A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  86

  I am sitting at my desk, reading a new book, a new author, Janet Frame—as a break from studying for my comprehensive examinations. “But it is too dark now, and the streetlights are switched on and the cats are lifting the lids of the dustbins and prowling secure and magnificent in their world, the narrow whisker-lane with smells sprouting in the hedgerows.”

  But it is too dark to see my book, the little black lines of print and magnificent words I love—“dustbins” and “hedgerows,” not “garbage” or “bushes.” Streetlights are yellow glass, thick glass atop black ornate columns, not the humming purple ones, those fluorescent curved ones, flimsy, made of aluminum rather than the noncrushable summer smells of childhood. The cats’ whisker-lane was mine too, when my head didn’t quite reach the top of the fence and my chin came just to the shelf on the bell-ringing Mr. Softee truck. I can see my sister in line in front of me, just a little taller, that blond, fine hair. We wait, while our guilty dimes (stolen from my mother’s pocketbook) sweat in our palms, for the cold custard on our tongues. Then there were fireflies, also called lightning bugs, caught in a jar and released each night. Our mode of travel, anywhere, was running, not walking. Grown-ups were a lethargic lot in their brooding stillness and endless monotone porch-talk. We jumped, jiggled, fidgeted, turned and ran; we whispered, yelled, commanded, demanded, whimpered, taunted, sang—and kept the longest burning silence. I can see those raggedy cats with torn ears lifting the lids of the dustbins, metal lids that come off clattering and roll into the alley, where the evening’s best drama takes place, before calling voices, bath time and bed, and the nightmare of the closet and under the bed and the chair coming to life, poking its long shadowy spokes right into my bed. Balanced carefully now, on the right and on the left between the hedgerows, unremembered details come back to me, the narrow whisker-lane of smells—pungent acrid sunflowers that hover above us in the dark, the sweet smell of Band-Aid on my finger, the tin-can smell as my nose presses into the screen door, the stale spun-out air, cooler than real air, that smelled of old newspapers—my mother insisted on air-conditioning us into hibernation each summer—and down I went, burrowing under three blankets, nose and all. Then there were the hedgerows—bushes, we called them, hedges or bushes, but not hedgerows, unless we were pretending to be English children, my sister and I, hovering over our plastic fine teacups under a sheet tent set up between two chairs and our beds. The hedges, they were dark, edgy, hedgy-edgy with fear. Their little leaves went from green to gray to black and stood in a tall mass, hedging me in, hiding something, someone. Any footfall, any shifting of leaves in the dark, the splash of night bugs on the screen window could be, but it could be—really, Mary, it could happen, really, it truly could, Mary—he would just step out of the bushes or come around the doorway or walk out of a field in daylight and take us, one by one. But it is too dark now, and the streetlights hum a little hum, a burning hum. I crawl into our bed, big sister, and feel your even breathing, a light breath in the night. I don’t move so you won’t waken and find me awake, yet in your sleep you move toward me and fling one skinny arm over me.

  Above us, just above our heads, a circle of colored light particles spins in the darkness.

  IV

  EPILOGUE

  Reading the bones, wetting a fingertip to trace archaic characters, I feel. a breeze of silence flow up past my wrists, icy. Can I speak here?

  -MARIE PONSET, In the Green Dark

  I have had such privilege and have wept ...

  -STEPHEN DUNN, Between Angels

  Terrible the rain, all night rain that I love. So the weight of his leg falls again like a huge tender wing across my hipbone.

  —TESS GALLAGHER, Moon Crossing Bridge

  Six years have now passed since I last saw Ben. I worked with Blumenfeld for another three years, and still have contact with him on occasion. I have not seen Melanie since the day we met in Blumenfeld’s office. In the meantime, I finished my doctoral degree and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to do postdoctoral research with Dr. Carol Gilligan on girls’ and women’s psychological development. Subsequently, I was hired as an assistant professor at Harvard and have begun a research project on children’s experiences of trauma.

  I have created a research and play therapy space, small, but complete with a child’s table, shelves of toys and puppets, art materials, dollhouse and doll families. In addition to the two adolescent girls I have been seeing, Erika and Beth, more recently I began to work with Carrie, a six-year-old who is afraid to go to school, afraid of spiders, afraid of the dark; afraid, period. I have conversations with Fred, a floppy brown stuffed dog, as I hold her and listen to her raspy fearful stories. This practice is as big as it will get for now—three children, all girls.

  I see Ben in this room, facing away from me, then turning around as he did in our first session. He would be twelve years old now. I have not seen him since he was six, when I returned to Glenwood to visit him. Mary Louise recently told me that he is attending a public school and living with his adoptive parents. He sees a psychiatrist, someone I do not know. I wonder if he remembers me. I find a blue-and-green marble in the side yard of my house and remember Ben spitting six marbles into my waiting hand. Of course he remembers.

  I think often about Melanie. My thoughts drift around a core of lasting sadness, sometimes tinged with bitterness, sometimes with compassion. My relationship with Melanie deeply affects my understanding of myself and my questions about clinical relationships, particularly among women.

  Carol Gilligan and I have often thought together about the particular difficulties women face in working in a traditional structure of psychotherapy-the desire by both patients and therapists for an authentic and enduring connection in a structure that upholds distance and teaches the necessity of giving up that desire. Precisely because Carol is not a clinician, she brings a unique view to psychotherapy. She and I speak the same language and react in similar ways to the various binds and facades of psychotherapy. I also have spoken at length about clinical relationships with Teresa Bernardez, who supervised my work with an adolescent girl and told me stunning stories of her own relationships with adolescent patients—relationships in which girls fought for a love that was trustworthy and enduring.

  Tonight it is raining and I am inside, writing in a circle of light, with a cup of tea. Alice, a compassionate and careful therapist with considerable clinical experience, asked to speak with me about a patient who was abandoned by a therapist she loved because the therapist became frightened and overwhelmed. This patient now hopes for a different relationship with Alice. For the first time in years, I lay on my bed and wept for the loss of Melanie in my life.

  As for Blumenfeld, he has not changed much, although he is older now. Last spring I went to see him, and that visit was like walking directly into my book. Blumenfeld is grayer and thinner, and most astonishing, he is much shorter! He said that he knew one day I would write a book, but he did not expect to be a character in it.

  “Don’t you recognize yourself?” I ask.

  “Oh yes, I do.”

  “You have all the best lines, you know,” I chide him.

  We do not know if he is to remain Blumenfeld and go on having phone conversations with me in Cambridge, or if we will go out to tea and develop a different kind of relationship. As we puzzle over these possibilities, he remarks that my voice is stronger, my face more alive, and we don’t know what will happen next because ... I join in unison, “The future really is unknowable.” “Otherwise, it is only a play of the past,” he says. Then he laughs that great deep laugh, a man who loves to wake up in the middle of the night and who sees with his heart.

  I have not seen or heard from Telesporus, or Emily, or Galle, or Margaret Mary, or Erin, or any of the others, except in my dreams. I am now taking a watercolor class with a wonderful Japanese man who points out light and shadows. “Look at autumn light. Paint the light.” I see light on apples and bark, on the sidewalk, under a si
ngle twig. I have had to learn skills that once came to me without effort, those gifts from others within me lent to me during the time of a shining affliction. I feel their steady presence in my life and I am grateful to them for all that is alive in me.

  AFTER WORD

  The people who come to see us bring us their stories.

  They hope they tell them well enough so that we

  understand the truths of their lives.

  —ROBERT COLES, The Call of Stories

  Take care when you speak to me

  I might listen.

  -TESS GALLAGHER, Moon Crossing Bridge

  Afterward

  I found under my left shoulder

  the most curious wound.

  As though I had leaned against

  some whirring thing,

  it bleeds secretly.

  Nobody knows its name.

  -MARY OLIVER, Dreamwork

  A Shining Affliction began simply as a lengthy case study about my relationship with the child Ben, drawn from tapes of our sessions and from my extensive notes. For a long time I was reluctant to bring the story of my own failed psychotherapy and subsequent breakdown into this book. What made this addition almost unthinkable was my observation that clinicians did not reveal the details of their personal histories. Those who wrote most eloquently about their cases, such as Freud, Winnicott, and Sechehaye, revealed themselves indirectly in the telling. But they focused on their patients and, when speaking about themselves, used an abstract language that often obscured direct access to the inner life of the writer. As therapists, we are acculturated not to disclose the details of our lives. Yet I felt dishonest as I continued to write about Ben without revealing my own experience. To write with any integrity, I had to say clearly how I was wounded and healed in my personal psychotherapy, or my book would not be able to sustain the emotional truths at the heart of my relationship with Ben.

  What were those emotional truths? As a novice therapist, I treated an “untreatable” child. Given the enormity of my own psychological struggle at the time, I should not have been able to treat him at all, much less work as an effective therapist. Faced with this enigma, I read my own words for the psychology of relationship they contained, sketching out a fragile trace of love and knowledge that runs all through this story. I wrote to Ben, “What you fear most has already happened.” But Ben did not know this about himself, and I did not know this about myself either. Both of us, in different ways, had to reexperience or reenact a devastating loss, in order to see that we had survived. What finally became clear, in my overlapping relationships with Ben and with Blumenfeld, was that Ben and I were each the fighting survivors of our own worst nightmares. In our short relationship, we were able to play with one another, to love one another, and to say goodbye. I know that in the process we were each healed in some crucial way.

  It has taken several years and many conversations with other patients and therapists for me to realize that the failure of my relationship with Melanie is a rather common story. It is ironic and heartbreaking to hear again and again how therapists took creative risks, which became seductive and false promises, and how, in the end, when they abandoned their patients, they used the language of clinical practice to step away from any real responsibility for those abandonments. When psychotherapy fails, we are accustomed to consider the shortcomings of patients and not the failure of the therapeutic relationship and our own part in it. Interestingly, many of the therapists whom I talked to initially tried to break with the structured distance of traditional psychotherapy because it was not working. At first, their patients were relieved and grateful. But it seems that these therapists had no conceptual structure that enabled them to think critically about the changes they made, and no supervisory relationship that could support the intention of what was, perhaps, their most courageous work. Because this story is relatively common, I think that it represents a systemic problem in clinical practice.

  If we consider carefully the possibility that an individual’s failed psychotherapy may center around a systemic corruption of a relationship that should be basically trustworthy, then our current practice of psychotherapy becomes suspect, or open to questions. Sometime in the distant future, I wonder if readers will see what seems so obvious that it is hardly worth mentioning in the current moment: that our language is suffused with an us/them split, so that we, the therapists, appear to have no serious psychological difficulties, while our patients clearly reveal whatever pathology fascinates us at any given time. If we are affected in a psychotherapy relationship, this influence is called “countertransference.” It is clear that we think we should eliminate such an influence as quickly and painlessly as possible, primarily by thinking about it with colleagues. These false beliefs and distinctions are maintained through clinical training, supervision, and clinical practice. In clinical training, often we are reticent to reveal our own lives for fear that we might be judged as pathological. In supervision, we sometimes do not describe what we actually do in practice, especially if what we do deviates from established norms and if we have serious questions and doubts about it. In practice, if we are uncomfortable, or truly frightened, we have a tendency to blame our patients, and we have concepts readily at hand to effectively squelch any doubts about our assessment. Yet, in the act of defending ourselves, we are most likely to pass on our deepest wounding to our patients. If this seems like a parody, an exaggeration that distorts the current state of affairs, consider these observations at your next conference or public case presentation.

  I hope it is apparent from reading A Shining Affliction that I love the work of psychotherapy and do not want to turn away from it. I wish that I had the answers to the enigmas of psychotherapy, beyond the story itself. I do not. I have some ideas, however, about how possibilities for harm and healing arise within our current structure of practice.

  The psychotherapy relationship is two-sided, whether we acknowledge it is or not. Each person brings to that relationship whatever is unrecognized, unknown, and unapproachable in her or his life, and a wish for knowledge of truths and wholeness. Since one cannot thrive on memories, on a relationship with projections, what keeps alive the hope of wholeness is an interchange of love, longing, frustration, and anger in the vicissitudes of a real relationship. Such an interchange is part of the fragility of this relationship; with openness, one is vulnerable to hurt and to loss, on both sides of the relationship. However, the therapist must, of necessity, understand the vulnerability of both persons involved. This necessity is sometimes very frightening. Yet if it is possible to remain open to our fears and make reparations for our mistakes, our vulnerability can be used in the service of healing. On the other hand, perhaps this terrible vulnerability explains why we sometimes speak as if we know (speaking in some combination of condescension and beneficent authority) what patients need when we do not know, when we cannot possibly know.

  In any treatment situation, it is the therapist who is responsible for holding two stories, or two plays, together. The work of sustaining a therapeutic relationship demands a two-sided or perspective in order to understand both stories. And the deepening of this relationship over time demands honesty and intimacy and sometimes extraordinary courage. Knowing that we are human, and therefore limited in our understanding and courage, we can be overwhelmed by these responsibilities. We can then create a greater distance to protect ourselves, and even appear to be unmoved by our patients’ responses to that distance. But the effect on our patients is deadening whenever we show them that they do not affect us. Or, alternatively, we can create an illusion of intimacy by making false promises, unwittingly seducing patients to reveal their deepest and oldest wishes, as if we could somehow mete out the right responses and withhold what would be harmful, as if we really knew that difference. But neither of these strategies really protects us from the terrible responsibility of holding another’s heart in our hands, at least for a time, while not forsaking ourselves.

  As I write this
sketch of my observations about clinical practice, I see that, rather obviously, they carry the story of the book as a whole. I hope that others—parents, teachers, patients of every age, but clinicians especially—will read this story as if standing outside a house at a window at night, peering into a room at once familiar and unfamiliar, and watching an unfolding drama that adumbrates their own knowledge of relationships in psychotherapy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Five people deserve particular thanks for accompanying me over several years in the writing of this book. Louis Smith got me started writing it and responded extensively to the first draft. Carol Gilligan asked me crucial questions and gave me the gift of her sensitive and perceptive readings. Dorothy Austin challenged me to understand and forgive the characters in this book. Meg Turner read several drafts of the manuscript with knowledge and love. Mary Mullens Rogers, my oldest friend and sister, was a wise critic and steady support throughout the years of writing and revising this book.

  Many friends who read and commented on drafts of this book helped me to shape its final form: Teresa Bernardez, Mary Casey, Nancy Coyne, Kathleen Curtis, Joan Erikson, Kathryn Geismar, Cynthia Hazen, Judy Jordon, Ruthellen Josselson, Jane Loevinger, Laura Maciuika, Vicki Magee, Joe Maxwell, JoAnn Miller, Kitty Moore, Normi Noel, Kate O’Neill, Arthur Rosenthal, Marilyn Southard, Catherine Steiner-Adair, and Karen Theilman.

  This book is most deeply indebted to the characters in it: Charles and Kate Brinker, Helen Hoeltzman, Mary Rogers, Michael Connelly, Rachael Sachs and Mary Louise Sweeney. I also want to acknowledge my friends Sarah and Patricia, as well as friends within: Emily, Galle, Margaret Mary and Erin. This book would not exist without my mother and father: Margaret Mary Mulvihill Rogers and Otis Benjamin Rogers. Telesporus, you are going to wing your way into many people’s lives, I hope. I want to thank Melanie Sherman for teaching me so much about myself, and Sam Blumenfeld for a ground of sanity to walk upon. To Ben, I send my love.