ‘cut myself down’ in love and work (‘lieben und arbeiten’). Day after day we’d been drilling down through the swamp of his obsession to the bedrock of his childhood until finally, today, he’d gotten relief from his symptom:

  ‘I still hear that voice – “He’s fucking her in therapy” – but you know something, Doctor? It doesn’t bother me as much.’

  If this wasn’t turning his neurotic misery into common unhappiness, what was? He still hadn’t owned his homosexuality, but the love between us was almost palpable and I had every confidence he would. It was dynamite work.

  As was my work with Christine and Zoe. A.K. had suggested I regress these cases as well, but Christine could only afford to come once a week. She too fit Freud like a glove. That harlot-blond hair, those black weeping tights and short skirts, those grand swings of mood from elation to despair, her using sex as bait – here was a classic case of hysteria.