Catherine Crier - Final Analysis

It was a deadly mix of transference and countertransference, one that would have explosive consequences.

Felix and Sharon Polk legally separated on October 10, 1978—one month after the couple celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary. Ironically, Felix had marked the occasion with a $600 gift of silver purchased at Gump’s, the famous San Francisco retail store. Then, he asked for a divorce.

That fall, his teenage girlfriend sat for the Standardized Achievement Tests (SATs). Susan scored a 740 out of 800 in English and a 530 in Math, without taking any substantive math courses in high school. She was ranked in the 98th percentile in English and the 80th in Math. Soon after, she was awarded her GED.

The following year, Susan moved out of her mother’s house and in with Felix. By this time, Felix was no longer her therapist; now he was simply her boyfriend. When she demonstrated an interest in college, he chose Mills College, an all-girls school in the foothills of Oakland, and there is evidence that he was footing the bill for her education.

Compliant, and anxious to please Felix, Susan attended Mills for two years. But then she decided to take a semester off, and soon it became clear that her days at Mills were over.

Not long afterward, she began to feel suffocated by her relationship with Felix. It was okay when she still had all of her high school issues, and Felix was there to save her, but now that they were living together, she was feeling more like a nineteen-year-old hostage than a girlfriend. She couldn’t make one decision without his approval. He was exacting and became edgy when things didn’t go his way. Finally it reached a point where Susan was afraid to say anything that might upset him.

To avoid confrontation, she often listened and agreed, rather than stir controversy. She began to think back to other points in the past where she had been afraid to disagree with him. During their sessions as therapist and patient, he would set out a number of provocative theories. For instance, he told Susan that all girls had fantasies about having sex with their fathers and that their fathers wanted to sleep with them as well. He also implied that most girls had fantasies of rape. When he asked a teenage Susan if she shared those fantasies, she grew embarrassed and told him “no.” Felix insisted that these thoughts were natural, and Susan had no reason to question him. Now as she looked back, she began to see the larger impact of those statements, statements that affected her ability to have relationships of any kind.

By 1979, however, she was no longer a naive teenager. For the first time, she felt capable of making decisions on her own. At times, she didn’t want to be with Felix anymore but didn’t know how to untangle herself from his web. That fall, she enrolled at San Francisco State University and moved on campus. Having a roommate and living on her own in the center of the city made her realize that being around other people was different than being around Felix. She was less anxious and no longer afraid to speak or have an opinion. It felt good.

At one point, she even mustered up the courage to tell Felix that she wanted to “break it off.”

Her pronouncement was met by a terrifying threat: Felix warned that he would take his own life if she left him. He had left his family for her and now he was going to kill himself. Worse, he began to cry and accuse her of violating his trust, saying that he had a problem with abandonment and deceitfully claiming that he tried to commit suicide after a girlfriend left him.

Felix’s psychological dysfunction seemed to pour from him as he told Susan of his secret troubles. He spoke of his difficult childhood as a survivor of the Holocaust and of his stay in a mental hospital after a suicide attempt. He alluded to a problem with anxiety and panic attacks. He admitted to being jealous and confided that he had issues with “potency” in his first marriage.

Susan somehow felt responsible. As much as she wanted to be free of Felix, her guilt would not permit it. Besides, he was paying her college tuition and expenses. With this in mind, she resolved to stay in the relationship, despite her reservations.

In May of 1981, Susan graduated magna cum laude from San Francisco State with a B.A. in English. That November, she celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday. One month later, she married her forty-nine-year-old therapist. The wedding took place just two weeks after Felix’s divorce from Sharon Mann was finalized. “Irreconcilable differences” were cited in the couple’s uncontested divorce, which was filed with the Superior Court of California, County of Alameda, on December 8, 1981.

After three years of heated negotiations with his wife of twenty years, Felix finally agreed to the terms of the marital settlement agreement, which provided Sharon with $2,500 a month and ownership of the couple’s Berkeley home. Felix also agreed to pay the college tuition for his son, Andrew, who was a sophomore at Tufts University in Massachusetts, and to share custody of the couple’s then sixteen-year-old daughter, Jennifer.

Susan and Felix exchanged vows at the Berkeley City Club on Channing Street on December 26, 1981. The elegant, buttercup-yellow mansion had vaulted ceilings, ornate moldings, and sweeping views of the university. It had recently been granted landmark status. While architect Julia Morgan, designer of the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, had built the elegant structure in 1929 for the Berkeley City Women’s Club, in recent years it was used as a catering hall.

Family members from both sides waited in the expansive dining room, with its limestone walls and palladium windows. Though several of Felix’s colleagues were in attendance, Susan had invited just one guest, Brenda, her roommate from San Francisco State. Brenda had never frowned upon the relationship with Felix, not even when Susan felt embarrassed by his age.

Susan liked that Brenda never passed judgment on her, but as she pulled on her wedding dress, a simple, short-sleeved gown, a terrifying thought came to her. She didn’t want to get married—at least not to Felix.

Suddenly, she felt lightheaded.

Susan had given her word to the waiting groom, who was downstairs dressed in a cocoa-colored suit and tie and surrounded by guests. She couldn’t go back on it now. That is not how she was raised; honoring a promise was the proper thing to do. As much as she wanted to disappear, Susan didn’t have the courage to become a runaway bride.

That evening, as she stood compliantly next to Felix, delicate and waif-like in a lacey, white dress, a wreath of baby’s breath in her hair, Susan consoled herself.

I’m young enough, she thought. I’ve got plenty of years left.

From the start, trouble was brewing in the Polk household. Soon after their three-week honeymoon in Europe, Felix promptly laid down the law about “his” household.

They were home only a few days when he stormed into the room and began berating his new bride, calling her a “pig” and a “slob.”

“Let me tell you how I expect my house to be kept,” he yelled until he was red-faced, before firing off a list of things he wanted done.

Susan was stunned at how her new husband was “so transformed and abrupt.” Horrified by how he was treating her, her first reaction was to leave. But as Susan went for the door, Felix stopped her, grabbing her roughly and throwing her to the floor.

According to Susan, he raped her that day.

As she sat on the floor trembling, she thought again about leaving him, but the harsh reality of her situation hit home: she could never try to leave again. With a single act, he had crushed her spirit, which had just begun to blossom. After years of wrestling with her father’s abandonment and mother’s criticism, now Susan had an entirely new trauma to contend with—her husband. The rape that day set the tone for their marriage. The power and control that Felix wielded would only increase, and his role as the dominant force in her life would shape her character for many years.