The Reluctant Exhibitionist

by Martin Shepard

  Among the uncomplimentary reports was that of the lady who gave the course on “depression”—the one in which I, in answer to her question as to why there was no interest in her course, dared tell her that she might be teaching it poorly.

  The “morbid pathology” reference is worth a fuller comment.

  Because of my interest in groups, I had decided to register for an elective course in group dynamics at the Institute conducted by one of their training analysts. This occurred in my last semester there, a time when I was already beginning to achieve some national recognition as a group-encounter leader. The class was to function as a group, with people free to bring up whatever they wished.

  As so often happens among this type of professional group, the sessions were extraordinarily dull and devoid of meaning. The biggest topic of conversation related to the difficulties we had in conversing meaningfully with one another. In short, one big dead end—everyone protecting his image by some sophisticated talk about the troubles of talking. Not much anxiety here, but lots of safe intellectualizations.

  One fellow psychiatrist in the group kept talking about his feeling that he couldn’t make contact with me, that he didn’t know me, and that this was because I was distant and guarded. These comments amazed me because I consider myself a rather open person. I kept offering to answer any curiosities he might have about me. But he only kept repeating his charge.

  “I would like greater closeness—more contact,” he would say.

  I extended my hand to him. He ignored it. I pointed this out to him and told him it didn’t make sense for someone who said he wanted “more contact.” But he ignored my remark and kept talking about my “distance.”

  Finally, I rose from my seat, crossed the room, and sat on his lap. He still kept talking about wanting more contact and acted as though I was in another room. Only later was he able to take cognizance of the fact that I was sitting in his lap and that such close contact made him uncomfortable.

  Such dramatic actions as I initiated with this future analyst are considered routine procedure in the new wave of encounter therapies. Yet I can only assume that our mentor, the psychoanalyst who gave the course, was totally unfamiliar with current developments in the field and was shocked by my response. I must assume this because this same lap-sitting episode was what the instructor referred to in illustrating my “morbid pathology.” (All the more interesting is the fact that he never confronted me with the notion that he considered me to have “morbid pathology” while I was taking part in his group, although he mentioned, as most group leaders do, the idea of being honest in one’s participation in the group/class.)

  In any event, in the affidavit, the Institute coupled my “morbid pathology” in the aforementioned group seminar to my work with Anthos: “His behavior in that course reflected his involvement in so-called ‘encounter’ and ‘confrontation’ therapy, and an increasing disinterest and contempt for analytic therapy.” (As if an interest in one showed a contempt for the other.)

  The affidavit acknowledged (page 18) that the meeting I was given with the training committee was “not for the purpose of having the Committee reconsider its decision, but so that the Committee could inform him of the basis of its action.” And of that meeting the document said that “both Dr. Shepard and Mr. Faulkner became argumentative, and the meeting was terminated” (page 19).

  It explained that their decision to dismiss me was not based upon publication of Games Analysts Play. Rather, “our decision was based upon our judgment as to his competence, his disinterest in and lack of commitment to psychoanalysis.… Certainly the views which Dr. Shepard expresses in his book were not new to us. We had become aware of them over a period of years.”

  Counter-affidavits followed one upon the other as night follows day. In mine, I stated, among other points, that my involvement at Anthos was irrelevant to my qualifications as a psychoanalyst. The Institute (June 15), implied that it was, and attached “Exhibit A,” an extremely critical review of what I did in my second book, Marathon 16 (an account of a sixteen-hour encounter session), which appeared in Look magazine on May 19, 1970. The Institute’s affidavit said, “Such article and the book Marathon 16 by Dr. Shepard, which is discussed in that article, were not, of course, available or before the Training Committee when it took its action. Nevertheless it points up what I have had to say in my affidavit of May 26, 1970.”

  On June 24, 1970, Supreme Court Justice Nathaniel Helman sustained my challenge that my dismissal by the Institute, without their informing me of the specific grounds for the discharge and giving me an opportunity to contest the findings of the training committee, was “capricious and arbitrary.”

  The subsequent “full hearing” consisted of my reading a statement and their reading a statement. My attorneys now had access to the files that the Institute kept on me. They could easily point to the fact that of twenty-four evaluations of my work from 1964 through 1967, although some were critical, more were positive. The three negative ones, of course, were the ones included in the Institute’s answering affidavit.

  The full record showed that, in addition to criticisms, there were many positive accounts of my work while I was engaged politically.

  The records showed that some of the critical remarks to which the Institute alluded were taken out of the context of a satisfactory evaluation. Indeed, they chose to include the one critical review of Marathon 16 they could find; The New York Times and Life magazine had both reported favorably on that same encounter book.

  And the record included the full evaluations of my last two supervisors. Remarks from Dr. Crowley included the following three:

  “Has the makings of being a versatile and excellent analyst” (November 30, 1968).

  “Martin Shepard: Full of life. He likes to try new things.… In general he works within an analytic framework even though some of his techniques are unconventional. He does act and think on his own. Progressing well. Will graduate. Uses supervision well, non-defensive” (February, 1969).

  “Dr. S. has the admirable quality of continually working at new ways at getting through to his patients … he’s good” (Spring, 1969).

  And Dr. Bone wrote, in November, 1968:

  “He is perceptive, eminently teachable, responsibly experimental, and rapidly on the way to becoming an excellent therapist.”

  In July, 1969, he sent in a second evaluation:

  “Shepard continues to develop very satisfactorily.… His wide-ranging experiences with various new developments in therapeutic procedure also enable him to give instruction occasionally—I have learned several valuable procedures from him. He is responsible and appropriately self-critical in his observations of and experimentation with novel techniques.”

  And in January, 1970, he wrote:

  “I consider him to be of much more than average competence as a therapist.”

  On January 22, 1970, after my dismissal from the Institute, Harry Bone wrote the training committee again to stress my merit as a therapist. He added:

  “I am informed that he has been expelled by the T.C. I do not expect my opinion to affect that decision but I want to put it on record anyway.

  “If the T.C. considers Shepard therapeutically incompetent I think they are wrong. If, on the other hand, he is being rejected because in his theory and practice he does not adhere strictly to the predominant views of psychoanalysis held by the T.C.… they convict themselves of the provincial, dogmatic position which judges a therapist in terms of his adherence to the current orthodoxy rather than in terms of whether he gets the job well done. Such a policy, of which there is considerable evidence in the Institute, penalizes independence and rewards docility and I, for my part, deplore it.”

  But the meeting with the training committee changed nothing. The same jury that convicted me before convicted me again. Whether the courts will reopen the case is still unsettled.

  One analyst close to the administration of the Institute told me that the training commi
ttee “knew” of various reprehensible things I did with patients. There were rumors of sexual exploitation of patients. Various people claimed they had heard or owned tapes of things I said to patients that were inept or outrageous. Yet no one on the training committee confronted me with these charges directly.

  The rigidity that I encountered in my psychoanalytic training has not been, I am sure, a solitary experience. Perhaps it is one reason why more and more young psychiatrists don’t go in for analytic training any longer, and why many analytic institutes have trouble finding candidates to fill up their classes.

  I’ve taken a lot of time to talk about my involvement at the White Institute. “Long-winded,” do you say? “Defensive,” do you ask? Perhaps so.

  But I am driven to document and justify my bitterness. That fault, too, is me. And as I implied in starting this book, the style is the man. So know me through my style.

  * The Oedipus Complex refers to the situation wherein the preschool child wants the mother all to himself instead of having to share her with the father.

  XXIII

  Q: So you don’t care what the White Institute thinks of you?

  A: Right.

  Q: Do you care about the opinions of any of your fellow professionals?

  A: Yes. A few.

  Q: Who?

  A: I’d care about Fritz Perls’ opinion. He was a crusty old man, content to accept almost every aspect of his personality, be it his pissiness, conceit, or whatever. He referred to himself proudly as a “dirty old man” and his sexual exploits are legendary. Fritz once claimed that he could tell more about a woman from the way she kissed than he could by interviewing her in a fifty-minute analytic hour.

  And I believe him.

  Q: But Fritz is dead now. How about your contemporaries?

  A: I’d wonder what Ronald Laing,* the Scottish psychiatrist, thought. For, like me, he recognizes that personal stability is best maintained by living out and living through one’s “madness.”

  He knows that there are people throughout the world (most therapists included) who try to invalidate the experience of the “madman,” so threatened are they by the experience, the awareness, the slice of reality that the “madness” presents. So they try to “psychoanalyze” his experience away. Or they place him in hospitals. And with talk, drugs, or occupational diversions they hope to make him “normal”—not realizing that the pressure he underwent in acting normal was what drove him “mad” in the first place. This, of course, sets up an absolutely insoluble, depressing bind.

  Q: Laing is a member of the White Institute, is he not?

  A: An honorary member, but he doesn’t live in New York. He doesn’t work with these people and probably doesn’t know what goes on there.

  Q: Anyone else?

  A: Thomas Szasz.

  Q: Who’s he?

  A: A maverick Freudian analyst who has written extensively on the myth of mental illness. He knows that most of what passes for “sicknesses” (neurosis, and most psychoses), represent, in actuality, life styles that differ from the norm. No one has yet—or is ever likely to, in my opinion—demonstrated a biological basis for these “mental illnesses” in the same way as one can show a relationship between the influenza virus and the flu or between a tuberculus bacillus and tuberculosis. Neither has anyone demonstrated organic lesions for most “mental illness” as one can demonstrate lesions in cancer patients, for instance, where the etiological factor is unknown.

  Szasz identifies “patients” as I would. A man becomes a patient not because of a “sickness,” but rather because he either accepts the label—the role—of patient or because it is forced upon him by a society that is troubled by or hostile to his life style. This is not to say that many people don’t enter our offices because they have problems in functioning. Most often, they do. Yet, instead of viewing their malfunctioning as being due to some lack of awareness or lack of experience, many professionals and clients alike think of this malfunctioning (or odd functioning) as an illness. For a “patient” to exist, however, you must have another person who is willing to play the role of “therapist.” That is to say, the doctor must be willing to view this unusual life style as a sickness that he then might be able to cure.

  I refuse to enter into that phony game. I will not allow a “patient” to hide behind and excuse his behavior on the basis of “sickness.” I would rather have him accept his behavior as an authentic experience, without apology and without shame.

  The philosophy behind Anthos epitomizes these ideas. Psychotherapy is not considered therapy at all. Rather, we conceive of therapy as nothing more than part of one’s educational process. Our present system of education—from the first grade through the university—teaches people geography, history, spelling, and arithmetic. Yet it is rare to find any program that teaches people how they relate to themselves and others. The groups at Anthos, offered to the general public (not “patients,” mind you), address themselves to that educational deficit. These groups are experimental/experiential laboratories where participants have an opportunity to know themselves and others better and in which they can try out, act out, and adopt new patterns of interaction.

  And when you strip the traditional therapies of their theoretical double-talk and technical bullshit, that is all that these therapies really offer—that is, when they work effectively.

  You asked me in your last interview whether or not I was playing a word game when I denied that the people I slept with at workshops last summer were “patients”; I will now categorically answer, “No.”

  I played no word game. I slept with people. And I slept with them without deceit, without secrecy, without exploiting them, and without shame.

  Q: You’re going off. I’d still like to know if there are any other therapists whose opinions matter to you. Someone more familiar to the general public, perhaps, than this fellow Szasz?

  A: Yes. John Lennon.

  Q: John Lennon of “The Beatles?” He’s a musician, not a therapist.

  A: Now you’re playing a word game.

  If you’ve appreciated the essence of my argument, the essence of my book, you must grasp the fact that I consider a good “therapist” to be someone who helps people accept themselves for whatever they authentically are.

  And for my money, John Lennon has helped more people accept themselves in recent times than has Sigmund Freud and his legion of worshipers.

  Q: How?

  A: Through his music. Through his commitment to peace. Through his irreverence. Through his playfulness. Through his acceptance of the flesh. Through …

  Q: Hold on. How does he show an “acceptance of the flesh?”

  A: By appearing nude on a record album cover along with Yoko. By his exhibit of “pornographic” art. By his open acknowledgment of his love and lust for his woman.

  Q: But he doesn’t see people in individual “therapy.”

  A: Neither did Jesus. Both inspired many young people by their honesty, by their life styles. And I think that a “therapist,” a teacher, a guru (they are all one and the same, really) teaches best by the example of his own struggle for authenticity.

  This interview is starting to affect me in the same way as the last one. It’s too professional and not personal enough—whatever that means. Why don’t you ask me a more “personal” question before we get back to the Tantric Road?

  Q: All right. How is your father doing? And how do you feel about him right now?

  A: In one way he’s doing quite well. He was up and walking a day after surgery. This past weekend—only ten days after the operation—he was discharged from the hospital. Yet the cancer cells continue to grow inside of his body.

  As for myself, I am in remarkably good spirits. It surprises me. Yet, when I think about it, why should I not be? My visits with my dad for the past few weeks have been a tonic.

  Q: A tonic? But the man is dying. That ought to evoke sadness.

  A: There are no dying people, only living ones. Aren’t
we all born to die? Is anyone reading this page today guaranteed of being around an hour from now? An accident, a burst blood vessel, an intruder in the night, and it’s all over for any one of us.

  So my dad knows he is going to die soon. What of it? He still would like to go on living as long as he can and is not about to roll over in despair and join the living-dead. Yet he is quite philosophical about the inevitability of death. He inspires me now as he has inspired me before.

  He and I have talked of life and we’ve talked of death. We’ve reflected upon the past and speculated upon the mysteries of the future. But mostly, in our meetings, we’ve stayed in the present—the point in time when life is lived. And we’ve laughed.

  Last week I was told a “secret” by a member of my family. When I visited the hospital that evening I related it to my dad, prefacing, the secret with the words, “I was asked not to tell this to anybody.”

  “Don’t worry,” he answered, breaking out into a belly laugh. “I’ll carry the secret to my grave.”

  * Ronald Laing, practicing in England, has set up radical “treatment” facilities for people with severe emotional problems. The “patients” live in a house with the “doctors,” but no distinctions are made between the two. All residents have an impact on one another by their shared existence, not through their roles (“doctor,” “patient,” “cook,” “nurse,” etc.). There are no specific “therapy sessions.” Residents are allowed and encouraged to live through and explore their supposed “madness” (i.e., unique perceptions) as the best way of establishing a new and better integrated personality. Laing, through his writings (The Divided Self, Knots, and others) is having an ever-increasing impact upon the younger generation of psychiatrists.