Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  Man Goes to See a Doctor

  Lately, a lot of people—why, I'm not entirely sure—have been sending me clippings about the decline and fall of psychoanalysis. Most of the reasons given for its disappearance made sense: People are happier, busier; the work done by the anti-Freudian skeptics has finally taken hold of the popular imagination, so that people have no time for analytic longueurs and no patience with its mystifications.

  Along with those decline-and-fall pieces, though, I also got sent—and in this case I don't entirely want to know why—a lot of hair-raising pieces about mental illness and its new therapies: about depressions, disasters, hidden urges suddenly (or brazenly) confessed, and how you can cure them all with medicine. Talking is out, taking is in. Some of my friends seem to be layered with drugs from the top down, like a pousse-café: Rogaine on top, then Prozac, then Xanax, then Viagra…. In this context, my own experience in being doctored for mental illness seems paltry and vaguely absurd, and yet, in its way, memorable.

  I was on the receiving end of what must have been one of the last, and easily one of the most unsuccessful, psychoanalyses that have ever been attempted—one of the last times a German-born analyst, with a direct laying on of hands from Freud, spent forty-five minutes twice a week for five years discussing, in a small room on Park Avenue decorated with Motherwell posters, the problems of a “creative” New York neurotic. It may therefore be worth recalling, if only in the way that it would be interesting to hear the experiences of the last man mesmerized or the last man to be bled with leeches. Or the last man—and there must have been such a man as the sixteenth century drew to a close and the modern age began—to bring an alchemist a lump of lead in the sincere belief that he would take it home as gold.

  So it happened that on a night in October 1990, I found myself sitting in a chair and looking at the couch in the office of one of the oldest, most patriarchal, most impressive-looking psychoanalysts in New York. He had been recommended to me by another patient, a twenty-year veteran of his couch. The choice now presents itself of whether to introduce him by name or by pseudonym, a choice that is more one of decorum than of legal necessity (he's dead). To introduce him by name is, in a sense, to invade his privacy. On the other hand, not to introduce him by name is to allow him to disappear into the braid of literature in which he was caught—his patients liked to write about him, in masks, theirs and his—and from which, at the end, he was struggling to break free. He had, for instance, written a professional article about a well-known patient, in which the (let's say) playwright who had inspired the article was turned into a painter. He had then seen this article, and the disputes it engendered, transformed into an episode in one of the playwright's plays, with the playwright-painter now turned into a novelist, and then the entire pas de deux had been turned by a colleague into a further psychoanalytic study of the exchange, with the occupations altered yet again—the playwright-painter-novelist now becoming a poet—so that four layers of disguise (five, as I write this) gathered around one episode in his office. “Yes, but I received only one check” was his bland response when I pointed this out to him.

  His name, I'll say, was Max Grosskurth, and he had been practicing psychoanalysis for almost fifty years. He was a German Jew of a now vanishing type—not at all like the small, wisecracking, scared Mitteleuropean Jews that I had grown up among. He was tall, commanding, humorless. He liked large, blooming shirts, dark suits, heavy handmade shoes, club ties. He had a limp that, in the years when I knew him, became a two-legged stutter and then left him immobile, so that our last year of analysis took place in his apartment, around the corner from the office. His roster of patients was drawn almost exclusively from among what he liked to call creative people, chiefly writers and painters and composers, and he talked about them so freely that I sometimes half expected him to put up autographed glossies around the office, like the ones on the wall at the Stage Deli. (“Max—Thanks for the most terrific transference in Gotham! Lenny.”) When we began, he was eighty, and I had crossed thirty.

  I've read that you're not supposed to notice anything in the analyst's office, but that first evening I noticed it all. There was the couch, a nice Charles Eames job. On one wall there was a Motherwell print—a quick ink jet—and, opposite, a framed poster of one of the Masaccio frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. I was instantly impressed. The two images seemed to position him (and me) between Italian humanism, in its first, rocky, realistic form, at one end, and postwar New York humanism, in its jumpy, anxiety-purging form, at the other. On a bookshelf beside him were nothing but bound volumes of a psychoanalytic journal, rising to the ceiling. (He had edited that journal for a time. “Let me give you some counsel,” he said to me much later. “Editing never means anything.”)

  He was lit by a single shaded bulb, just to his left, in that kind of standing brass lamp with a long arcing neck. This put his face in a vaguely sinister half-light, but, with his strong accent and the sounds of traffic out on Park Avenue and a headlight occasionally sweeping across the room, the scene had a comforting European melancholia, as though directed by Pabst.

  Why was I there? Nothing interesting: the usual mixture of hurt feelings, confusion, and incomprehension that comes to early-arriving writers when the thirties hit. John Updike once wrote that, though the newcomer imagines that literary New York will be like a choir of angels, in fact it is like The Raft of the Medusa—and he was wrong about this only in that the people on the raft of the Medusa still have hope. In New York, the raft has been adrift now for years, centuries, and there's still no rescue boat in sight. The only thing left is to size up the others and wait for someone to become weak enough to eat.

  I spilled out my troubles; told him of my sense of panic, anxiety; perhaps wept. He was silent for a minute—not a writer's minute, a real one, a long time.

  “Franz Marc was a draftsman of remarkable power,” he said at last: the first words of my analysis. His voice was deep and powerful, uncannily like Henry Kissinger's: not quacky, pleading Viennese but booming, arrogant German.

  The remark about Franz Marc was not quite apropos of nothing—he knew me to be an art critic—but very near. (Franz Marc was the less famous founder of the German Expressionist movement called Der Blaue Reiter; Kandinsky was the other.) He must have caught the alarmed look in my eyes, for he added, more softly, “There are many worthwhile unexplored subjects in modern art.” Then he sat up in his chair—swallowed hard and pulled himself up—and for a moment I had a sense of just how aged he was.

  “You put me in mind,” he said—and suddenly there was nothing the least old in the snap and expansive authority of his voice—“you put me in mind of Norman Mailer at a similar age.” (This was a reach, or raw flattery; there is nothing about me that would put anyone in mind of Norman Mailer.) “Barbary Shore, he thought, would be the end of him. What a terrible, terrible, terrible book it is. It was a great blow to his narcissism. I recall clearly attending dinner parties in this period with my wife, an extremely witty woman, where everyone was mocking poor Norman. My wife, an extremely witty woman …” He looked at me as though, despite the repetition, I had denied it; I tried to look immensely amused, as though reports of Mrs. Grosskurth's wit had reached me in my crib. “Even my wife engaged in this banter. In the midst of it, however, I held my peace.” He rustled in his chair, and now I saw why he had sat up: He suddenly became a stiff, living pillar, his hands held before him, palms up—a man holding his peace in the middle of banter flying around the dinner table. A rock of imperturbable serenity! He cautiously settled back in his chair. “Now, of course, Norman has shown great resourcefulness and is receiving extremely large advances for his genre studies of various American criminals.”

  From the five years of my analysis, or therapy, or whatever the hell it was, there are words that are as permanently etched in my brain as the words “E pluribus unum” are on the nickel. “Banter” and “genre studies” were the first two. I have never been so gratef
ul for a mot juste as I was for the news that Mrs. Grosskurth had engaged in banter, and that Norman Mailer had made a resourceful turn toward genre studies. Banter, that was all it was; criticism, the essential competitive relations of writers in New York—all of it was banter, engaged in by extremely witty wives of analysts at dinner parties. And all you had to do was … refuse to engage in it! Hold your peace. Take no part! Like him—sit there like a rock and let it wash over you.

  And then there was the wacky perfection of his description of the later Mailer, with its implications of knowing (not firsthand, certainly; Mailer, as far as I know, had never been his patient) the inside story: He had, under stress, found appropriate genre subjects. American criminals. The whole speech, I thought, was so profound that it could be parsed and highlighted like one of those dog-eared assigned texts you find on the reserve shelf in undergraduate libraries: Artists suffered from narcissism, which made them susceptible to banter, which they could overcome by resourcefulness, which might lead them to—well, to take up genre studies.(“Genre studies,” I was to discover, was Grosskurthese for “journalism.” He often indulged in strangely Johnsonian periphrases: Once, talking about Woody Allen, he remarked, “My wife, who was an extremely witty woman, was naturally curious to see such a celebrated wit. We saw him in a cabaret setting. I recall that he was reciting samples of his writings in a state of high anxiety.” It took me days of figuring—what kind of reading had it been? a kind of Weimar tribute evening?—to realize that Dr. and Mrs. Grosskurth had gone to a nightclub and heard the comedian's monologue.)

  I came away from that first session in a state of blissful suspended confusion. Surely this wasn't the way psychoanalysis was supposed to proceed. On the other hand, it was much more useful—and interesting—to hear that Norman Mailer had rebounded by writing genre studies than it was to hear that my family was weird; that I knew already. I felt a giddy sense of relief, especially when he added sardonically, “Your problems remind me of”—and here he named one of the heroes of the New York School. “Fortunately, you suffer from neither impotence nor alcoholism. That is in your favor.” And that set the pattern of our twice- and sometimes thrice-weekly encounters for the next five years. He was touchy, prejudiced, opinionated, impatient, often bored, usually high-handed, brutally bigoted. I could never decide whether to sue for malpractice or fall to my knees in gratitude for such an original healer.

  Our exchanges hardened into a routine. I would take the subway uptown at six-thirty; I would get out at Seventy-seventh Street, walk a couple of blocks uptown, and enter his little office at the corner of Park Avenue, where I would join three or four people sitting on a bench. Then the door opened, another neurotic—sometimes a well-known neurotic who looked as though he wanted to hide his face with his coat, like an indicted stockbroker—came out, and I went in. There was the smell of the air conditioner.

  “So,” he would say. “How are you?”

  “Terrible,” I would say, sometimes sincerely, sometimes to play along.

  “I expected no less,” he would say, and then I would begin to stumble out the previous three or four days’ problems, worries, gossip. He would clear his throat and begin a monologue, a kind of roundabout discussion of major twentieth-century figures (Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and, above all, Thomas Mann were his touchstones), broken confidences of the confessional, episodes from his own life, finally snaking around to an abrupt “So you see …” and some thunderously obvious maxim, which he would apply to my problems—or, rather, to the nonexistence of my problems, compared with real problems, of which he'd heard a few, you should have been here then.

  For instance: I raised, as a problem, my difficulty in finishing my book, in writing without a deadline. I raised it at length, circuitously, with emotion. He cleared his throat. “It is commonplace among writers to need extreme arousal. For instance, Martin Buber.” I riffled through my card catalog: Wasn't he the theologian? “He kept pornography on the lecture stand with him, in order to excite him to a greater performance as a lecturer. He would be talking about ‘I and thou,’ and there he would be, shuffling through his papers, looking at explicit photographs of naked women.” He shook his head. “This was really going very far. And yet Buber was a very great scholar. It was appropriate for his approach. It would not be appropriate for you, for it would increase your extreme overestimation of your own role.”

  Mostly, he talked about what he thought it took to survive in the warfare of New York. He talked about the major figures of New York literary life—not necessarily his own patients but writers and artists whose careers he followed admiringly—as though they were that chain of forts upstate, around Lake George, left over from the French and Indian War: the ones you visited as a kid, where they gave you bumper stickers. There was Fort Sontag, Fort Frankenthaler, Fort Mailer. “She is very well defended.” “Yes, I admire her defenses.” “Admirably well defended.” Once I mentioned a famous woman intellectual who had recently gotten into legal trouble: Hadn't she been well defended? “Yes, but the trouble is that the guns were pointing the wrong way, like the British at Singapore.” You were wrung out with gratitude for a remark like that. I was, anyway.

  It was his theory, in essence, that “creative” people were inherently in a rage, and that this rage came from their disappointed narcissism. The narcissism could take a negative, paranoid form or a positive, defiant, arrogant form. His job was not to cure the narcissism (which was inseparable from the creativity) but, instead, to fortify it—to get the drawbridge up and the gate down and leave the Indians circling outside, with nothing to do but shoot flaming arrows harmlessly over the stockade.

  He had come of age as a professional in the forties and fifties, treating the great battlers of the golden age of New York intellectuals, an age that, seen on the couch—a seething mass of resentments, jealousies, and needs—appeared somewhat less golden than it did otherwise. “How well I recall,” he would begin, “when I was treating”—and here he named two famous art critics of the period. “They went to war with each other. One came in at ten o'clock. ‘I must reply,’ he said. Then at four-thirty the other one would come in. ‘I must reply,’ he would say. ‘No,’ I told them both. ‘Wait six months and see if anyone recalls the source of this argument.’ They agreed to wait. Six months later, my wife, that witty, witty woman, held a dinner party and offered some pleasantry about their quarrel. No one understood; no one even remembered it. And this was in the days when ART news was something. I recall what Thomas Mann said….” Eventually, abruptly, as the clock on the wall turned toward seven-thirty, he would say, “So you see … this demonstrates again what I always try to tell you about debates among intellectuals.”

  I leaned forward, really wanting to know. “What is that, Doctor?” I said.

  “No one cares. People have troubles of their own. We have to stop now.” And that would be it.

  I would leave the room in a state of vague, disconcerted disappointment. No one cares? No one cares about the hard-fought and brutally damaging fight for the right sentence, the irrefutable argument? And: People have troubles of their own? My great-aunt Hannah could have told me that. That was the result of half a century of presiding over the psyches of a major moment in cultural history? And then, fifteen minutes later, as I rode in a cab downtown, my heart would lift—would fly. That's right: No one cares! People have troubles of their own! It's okay. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it; it means you should do it, somehow, for its own sake, without illusions. Just write, just live, and don't care too much yourself. No one cares. It's just banter.

  Sometimes his method of bringing me to awareness—if that was what he was doing—could be oblique, not to say bizarre. There was, for instance, the Volestein Digression. This involved a writer whose name was, shall we say, Moses Volestein. Dr. G. had once read something by him and been fascinated by his name. “What a terrible name,” he said. “Vole. Why would a man keep such a terrible name?”

  His name didn't st
rike me as a burden, and I said so.

  “You are underestimating the damage that this man's name does to his psychic welfare,” he replied gravely. “It is intolerable.”

  “I don't think he finds it intolerable.”

  “You are wrong.”

  Then, at our next meeting: “Your resistance to my discussion of Volestein's name at our last session is typical of your extreme narcissistic overestimation. You continue to underestimate the damage a name like that does to the human psyche.”

  “Doctor, surely you overestimate the damage such a name does to the human psyche.”

  “You are wrong. His family's failure to change this name suggests a deep denial of reality.” He pursued Volestein's name through that session and into the next, and finally, I exploded.

  “I can't believe we're spending another hour discussing Moses Volestein's funny name!” I said. “I mean, for that matter, some people might think my name is funny.”

  He considered. “Yes. But your name is merely very ugly and unusual. It does not include a word meaning a shrew like animal with unpleasant associations for so many people. It is merely very ugly.”

  And then I wondered. My name—as natural to me as the sound of my own breathing? I had volunteered that it might be peculiar, out of some mixture of gallantry and point-scoring. But my hurt was enormous. My wife, who had kept her own name when we married—out of feminist principle, I had thought—said, “Yes, when we met, I couldn't believe it. I wouldn't go out with you for a week because of it.” It was a shock as great as any I had received, and as salutary. Had he obsessed on Volestein with the intention of making me face Gopnik, in all its oddity, and then, having faced it, grasp some ironic wisdom? I had a funny name. And then the corollary: People could have funny names and go right on working. They might never even notice it. Years later, online, I found myself on a list of writers with extremely funny names—I suppose this is what people do with their time now that they are no longer in psychoanalysis—and I was, amazingly, happy to be there. So that was one score. Even your name could be absurd and you wouldn't know it. And the crucial addition: It didn't matter. Indifference and armor could get you through anything.