Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

Primo brought Henry to my house. We drank and talked all night long. I said that in my own analysis I too was feeling depressed.

"Yeah, analysis kills your health, physical and mental?" he said. "I'm hangin' on by a threat?" He stopped, and stared inward, in horror. "Holy shit what a slip? Man, I am deeply deeply depressed?"

In the morning he insisted I drive him to Slapadek's house for his regular appointment, to-his words-"fight fire with fire." I waited in die car for him to come back out. He never did. I rang the bell but no one answered.

The next day Henry did not appear. Lloyal von Nott met with Win, Arnie, and me. We assumed it was to talk about Hannah's and Henry's being gone, but he ignored this and talked about the Misery Capital Campaign Luncheons. Later we got a memo from Schlomo Dove, Director of Training, saying that Henry Solini and Hannah Silver were both taking leaves of absence and we three would now be on call every third night, to fill in.

Soon I was exhausted, even more irritable and vulnerable. But my patients continued to respond to my psychoanalytic method. I continued to see Zoe and Cherokee five times per week. Like me and as expected, they were both deeply depressed and following A.K.'s predictions perfectly, though they refused to regress from Genital Stage to Oral Stage, clearly a problem of my technique, not Freud's theory. A.K. said that it was because I was still so neurotic and only beginning my analysis that they were still stuck, holding on to their genitals: Cherokee not being able to get it up, and Zoe not being able to give up trying to seduce me. In general they were doing Freud. It was Oscillator City, and I'd begun to think I'd started to understand it a little. Listening in the "material" for my patients' unconscious perception of my father's death, I heard all kinds of referents. It was astonishing to me, just how clearly they unconsciously were picking up my unconscious.

My sessions with Christine, only once a week, seemed

shallow, skimming the surface of Cherokee and his flaccid penis.

A.K. was warming to me even more. She talked about her own work with Oly Joe Olaf, using it to give me helpful hints such as, "If, for a long time, you don't say anything at all, then when you actually do say something, you have incredible power."

"Slashing in like a Cutlass Supreme?"

She smiled and nodded wisely. "With Oly Joe, I am trying to build up a stronger baby version of himself. I send him fond letters and write him nice notes in children's books like Goodnight Moon arid Where's Spot? She took down one of her dozens of leather-bound ledgers, opened it and took out a Hallmark greeting card, with a note in it:

"An analyst is like a mom,

Read this over and you 'II feel calm."

"Wonderful," I said. "Very creative."

"Yes. In those locked-up binders are my notes on the case. Six hundred seventy-one pages of process notes so far. Sex and aggression. Understand?"

"Do I ever," I said. "I am one sick puppy."

"Good. Last weekend I myself went to a Tavistock workshop in the Allagash Wilderness and…" She paused, then said, with pride, "I was psychoticl"

"I'm half psychotic all the time! And now I've got all these symptoms too." I told her how, after only a few weeks of analysis, I had developed scary psychosomatic symptoms: exhaustion, splitting headaches, recurrent flu, a booming flatulence, and night terrors. "I've never been so depressed in my life."

"Good, good," she said, nodding wisely. "You're getting warm."

She invited me to come as her guest to the annual New England Regional Defense-mechanism Congress- NERDCON-held every April in Boston and always on the same topic, "Me, Myself, and I: Psychoanalytic Theories of Yourself." A.K. would be presenting a new paper, "Goldilocks and the Three Bears and the Oedipal Oscillator." We also

made a firm date, at the end of the month, during my last week rotating on Thoreau, for tennis and dinner at her home.

Most incredible to me was not her warmth and openness in our supervisory sessions, but rather how she still treated me like shit in public, with silence and contempt. Our secret was being kept within the four walls of her office, held by us both. No one knows what goes on behind that therapist's closed door.

My own analysis with Adolf Zement "Poppa Doc" Shaper- my nickname for him-was going like gangbusters. I would come in, he would nod me toward the couch, I would lie down and begin to free-associate and fantasize. He would say nothing until the end. Then he'd utter soothing phrases like, "We are all messes, trying to help bigger messes," or "It's amazing how many people go home and cry into their pillows at night." I looked forward to my sessions and felt incredibly worse when I left them. Things were going extremely well.

POOR BLAIR HEILER. All those months chasing around the world to be at a conference where Renaldo Krotkey would actually show up, and now while Blair was off in South Africa-"Black and White Borderlines After Apartheid"- listed on the program just below Krotkey himself, Renaldo was sitting right here on Mount Misery, watching a Family Analysis on Thoreau.

He had appeared by surprise, a short fireplug of a man with a head like a bowling ball covered with shorn red hair, and a horribly pocked face. He wore a European-style suit with a bow tie that made him look like a waiter in a kosher deli, and he had a German accent. He had come with a European-style woman whom he referred to as "My amanuensis, Pensilena Teiche." She wore a short black leather slit skirt and matching leather vest over a bare chest. Her hair was as blond as my hysteric Christine's. Despite the prominent No Smoking signs, both chain-smoked Gitanes from black and silver holders.

There was an electricity in the room as Lowell greeted Krotkey, a jolt, I associated, much like the moment Freud met Jung. I felt nervous as hell, for Krotkey would be observing my Family Analysis of Zoe. Malik was there too. A.K. herself would be taking the place of Faith Baltsburg, who, regressing hard, had been found the day before weeping hysterically in

the safe-deposit vault of the Rank Bank. A.K. now had a lot of free time, for all her therapy cases had left AMA-Against Medical Advice-except for Oly Joe Olaf.

Bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong bong.

A.K. and I entered the room and took our seats at either end of the semicircle of Zoe's family-father, mother, and, for the first time, her siblings: older sister Marion, a mother of six married to someone at Morgan Stanley and living in Darien; and older brother Butler, a senior vice president at Chase, living in the East Eighties, and still single. The first part of the session went well, as her sadistic father joined her engulfing mother in saying how much worse Zoe was. She wore her petite flowered'dress, and was rocking seductively in her chair.

A.K. had been puzzled by Zoe's not regressing from the genital. Finally she solved it. Zoe's old friend Thorny was visiting her every day after work. They talked about-in Zoe's words-"everything!" including what was going on with me in her therapy. A.K. said that my allowing Thorny to visit her on Thoreau was diluting the transference and I had to prohibit their meeting. I had mixed feelings about doing this. Thorny was doing well, going to AA, working at a recycling plant. All year long they had helped each other out. They were best friends. But A.K. had insisted, and had written the order herself that prohibited Thorny from entering Thoreau. Ever since, Zoe had been enraged with me-which A.K. pointed to as a glimmer of movement toward the oral, the "tit tucked away."

Now, Zoe's brother and sister, Butler and Marion, joined the happy chatter of the family, which all of them, laughing, described to A.K. and me as "just us Cranky Yankees." They chatted and laughed as if they were sitting not in a mental hospital but a private club, laughing and chattering easily in those polite shallow deflections of thousands of cocktail parties and balls and benefits the family had absorbed to make sure that nothing deeper or even deep ever got said. A.K. and I held to a tight, top-drawer silence.