Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"I still hear that voice inside, but ever since I started my affair with Christine, it doesn't bother me as much. I worry about getting in too deep with her, but…"

"And so you feel better?"

"I feel like crap and it's your fault! Now, not only am I paranoid, but you've got me cheating on my wife!"

"I've got you cheating?"

"She's your patient, isn't she? It's so embarrassing! I'm acting just like Father- all of his slimy affairs. And

Oh yeah, that new Indian place yeah.

Maybe I'll try it?

Hm. Maybe she is fucking somebody after all.

Technique 4: Ask the Opposite of the Opposite You Just Asked. No, better stick with Chinese.

God I love hearing the sexy bits of their affair! More!

Fear of his Engulfing/Intrusive Mother.

Shit-a mistake. Erase it.

His Oedipal rage at my mistake. Erase this too. He thinks I'm his Father.

Father-transference interpretation.

You mean your Mother. Identification with Father.

now I'm hearing his voice all the time too: 'Don't be a puff Cher'!" I'm so depressed I could scream!"

"Ahem."

'Time's up already? Please, Doc, don't hit me too hard today, O.K.?"

"Hey, it hurts to have your cock cut off."

Silence. Stunned look in eyes.

"You are hungry for your Father's love and starve yourself to get it and Christine can't feed the hurt of feeling 'I am not good enough.' "

Silence. Panicked look in his eyes.

More silence. His look changes to gratitude and admiration.

Projection of his homosexual wish. Oh, such a puniml- why do I sound so much like Schlomo? A sign that I'm comfy with my own homosexual wishes. And hey it hurts to have your cock cut off.

Thirty seconds left. Hit him with a final interpretation, one to grow on.

Castration Anxiety. He sees me as his Distant/Sadistic Father, great.

Got him. Great! Go for it again.

Not bad, but why all these "ands"? Just like my father, and why do all my Freudian interpretations sound like his letters? And why has he stopped writing me letters?

Maybe tonight I'll order chicken with cashews?

And Szechuan spicy pork.

"Gotta hand it to you, Doc, you're good. You beat me again."

He staggers out, closes the door.

Oedipal Rivalry: I, the Father, win, he, the Son, loses.

Chow down!

Cherokee's Father-transference to me now was so intense it was almost palpable: his hunger for my approval, his identifying with me, trying to be friends with me, asking about my car, my wife, my house, my kids, fearing my wrath, complying with whatever I said, putting himself down-all because he wanted to kill me.

It was incredible to see, in Cherokee's childhood Genital-Stage arrest, how well he fit Freud: at age five his unresolved castration anxiety had back-flipped into a killer Superego now perched on his skull like a hawk, peering down at the dove of his Ego in his brain, both dove and hawk pecking at the lizard in his groin, his Id. The unconscious forces behind his behavior were being made conscious. His affair was, deep down, a way both of identifying with his distant/sadistic Father and of making love to his intrusive/engulfing Mother (to whom he had a strong attachment, the root of his homosexuality). His trying to "kill" Father by shunning Wall Street for Walt Disney deep down was a way of loving Father homo-sexually. He'd been afraid to "be bigger" than Father and had "cut myself down" in love and work ("lieben und arbeiten"). Day after day we'd been drilling down through the swamp of his obsession to the bedrock of his childhood until finally, today, he'd gotten relief from his symptom:

"I still hear that voice-'He's fucking her in therapy'-but you know something, Doctor? It doesn't bother me as much."

If this wasn't turning his neurotic misery into common unhappiness, what was? He still hadn't owned his homosexuality, but the love between us was almost palpable and I had every confidence he would. It was dynamite work.

As was my work with Christine and Zoe. A.K. had suggested I regress these cases as well, but Christine could only

afford to come once a week. She too fit Freud like a glove. That harlot-blond hair, those black weeping tights and short skirts, those grand swings of mood from elation to despair, her using sex as bait-here was a classic case of hysteria.

Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Then-symptoms are the remnants and the memory symbols of certain [traumatic] experiences… They cannot escape from the past, and neglect present reality in its favor.

And why, deep down, do they do this?

Every hysteria is founded in repression, always with a sexual content… Envy for the penis-the striving after the possession of a male genital.

A.K. said that since I was seeing her only once a week, I had to hit her with harder interpretations. This I did In a session a few weeks before, she'd offered a dream fragment:

"I dreamed that I floated out of my bed and into the arms of a woman in white standing tall, and as I went to her we both burst into flames."

"White standing tall" was obviously a penis, and "burst into flames" an ejaculation. I said, "You have the wish to suck my penis?"

"Yeah. I'd like to turn off the lights and give you a blow job."

"As you wished to do with your distant/sadistic Father."

"Yeah," she said cheerfully, "and as I'm gonna do in about ten minutes, with Cherokee, in the Jammer Motel just down the road."

Failing to get my interpretation, she was "acting out" sexually. Freud's "economic" theory of repressing libidinal energy was hydraulic, like trying to stuff a fat lady into a tight bathing suit: if you got one part in, another part would pop back out. Repressing her desire to suck her Father's penis, she sucked any man's penis she could find-even, for a while, Arnie the Lunkhead Bozer's.

After my dream interpretation she "cut down" on "giving head" but started having migraines. I interpreted this hysterical conversion symptom as repressed penis envy for

her distant/sadistic Father-"Giving head gives you headaches." She stopped having migraines and started blacking out at work-"hysterical blindness," as in nineteenth century Vienna. She'd always wanted to be a painter. In the last session we'd analyzed this right out: She'd held herself back from painting because her Father was legally blind. "Canvasing men" sexually was a symptom of her inability to "hold a paintbrush to the canvas without shaking"-penis envy, big-time. It was exhilarating work.

But my most challenging case was Zoe.

Zoe had money. Living on the Family Unit and seeing me three tunes a week, she was regressing like crazy. The erotic transference was like a good fastball: high-inside and hot. The previous week A.K. had quoted me this, by heart, from Freud's "Observations on Transference Love":

"One motive at work, connected with falling in love, is the patient's efforts to reassure herself of her irresistibility, to destroy the physician's authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover."

"Yes," I said excitedly, "that's exactly what she makes me feel."

"You want to fuck her?"

"No. Well… maybe a little."

"Fuck her a… 'little'?" She smiled. "Or do you want to suck her?"

This too seemed appealing. I nodded. She smiled again, and suddenly I had the fantasy of getting up and unpeeling A.K. herself from that dark, manly suit. What was under there? I blushed. "What's the difference?"

"You want to suck me?"

"Well," I said, trying to make a joke, "you found me out."

"Like you always wanted to suck your mother because you were not enough?"

Boom. A curtain parted like in the Columbia Movie Theatre and I saw my mother in a summer "playsuit" and my father's gentle dental hands and I myself playing right field in Little League behind the Elks Club-my father always said their initials, BPOE, stood for "Best People on Earth"-needing glasses and not having told anyone I couldn't see and sud-