Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

I responded to Zoe that day by being more theoretical than ever. Rejected, she screamed, "You are a royal pain in the ass!" and stormed out.

I wrote up the session for A.K., who praised me for using the theory but pointed out that I must be using the theory wrong because while, even if I were to be given the benefit of the doubt and her "pain in the ass" were a regression from Genital Stage to Anal Stage, there was no hint, no hint at all, of any Oral.

"I'll try harder."

"That's the worst thing you could do."

"I'll try less hard."

"You can't."

"Until I'm analyzed?"

Number 2 number four.

Work with my cases was intense and exhilarating. I looked forward to seeing them, spending hours the nights before going over my ledger and reading the relevant Freud, and then after each session transcribing for supervision with A.K. Now I had a vision of how therapy went. As I held to this vision with my cases, except for Zoe they mostly went that way. I'd float out of sessions light-headed, full of ideas. With my associations, dreams, and fantasies, my inner life was rich, a garden of unconscious delights. No wonder so many analysts had creative hobbies like sculpture or painting or basket-weaving. In terms of my cases, it was the best.

But in terms of myself, it was the worst.

On Thoreau, surrounded by Freudians, I felt watched constantly. Feeling watched constantly, I came out constantly with words and actions that were bizarre, a sign of my deep psy-chopathology. Tapping a pencil on a desk was guess what? Fondling a basketball while waiting for Malik? Eating a banana in public? — the stares of Faith and other Thoreauvians soon made me stop, fold it up, hold it down-more stares-"What is he going to do with that banana?" It was astonishing how any object or action could be seen, deeper down, as sexual. At first it had only been penises. Now it was also breasts. Breasts and nipples were everywhere! It was remarkable just how many breasts you could see and hear, if you kept an open mind. Lunchtimes were hell, with hot dogs and melons-once, with Faith, a taco transformed itself before my eyes into a vagina.

It was a vicious cycle: the more I started to feel that my every move and my every word were being analyzed, the more wary I became, and the more utterly stupid things I seemed to say or do. Worst was my seeming to be happy- say, about my cases-which deep down meant I was unhappy. The happier I seemed, the deeper down was my unhappi-ness, the more miserable I must be. The present became mythic, almost Jungian! It was hard to take.

My own worst psychopathology came out around A.K.

herself. I began to show up for supervision either too early or too late, at the wrong time or on the wrong day. One day I barged in on her during a session, interrupting a well-dressed woman, knees up, weeping on the couch. Humiliated, knowing I had set the analysis back several weeks if not months or years, bowing my abject apologies, I slunk back out. Suddenly I seemed in possession of a trick appointment book, its pages now porous, unable to hold my writing, or acidified, so as to render my ink invisible, or even with whole days missing. My mind seemed made of mud. My everyday life was pure neurosis. My head felt like a bog, my stomach raw hamburger. My Me felt jinxed. I was a nervous wreck.

Then, soon, I got paranoid. Was it our old friend homosexuality? I walked Thoreau on eggshells, when I wasn't hiding out behind the closed door of my office. When in public, I was as silent as possible. I was living under a kind of Freudian Miranda warning-"Anything you say can be used against you." I shut up. But when I did speak, Freudian slips abounded. My efforts to cram my words down into silence seemed to make my actions burst out in ever more bizarre ways-the Fat Lady in the Bathing Suit theory. Everyone seemed to be wondering when the hell I'd get myself into analysis.

When I told A.K. about Cherokee finding condoms in his wife's purse and being vasectomized, so that she was fucking someone, A.K. said nothing. Then I told her about Cherokee dating Christine, and she was furious. "You fixed them up with each other? What the hell are you doing, running a dating service?"

"I happened to leave the outer door open, she came in early, and they just happened to meet."

"You didn't 'happen' to, and nothing is 'just' something. Your repressed wish to fuck her came out in your 'leaving the outer door open' so he could fuck her. It's Oedipal. Primal Scene." Her eyes widened. I braced myself.

"And do you imagine that you saw your father fucking your mother?"

Boom. Pitch-dark, and on the other side of the thin wall of my bedroom a grunting, a muffled crying…

"Are you going to go on?" A.K. was saying.

I fought back tears, and said nothing, my head hanging

down. I felt her staring at me, slats of heavy winter light through Venetian blinds. Childhood.

"When you're ready," she said, in a kindly tone I'd never heard before, "you're ready." I looked up. There was kindness in her eyes. "There's a lot of pain in there, waiting to be let out."

Astonished and touched by her concern, I went back to talking about the found condoms in Lily's purse and Cherokee's vasectomy. When A.K. refrained this, saying, "The reality of the condoms in her purse is less important than the deeper meaning of 'the condoms in her purse,' the dreams, fantasies, and associations to the condoms," I nodded my agreement. Somehow I managed to stumble through the session until she grasped number 2 number four and said:

"You're not doing that badly. You're bright, and even though you're only a first-year resident, I've been giving you third-year-resident supervision. Perhaps it is beginning to pay off."

I floated out of her office on a pink cloud, as if tipsy, or in love.

" 'BEWARE OF ALL enterprises that require new clothes,' " Malik was saying, staring at my new Schlomo suit and rainbow-colored Jackson Pollack tie, the first suit and tie I'd worn since the day I'd met him on Emerson, lifetimes before. "A quote, from Henry David Thoreau."

It was late Thursday afternoon February 25; the talons of winter were hooked so deeply into the year that you could almost feel the horny cartilage all icy against your ribs. Malik was standing outside his office on Thoreau, and beside him were an elderly woman and a seeing-eye dog. I wanted to talk to Malik about Cherokee.

The woman, like Malik, was wearing orange-tinted sunglasses. She carried a red-tipped cane. I answered Malik with silence.

"Dr. Roy G. Basch, meet Dr. Geneva Hooevens, and her dog Yoman."

She was the blind woman who, at the meeting after Ike White killed himself, had stood up bravely and asked Lloyal von Nott why he was denying that Dee White had killed himself. Geneva

was a large, broad woman with rich chestnut hair in braids. In her handshake I felt a delicate, iron sensitivity.

"Geneva," Malik went on, "practices in the community, and also has an office here, as a member of the Attending Psychiatrist Staff. She saw one of our Thoreau patients a few times in therapy, until the parents heard how terrific the Family Unit was and stuck the girl here against her will. I was just going over her impressions."

"Yes, won't you join us?" Geneva asked.

I did, and in silence listened to them discuss the case, thinking that they were talking much too pragmatically, about the manifest symptomatology-promiscuity-rather man the deeper developmental arrest around the pre-Oedipal Mother, who I knew, from family therapy, was engulfing and intrusive. I drifted downstream on my associations, until Geneva got up to go.

"I guess her family saw me as not high-powered enough," she said. "And maybe they're right. Out there in the community, in daily practice, you're just flying by the seat of your pants-theories don't matter much. A girl like this, well, I start to feel I'm not doing it right, just stumbling along, and that I should be reading more-but what seems to work best is just trying to create a kind of friendship. Seems to help some of them, even though it's not in the books. The books are always written by the analysts."