Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“No,” he interrupted, gently but firmly. “You’re right. It’s time to grow up. I should be out there on my own.” We agreed to have three more sessions and then terminate.

I saw him next after the Computer Show. Black Dragon was well-received. Orders were not what they had hoped; but they weren’t for their rivals either. The recession was hitting computers hard. The machine was a technical triumph, however, and that was to Gene’s credit. He and Halley made love every night during the trip. Gene said it was the most passionate and exciting sex of his life. He found her fascinating and spent most of the session telling me stories about her life: her brief career in Hollywood trying to be an actress got some attention but he mostly talked about a trauma that particularly fascinated Gene — the death of her younger brother five years ago in a skiing accident. He knew about it vaguely because Stick took a week’s leave for the funeral, although Copley had never discussed the tragedy with Gene. He was moved by her love for her brother and her grief. She told Gene he was the only person she had been able to talk to about her brother’s death. She praised him for his empathy and said he was the first man who truly understood her. She openly admitted she wanted him to leave his wife and marry her. Halley said she was so in love that she would accept him on any terms, but she hoped for a full commitment.

He went home confidently, albeit with a grim determination, prepared to confront Cathy with the truth. He didn’t go through with it, however. He claimed he was thwarted by the surprising warmth of her welcome home. She didn’t greet him with her typical petulance. She hugged him tight and kissed him passionately while Pete tugged at them, until they all toppled to the floor. Gene’s little boy crawled over him while Cathy snuggled both of them. She had cooked an elaborate dinner, complete with fresh flowers and candles for the table; Petey had built a Lego model of Black Dragon. Gene was pleased and embarrassed by his predicament. Of course, he expressed the appropriate emotions: guilt that Halley loved him; shame that he was betraying Cathy; fear that he was hurting Pete. But it wasn’t hard to crack the thin shell of these civilized formalities and get to the yolk of his true reaction: glee that there were two women who wanted him; relief that he was, after all, a desirable and successful man.

“What do I do?” he asked me.

“I don’t know, Gene. I know you don’t believe me, but I’m really not a priest. It’s up to you to decide what’s right and what’s wrong. I’m sure you remember what you thought about your father when you found out he had been having an affair all those years.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, for the first time keen guilt worrying his cheerful face. “He just made it worse.”

“But you’re not your father, right?”

“Right.”

“What’s right and what’s wrong is up to you, Gene. My hope is that you will act on your feelings, not what you imagine someone else wants you to do.”

[I assume some of my lay readers may be shocked by my casual reaction to Gene’s affair. I’m aware from television talk shows and popular psychology books that in the United States confusion has arisen between what is mental health and what is moral behavior. There is also a humorless lack of awareness of moral relativism. In France, if Gene made Halley his mistress, he would not be frowned on by society unless he was so cruel as to rub it in Cathy’s face. In the U.S., the deception itself is often regarded as tantamount to illness and he would be considered noble if he walked in the door, told Cathy he had fallen in love with another woman and wanted a divorce. I’m sorry that so many popular psychologists encourage confusion about the role of therapy: a judgment of Gene’s affair, except insofar as the situation was generated by years of emotional and sexual passivity, is a matter for social mores or religious convictions. As I’ve noted before, my job was to introduce Gene to his real self, not to shape that self to suit my notion of good behavior. I assume there are some professionals reading this who would interpret Gene presenting a crisis in his marriage two sessions prior to termination as a way of prolonging therapy — in short, a cry for more help. I admit I believed then that there was an element in his behavior of creating material for me, providing an event he could claim was overwhelming and therefore justify a continuing dependence on our sessions. Indeed, this is part of the reason I reacted casually. It was time for Gene to deal with his life without a pretense that he wasn’t fit for the job. The transference had reappeared: I was the last barrier he couldn’t climb comfortably, the last excuse not to act on his feelings. Bear in mind, if Gene got himself into real trouble, I knew he could, and moreover, would come to me. Should he divorce Cathy and need support, I would supply it or find it, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath waiting for that drama. To put this as simply as possible: I did not consider his adultery to be an illness that I could treat.]

On March 15th, 1990, I began our last session by offering Gene the taped record of our work together. At first, he seemed embarrassed. He grinned, touched the hard shell of his moussed hair, and said, “What am I gonna do with them?”

“Whatever you like. I told you I needed them for our work but that’s over and—”

He raised his hand from feeling his smooth hair, like a student asking for the teacher’s attention and interrupted, “What happens if I need to come back?”

“I’ll keep them if you want. They’ll be safe. I just thought it was right to offer them.”

“No, you keep them. It’s too final if I take them.”

He talked about the situation with Halley. She was traveling a lot, trying to sell the company’s products, not the relatively popular Black Dragon, but their less successful line of personal computers. Her frequent absences relieved his feeling of urgency about his marriage and the affair. Besides, Halley had kept her word: she continued to see him when in town without pressuring him to leave Cathy. Of course, this had a perverse effect on Gene, worrying him that perhaps Halley didn’t love him as much as she claimed. I must admit I was skeptical about the authenticity of her feelings. Why had she taken a job with the company her father was running, especially since she didn’t seem to have any background or interest in computers? Why, if she was as beautiful and intelligent as Gene described her, was she involved with a married man who, to be blunt, didn’t seem sufficiently dynamic to inspire an illicit love? I guess I assumed from the slight facts that she was a female version of the old Gene — that she got herself into situations and relationships which were guaranteed to thwart her desires, probably because she didn’t want to face other, deeper needs. And she obviously had some version of an Electra complex, working for her Daddy, involved with his number one man. Probably, given Gene’s status as a kind of adopted son of Copley’s, there was an element of making love to a stand-in for her dead brother. And, perhaps unfairly, I assumed she was much less fascinating a woman than Gene believed her to be. Her true motivations were beside the point, however. What seemed utterly clear — and a little unpleasant — was that, for the first time in his life, Gene was in control of the people around him. Stick was under pressure at the company, in danger of being fired by the board for dipping sales, indebted to Gene for their only successful product and dependent on his management to bring in a new line for next year. Now that her husband needed her less desperately, Cathy had become a loving wife. Gene commented on this irony: “It’s weird, you know? It’s kind of sick. Now that I’m getting laid a lot, she wants sex. And it’s getting better. Not as good as with Halley, but better. I love her less,” he said, “and she seems to love me more.” He noticed Freudian oddities, observing that the names of the two women in his life were strangely similar: Cathy and Halley. “Sometimes I have to think twice before I say them, it’s so easy to make a mistake,” he told me and cackled, not truly mean-spirited, more a childish delight at his surfeit of pleasures. He was like the youngest sibling after the older ones have moved out — amazed and thrilled that he no longer has to worry about his big brothers and sisters gobbling up all the dessert before he gets his share. He looked at the choice in his life — to stay married or go off with Halley — nervously, of course; but also with excitement; that at last he was the playwright of his own drama. Whatever misgivings I may have felt about my help in freeing Gene’s id were calmed by my knowledge that in the end I was confident he was a caring man who would do his best for all of them.