Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“Was she hurt badly?”

“No—”

“Was she bleeding—?”

“I know what you’re saying. Okay. But she was scared. She didn’t know if he would stop. She told me she thought he was going to kill her.”

“Okay. Your mother thought he was ready to kill her. And so she leaves a sick seven-year-old boy alone with this monster?”

I wasn’t trying to impose any particular point of view on Gene. My example here may seem to be partisan, but in other conversations, I took his mother’s side. What I was really trying to do was to get Gene to stop blindly accepting his parents’ version of these events and discover what he felt. In some cases, perhaps I was trying to lead him to feelings he ought to have had — that’s a difficult charge to defend against. I was not interested in the objective truth. Many people who are upset by psychotherapy assume its sole concern is to make mothers and fathers into villains. If Gene had been a different sort of neurotic, one who was in love with an image of himself as victim, I might have defended his parents’ actions. The moralistic way of seeing life that pervades all religions and cultures makes some people ill, especially children. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether Don or Carol or Gene is right or wrong about each of these actions (although how a seven-year-old with a fever could be wrong about anything is beyond me), what matters is that Gene was deeply affected by incidents such as the one described and yet he was a stranger to his feelings. He was as cut off from what each moment meant to him while it was happening as if he had never been present.

He had entombed himself in his mother’s and father’s experience of these events. He hid himself within his mother’s opinion that Don was merely trying to be a good father and husband by taking Gene along on this important job rather than what Gene actually felt, that his father was passive and his mother neglectful. He convinced himself of Carol’s opinion that his father had been a poor workman for the shelf error and a bad businessman by offering to repair it, when, at the time, Gene actually felt his father was dishonest and weak. We discovered, in the therapy, that Gene had silently counted the tall and deep shelves while the gallery owner raged about them, and found that his father had built the right number. He couldn’t accept that his father agreed with a false criticism, so he covered up this unpleasant fact with his mother’s distortion that Don had made a mistake, but should have demanded payment anyway.

To shore up all these facades, the teenage Gene was also convinced of Don’s version, that his father was accurate in using Gene as an alibi; that Don made an error because he had to take care of a sick child. In fact, the seven-year-old Gene knew the job was done properly and felt that he had been a good little boy, trying hard not to bother his father. It may confuse or annoy some readers that Gene’s judgments and feelings contradict and differ from how they might have felt or acted. (By the way, Rafael Neruda saw these actions and behaviors differently than seven-year-old Gene.) But that’s the difference between reacting to someone in life and as a therapist. Even if one believes Gene could be wrong in his feelings (for example, that it was understandable for his illness to be treated so casually in relation to his parents’ work), even so, before the mature Gene could come to that conclusion, he had to know what he felt as a seven-year-old. How can someone change their opinion if they don’t know what it is? It’s up to Gene to decide — if he needs to — whether his mother or his father was the better parent or whether their actions were good or bad. That comes later. My job was to present the evidence for the only participant who had no lawyer. My seven-year-old client’s guilt or innocence, in the eyes of Catholicism or Communism or feminism or capitalism or est or the op-ed page of the Times, was irrelevant to me. My job was to bring that seven-year-old back to life, to introduce Gene to himself, and let him be his own juror.

Over the next year, we returned again and again to this story. It had many doors to the interior of Gene’s heart. The vomiting, for example, was an entrance to the basement where Gene hid his anger. It was a fierce struggle getting down there. Gene denied the vomiting had any significance for a long time, insisting it was a coincidence, although it was immediately preceded by Don blaming Gene’s illness for the shelf error.

Remember, we discovered that, in fact, there hadn’t been a mistake. Gene confirmed this for both of us by checking his memory with Don the same day he informed his father that he was in therapy. Much to Gene’s surprise (not to mine) Don didn’t object to his seeing me, although he was dismissive of its being useful. Once over that, Gene told his father that he remembered counting the tall and deep shelves and found them to be correct. Don, Gene reported, was delighted. “You remember that?” he said with a smile and they had a rare relaxed afternoon together. Don even showed Gene some recent photos he had taken. Being reminded of the shelf fiasco — given his current success as a photographer — was pleasant for Don. The bullying gallery owner was now fawning toward the newly successful photographer. Indeed, Don confided to Gene, a friend recently told Don that the gallery owner bragged to him that his shelves had been built and designed by the “brilliant Don Kenny.” Later that night, Don joked to Carol, with Gene present, that he should send the gallery owner a bill now. The adults laughed. This is, of course, the difference between adult and childhood experience. For them, it was a parody of their conflicts and neurosis; for Gene, it was the tragic original.

I knew Gene’s therapy was almost done the day he finally relived what he felt, not what his parents had told him to feel, at the moment he threw up on Bosch’s vision of hell. He had long since understood that he was desperate to believe his father’s lie. Given a choice between Don as a disingenuous opportunist, willing to blame his child rather than confront the gallery owner, or as a decent man who couldn’t juggle the dual responsibility of fatherhood and work, Gene much preferred the latter. Don’s cover-up was that Gene was ill, so Gene performed on cue. What had remained hidden from Gene was the deeper feeling, what in jargon we would call the introjection of Gene’s rage at the betrayal, the deep betrayal not only of himself by his father, but the much more terrible betrayal by Don of Gene’s cherished image of his father. It is fair to say, in psychological terms, that Gene would rather die than see his father as he really was, a man who would neglect his child, abandon his dignity, and lie, in order to get his work exhibited. And so the real Gene did die. But the rage at the murder was there and it erupted out of him, pieces of himself spilling on the art. Erupted, but in the safe way — with the marvelous self-defeating logic of neurosis — in a way that could punish his father, the gallery owner, and the alibiing Gene. From then on Gene was to despise himself, the child who was a willing accomplice to the death of Don the self-assured carpenter and his beloved apprentice son.

Gene wept the day he relived the incident as himself. In great silent drops, he mourned. First he said, “I knew he didn’t love me,” in a dreadful tone of conviction and the tears rolled. “I knew that he didn’t really care about anything but his pictures.”

“And you threw up on a picture,” I said, pedantically and with wrong-headed coolness, I’m sorry to report.

“Yeah …” There was a painful silence. “He didn’t care about himself. He didn’t even care about me.”