Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

cropped light brown hair was mannish, as were her high cheekbones and fixed nose and dark and unmade-up eyes. Her lips were the only feminine touch, plump, inviting, as if they were about to giggle at all this muscular silence, at the power suit and the tight, tall body, and shout out, "Hey, come on- lighten up!"

Unable to hold her silent gaze, I had inspected every inch of her office. The decor seemed of the century past, reminding me of my immigrant grandparents' apartment on Magaw Place in New York City. Heavy velvet drapes, weathered leather chairs with grandmotherly doilies, fringed lamp shades, and in the corner a massive analyst's couch covered by a heavy multicolored drape reaching to the Persian carpet. Behind the couch was a high-backed leather chair, winged for a nodding head, and a fringed ottoman. My eye caught a black-and-white photo showing another draped couch, chair, carpet, ottoman-a replica of the office I was sitting in! The caption informed me that this was "S. Freud's Office, 19 Bergasse, Vienna, the Birthplace of Psychoanalysis."

A small framed photo sat with its back to me on A.K.'s desk. In a locked glass cabinet behind A.K. was a row of leather-bound ledgers like you used to see in accountant's offices, each with initials on its spine.

As I told A.K. about my session with Cherokee, she wrote furiously in a crisp new ledger. Each page had a vertical line down the middle. On the left-hand side, A.K. wrote what I said Cherokee said and what I said back to him. For each phrase on the left-hand side, she wrote her own phrase on the right-hand side, as if doing a crossword puzzle.

"Fascinating case," she repeated, and glanced at her watch. She lit her cigar. Then she reached to the left-hand side of her desk next to the small framed photo where there were two perfectly sharpened yellow number 2 pencils, grasped one in her sculpted hand, and slid it slowly across to the right-hand side of the desk, where it joined two other perfect yellow number 2 pencils, in strict alignment. This meant that we were now at the three-quarter mark of the supervisory session. When I had entered, there had been four number 2 pencils on the left. As I had sat down, she had slid number 2 number one left to right; at the fifteen-minute mark, number 2 number two; now, number 2 number three; when that sinewy forearm reached for

number 2 number four, I gathered, the session would be over and I would be history.

"Deep down it's penis," she said, reading right to left.

"Penis? But he's obsessed with Schlomo fucking his wife."

"No, he's paranoid."

"Suppose it's true?"

"Paranoia," she went on, as if I hadn't asked what I'd just asked. "But paranoia is surface level, a defense against a deeper homosexuality…" She paused, blowing out a diabolical silence.

"Homosexuality?" I said, as nonchalantly as possible, but all of a sudden seeing how attracted I was to Cherokee, how much I liked, even loved, him. I started to sweat, and said nothing more.

"Homosexuality which is a defense against the Oedipal struggle, which is, at its deepest level, a defense against castration anxiety. Penis."

"Penis?"

"Penis. Your patient Cherokee is a classic case of what Freud describes in his classic on cases like this, 'Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality.' " She nodded to a bookshelf on which were several feet of books in light blue dust jackets, as strictly aligned as the pencils. The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. "Read Freud. Cherokee is a classic case of homosexuality, disguised as paranoia." She then gave a brief rendition of the classic paper that sparkled and shone with clarity, even with a flicker of wit. It was not all that hard to understand, although my attention was split: part of me was listening to the content, part of me was astonished by the process-she was so damn chatty. She seemed to care about teaching me how to work with my patient. This, after Toshiba, seemed bizarre. She stopped, laying out silence.

"But what about Schlomo fucking his wife? You don't think it's true?"

"There is no truth, there is only the individual perception of experience."

"Wait a minute. The truth is that I'm taller than you."

"That's not the truth, that's your transference to me."

"We can measure it. To see who in fact is taller."

"You think 'taller' can be 'measured'?"

I saw her point. She wasn't only aware of the objective fact, she was also aware of the deeper meaning psychologically. "But I'm stuck," I said. "With Cherokee, I don't know what to do."

"You're not doing badly." This stunned me. Except for Malik, my supervisors at Misery were constantly telling me just how badly I was doing. "You even asked about the father-transference, his feeling ugly compared to you."

"Yeah but he wouldn't talk about it."

"Of course not. He had resistance to it. You should have asked about the resistance, the defense. You say, 'What gets in the way of your talking about your father?' In analysis mere's a correct response to every situation."

"A road map?"

"With limited routes. Roots. Like a towering tree. They come into our consulting rooms with seams, we psychoanalyze them, they go out seamless."

They go out seamless. Ike White's phrase. Her friend, classmate, and fellow Schlomo patient. Was this some kind of secret Freudian password?

A.K. lit her cigar, puffed, and stared at the shape. A banana, perhaps a cuke. Could, of course, be a penis too. "This hospital is a travesty of psychiatric care. Money, insurance, DSM diagnosis to five digits, drugs. No one listens to patients. No one gives them enough time to heal. Here on the Family Unit we are lucky. We have time, money, and Freud. Freud is the only complete, cohesive, scientific theory of human development, pathology, and treatment. In fact we today here are much like Freud in fin de siecle Vienna: radicals, rebels, even revolutionaries, trying to increase human knowledge in spite of the distortions of the biologists and the bankers. In the consulting chamber, we use the powerful tool of psychoanalysis to help people change and grow."

"Psychoanalysis cures people?"

"No, no," she said with a smile. She actually smiled! "We wouldn't stoop to cure. As Freud put it, 'Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your neurotic misery into common unhappiness.'"

"But Cherokee won't talk to me about his feelings, or his past. He just talks about his obsession."

"You have to go deeper into his obsession, find the deeper meaning, the roots of it in his childhood, his past."

This was exactly what Malik had warned me against doing. Suspicious, I asked, "How?"

"If he talks feeling, you talk thought. If he talks thought, you talk feeling. If he talks past, you talk present. If he talks present, you talk past. You the doctor talk constantly about what he the patient doesn't want to talk about. This is the analysis of the resistance. Then, when he starts distorting his relationship with you and calling you a sonofabitch for not talking about what he wants to talk about, then you do the analysis of the transference, telling him he's treating you like his father, his mother, his aunt Sally, whatever. On a deeper level still, you can analyze the resistance to the transference, and the transference to the resistance. Not to mention the countertransference to each-but that's way beyond you at this point."

Finally I felt I was getting some concrete advice about what to do in therapy, and I scribbled this down on the back of a bank stub. "But how do I do that?" I asked. "How do I get him to talk about his feelings?"

"You use the Three Techniques of analysis. One, free association. You ask, 'What's the first thing that comes to mind?' Two, dream analysis. You analyze dreams. Three, fantasy analysis. 'Tell me your fantasies about x.' You explore."