Her arms grasped and beat and stroked. Her legs flew about me with a writhing, churning motion. And she kept pulling and pumping and bumping and sucking until I too was caught up in the dance of the little death and gushed and burst and squirted my hot cum into this eyeless woman.
The two of us lay there, spent, exhausted, and speechless, floating for what seemed an eternity. It could not have been more complete.
Then, as so often happens after such a fulfilling joining of flesh, we began to talk—simply, honestly, humanly.
“I wish I had your strength,” she said. “You seem to know what it is you want and nothing seems to frighten you.”
“That’s your illusion. It’s true that I do pretty much know what I wish but there are some things that give me the terrors.”
“So many situations scare me, though. The idea of being unconscious, people rebuffing me, saying good-byes, being ill … sometimes even falling off to sleep. How about you?”
“I’m not too concerned about whether or not particular people like me. I’d say that the two things that would really shake me up are, one, if my wife ever left me and, two, the prospect of dying. Overwhelming. Although I think I’m much less afraid of death since I’ve really begun to think so much about it.”
“You think about it a lot?”
“Someone once asked me if it was an obsession with me. I said, ‘No. I only think about it four or five times a day.’”
“Why so much?”
“Can’t tell you that. It just happens. I suspect it’s part of the natural flow. When you look at little kids—even mine when they were two and three years old—you see them concerned with it. They’re always keen to watch ghost programs and killing programs and play ‘I’ll shoot you’ and ‘Monster’ games. So the mysteries of existence even seem to be on the minds of toddlers. And I’ve found, too, that far from being depressing, thinking about death so much accentuates—gives added urgency and meaning—to my life. Knowing and learning to accept its inevitability has moved me to really live each and every day as fully as I can. And to appreciate the basics … like touching, talking, loving, fucking. But you think of it, too, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Most of the things that you say scare you are all part and parcel of dying—being unconscious, saying good-byes, and what not.”
“I’d never thought of it that way before,” she answered, and then began to tell me of her very own sword of Damocles. She had had a cerebral tumor corrected by brain surgery while in her teens. Recently she had headaches and tests showed that she had developed an aneurism at the tumor site. She faced another operation this fall. And suddenly the paradox of this soft and open, yet frightened and tentative woman—who “didn’t know” whether she thought of dying but was in danger of bursting a blood vessel in her brain with every single heartbeat—made sense.
As she told her story we began—like children walking through a graveyard, huddling ever closer to keep the spirit world at bay—to touch and hold on to one another. But we were children no longer, and when her hand reached my prick, it began to stir.
“Let me take advantage of this while I’m here,” she said, as she sat up, twisted about, and slowly lowered her head to lick, swallow, and tempt my cock to come alive again.
So the universal shivers were shared after all. And as the whites of her eyes began to show once more, and as her body went limp, we broke through death’s door and back into the spinning, copulative rhythm of life.
Tuesday, August 4
Lying here on the beach this afternoon, between swims, reading The New York Times, and playing with my kids, I’ve been rereading this journal.
I was watching the sun’s reflections dance upon the almost waveless and motionless sea—not even aware of thinking—when it suddenly hit me: the reason most therapists never sleep with patients—and if they do don’t dare talk about it—is that deep down, in the inner, inner chambers of their beings, they think that sex is dirty.
XIII
I am sitting in a psychotherapy session, listening to a man who is troubled over a business setback.
The phone rings.
It is the surgeon.
He’s just left my father.
He’s sorry, but it’s not good news. My dad has—at the outside—only six months to live.
XIV
XV
Mac.
XVI
XVII
I love you.
XVIII
XIX
I enjoy responding to questions. I think I shall interview myself.
Q: You say you are a psychiatrist?
A: That is correct. I attended the New York University College of Medicine, interned for a year at the Bronx Hospital, spent two years in a psychiatric residency at Hillside Hospital, and in my last year I was a chief psychiatric resident at Mount Sinai Hospital. So you see, if I am a “freak,” it is in spite of having had the very best training that the Establishment could possibly offer.
Q: Much earlier you referred to yourself as a “defrocked psychoanalyst.” Could you elaborate on that?
A: Certainly. In 1964, following the completion of my residency training (after qualifying as a psychiatrist) I was accepted at the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Institute. For the next six years I devoted hundreds upon hundreds of hours to taking courses, treating psychoanalytic patients under supervision, and seeing a training analyst for my personal analysis.
Things seemed to go pretty well there as long as I concentrated solely upon following the psychoanalytic model in my work with patients. But whenever I embarked on “heretical” projects—like publicly involving myself in anti-Vietnam-war politics, studying or working with nonanalytic psychological techniques, or truly sharing my feelings about the Institute’s training program—there was a lot of static.
Still, I managed to weather the storms and eventually completed all of the courses, supervision, and analysis necessary to secure my certification as a psychoanalyst. However, one week after this expensive training ended (I would estimate that the Institute cost me well over $20,000), my first book, Games Analysts Play, was published. Some days later, instead of receiving my certification, I received a letter dismissing me from the Institute for not “completing the training requirements.”
Q: You imply that you were dismissed from the White Institute for writing a book satirizing standard psycho-therapeutic technique. Do you really believe that you were dismissed for reasons that petty?
A: Oh, yes. That may seem hard to believe if you haven’t experienced these characters first-hand. Indeed, before my first exposure to the Institute I held its members in phenomenally high regard. After all, they had all been “analyzed.” They were “aware,” “honest,” “mature,” “open,” to hear them tell it. In addition, I had had a highly satisfactory personal analysis with someone at the White Institute’s low-cost clinic. It had turned me around totally, from a shy, readily intimidated, fearful person, to someone who was capable of being clear about his feelings and needs and bold enough to act upon them.
When I finished my psychiatric residency, I decided that I had an obligation to obtain psychoanalytic training. After all, I had been helped enormously by a White-trained analyst. I felt that the analysts had the secret of secrets. And I had to learn that secret in order to best help others.
However, the biggest secret I learned in the course of that training was that the analysts were made of the same clay as other mortals—that they were as presumptuous, arrogant, blind, competitive, uptight, and as capable of being tin gods as all of the nonanalytic therapists I had seen in the course of my training.
And I began to realize that my own successful analysis was the result, not of magic, but of a meeting between one particular female therapist and one particular patient—namely, myself. This first analyst of mine was truly humble. She was aware of her ignorance, comfortable in not knowing the future, and therefore able to tolerate the unknown. Her openness to t
he unknown—her relative lack of prejudgments and presuppositions—coupled with my basic counterphobic philosophy, was what accounted for the good “analytic” result in my case.
So again, “yes.” I do feel that things “as petty” as criticizing analytic operating technique and utilizing other approaches did indeed cause my dismissal from the Institute, although they claim that my discharge resulted from my lack of commitment to analytic work.
Q: You say your “counterphobic philosophy” contributed to your own successful analysis. Just what does that mean?
A: Counterphobia means going against your fears. When I discovered that I feared confronting some issue—be it dining in a restaurant by myself, living alone, breaking off with a girlfriend, being honest with people, speaking to strangers who attracted me—I would attempt that which I was afraid of. Most often, I discovered in the process that the only thing I had to fear was, as F.D.R. said, fear itself. I found that I had been imposing restrictions on my behavior that were unnecessary, restrictions rooted in childhood superstition and social conditioning. I began to appreciate options in living that I had never dared see, much less take. I began to know what freedom was about.
My counterphobic style accounted for a very different type of psychoanalysis than others that I came to see. Some people are so well analyzed that they can give you exquisite reasons for why they do what they do. They appreciate the influence of their mothers, grandmothers, maids, fathers, sisters, and neighbors in contributing to their “neurosis.” Of course, they are just as limited after this type of analysis as they were before—just as “neurotic.” Except that now they “understand” the reasons for it.
Q: You claim that the William Alanson White Institute dismissed you for rather petty, parochial reasons. Has it not occurred to you that they might well have dropped you for conduct unbecoming a member of their Institute? For sleeping around so readily, for example?
A: The only “unbecoming conduct” I was guilty of, so far as I know, was the conduct of honestly saying what I felt, what I thought, and what I did.
There was, for instance, the time our class had a particularly boring seminar on “depressions.” Since this class was compulsory, there was no avoiding the impact of our female instructor, who would read, monotonously, from prepared lectures for two solid hours.
She herself became aware of the class’s restiveness and asked why so little attention was paid to her monologues and reading lists. Yet nobody in the class seemed willing to share with her the opinions we shared among ourselves when she was not present. So, session after session, she would drive us to incredible heights of mad distraction and then always ask why we appeared uninterested.
Finally, in one of those rare fits of reckless desperation that can come only from being part of a captive audience, I told her what I thought was amiss.
“There’s just not enough stimulation in the course as it’s set up. Perhaps if we could depart from the prepared lesson plan and reading lists and share the experiences that have arisen from our own clinical work with depressed patients, it would be livelier, more interesting, and more relevant than these abstract, non-discussable lectures.”
Now, do you think this lady was appreciative of my answering her question? Not at all.
“I’m afraid we can’t do that, because if we get involved in such discussions there won’t be time to present the material in the literature.”
Thus she persisted in presenting “the material.” When the class response remained unchanged, she proceeded to lecture us about our poor attitude. I, in turn, suggested that the course was uninteresting because of her unwillingness to make the subject relevant to our clinical work.
This “confrontation” with my instructor evoked one of the most critical evaluations I received from the Institute personnel—a report to the effect that I was a hostile troublemaker.
Later, when I realized that trying to help this woman make her course more stimulating was futile, I fell back into silent boredom, nodding attentively and mechanically every fifteen minutes, while my mind was off on vacation. Her final comments on this resigned change in me were favorable. She felt that since she had talked to me about my negativism, I had now adopted a more serious attitude.
My experiences have led me to believe that the analytic institute, contrary to popular belief, is more interested in conformity than anything else. Let me give you another example.
Once, in a case seminar in my third year of training, I brought in a tape-recorded session that I had conducted with an emotionally dishonest young woman. She was quite a capable career girl, tough-minded, ambitious, and popular with men, but tended to act small, helpless, and weepy whenever criticized by people in authority. This was a game, a game she played so well that more often than not she got caught up in the act and began to believe in her own helplessness.
In the recorded session, while relating an incident at work, she suddenly went into one of these “helpless” bits. It was quite dramatic, quite phony. Her voice slowed down, her volume decreased to a whisper, her vocabulary became that of a three-year-old, and she was apparently making a plea for my sympathy.
“You know, sometimes you’re full of shit,” I responded.
That did it. The seminar was being conducted by Dr. Earl G. Witenberg, the head of the White Institute. A formidable-looking, austere, handsome, poker-faced man, he would make a perfect analyst for any movie studio interested in type-casting.
“That is uncalled for,” he tersely remarked. “It is pejorative,” he pejoratively told me. He then proceeded to wipe the floor with me in the presence of my peers. Any protests on my part to the effect that the lady in question responded very well to my interjection, or that she was indeed full of shit, were deemed irrelevant by him. He had heard enough of the session already. My protests and actions were merely the result of countertransference,* of unanalyzed hostility. As far as he was concerned, the case was closed.
“I admired your courage in presenting that material,” one of my classmates told me after the seminar ended. He didn’t think my remark was out of order, but neither did he wish to antagonize Dr. Witenberg by defending me in public.
Q: And just what is that story supposed to illustrate?
A: Three things.
First, it highlights the thinking of this prototypical psychoanalyst who presumes, ipso facto, to know what can or can’t be said to another person in order to be helpful.
Secondly, it illustrates the paradox of his attitude. For, in effect, when you strip away the technical jargon he threw at me (“countertransference,” “neurotic”), he was telling me that I was full of shit. Yet he couldn’t see that he was telling me “do as I say, not as I do.”
And lastly, it underscores the fearfulness and dishonesty of some students—the psychoanalytic “wave of the future.”
This is not just an isolated example. Through the years, a number of my Classmates told me of doctoring up the material they presented to their supervisors. They would omit transcriptions of sessions that might be controversial, or in error, or likely to offend their supervisors. They were less interested in giving the supervisors an honest accounting of the sessions they had with their patients, and less interested in getting back the supervisors’ honest reflection, than they were in being well thought of.
And of course that tactic worked. They managed to get through.
Indeed, that’s one of the “games” I wrote about in Games Analysts Play.
Q: But my earlier question to you was whether or not you thought the Institute might have dismissed you for your sexual adventures?
A: If they did, they never raised that question with me. Also, I never had these so-called “sexual adventures” prior to being dismissed from the Institute. And lastly, the situation has not changed from that which I wrote about during last year’s Tantric summer—namely, that I have never slept with any patient of mine.
Q: Never?
A: With one exception. And that was with a girlf
riend who took part in a group I was conducting.
Q: Can you say something more about that?
A: I’ll have more to say about that in Chapter 26.
Q: May I peek ahead?
A: Do what you wish. But if you want to read my story as I wrote it, you’ll wait until you finish Chapter 25.
Q: Your “exception” aside, how do you reconcile sleeping with people who attended your encounter groups last summer with your claims of not sleeping with “patients?”
A: People who register for these weekend workshops don’t consider themselves “patients,” nor do I. The programs at Anthos were open to the general public—to “normal people” who might wish to explore certain themes in living or want to learn more about human interactions.
Q: Aren’t you just playing with words, though? Aren’t many of these “normal people” actually neurotic? Aren’t they in a larger sense “patients” even though they don’t call themselves patients?
A: You raise a good point. Don’t think that I haven’t asked myself that same question. I hope to deal with that issue in a subsequent interview.
I’m getting rather tired of this interview. It’s a bit stuffy. A bit too erudite. A bit too formal for my taste. Can we stop now?
Q: Just a few more questions, if you will.
A: All right. But keep it short.
Q: Are you against therapists sleeping with their patients?
A: No, I am not. Provided it is done with discrimination, affection, and honesty, and does not contribute additional burdens to those that the patient brought into the therapist’s office.
Q: Is it fair to say, then, that you are in favor of therapists sleeping with their patients?
A: No. It is not fair to say that. I am neither in favor of, nor opposed to, such intimate transactions in the abstract. I am always interested in what happens between two particular people.
The Reluctant Exhibitionist Page 10
