Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

“You did it, Gene. You’ve made a success of your life. You know, that’s the scam of psychiatry. The patient does all the work and we take all the credit.”

Gene put his glass down. He cleared his throat and frowned. “I don’t believe that,” he said quickly and rushed on. “Cathy once asked me about you and I realized something terrible, really embarrassing.” He checked on me fast and then focused on a hunting print behind my chair. “I never asked you anything about yourself. I just poured my heart out for three years and never found out anything about you.”

“You were right. You instinctively understood that I was merely a symbol. You knew everything about me you had to know.”

That earned me the longest look of our relationship: head cocked, his wide mouth twisted into a blend of curiosity and amusement. “What do you mean?”

“I was a stand-in for whomever you were working things out with. Sometimes I was your mother, sometimes I was your father, sometimes I was you, or parts of you anyway.” I realized I had fallen into pomposity, used to lecturing from all the testifying and interviews. I waved my hand. “Don’t worry about it. If you hadn’t gone off to college we probably would have continued the therapy for a while—”

“Really?” Gene interrupted pointedly.

“Not for long. Not really to discover things, just a more gradual end to the therapy. If you had had separation problems in general, we certainly would have taken our time, but you were eager to get on with your life and that’s healthy. Anyway, as part of that weaning, I guess you could have asked some things and realized I was just a person, someone quite different from the incarnations of the therapy. But I don’t approve of therapists and patients becoming friends afterwards. I trained under my psychiatrist — you remember Susan Bracken?”

“Sure. She was your doctor? No kidding.”

I nodded. “First she was my shrink, then she was my training analyst, finally my boss. We became good friends. But she’ll always be something other than merely a person to me. In fact, I no longer work for her partly because I couldn’t resist the urge to run to her for help with every patient. And, although I like to think I’m her friend, she’ll always be more than just a friend to me.” I looked at my watch. “I really have to get some sleep …”

“Sure.” Gene waved to the one sleepy waiter left on duty. He asked for the check, which was instantly produced. Gene stopped me from reaching for it. “It’s mine. This is the first time in my life I’ve got an expense account.” He sent the waiter off with a hundred-dollar bill.

“How are your parents?”

“Dad’s great. I mean, he’s moody. You know, up and down about his career, but really he’s having a good time. And Mom.” He sighed. “Mom never really got over the divorce and then she got sick.”

“Something serious?”

“Yeah. Ovarian cancer. She died just before Peter was born.” Gene spoke with no affect, as the jargon goes. No sadness, no anger. Just the fact. I considered the timing. His mother had died three years after our last session, while his new wife was pregnant and he was graduating from college. The death of a parent is always stressful, naturally, and those circumstances would have made it much more so. To borrow a phrase from Gene’s work, my professional systems came on line, a bit wearily, but instinctively.

“I’m sorry, Gene,” I said with all the feeling I thought he should have. I didn’t have to fake it; I felt true sympathy. His relationship with his mother had been difficult and, as far as I knew, unresolved. The timing of her death was cruel; not that death can be well-timed, but, given her emotionally incestuous relationship to Gene, somewhere it must have felt to him that she died because he had replaced her with another woman, another family. Had Gene really managed this without the need for help? If so, that was impressive and meant our work together had been much more successful than I had any right to expect.

[Cure is used too casually, to say the least, in my profession. Psychopharmacologists use it when an objective observer might say the patient has had his most severe symptoms overwhelmed by chemicals. Talking therapists use it when others might say that a particular issue has been resolved. In theory, a cure should mean that a patient has achieved a feeling of harmony — homeostasis — and has the strength to regain that balance on his own each time life deals one of its inevitable blows. In my experience the latter is the rarest of accomplishments. An event such as Carol Kenny’s early death just as Gene was pouring the foundation for his own family, often sends a patient back to therapy, usually to repeat what was done before, but sometimes — this was Jung’s main preoccupation — for the sake of consolidation and further growth. Some believe, in particular psychopharmacologists, that this apparent recidivism proves talking therapy doesn’t work. That seems to me to underestimate life’s difficult terrain. To scale one mountain doesn’t mean a higher one won’t require a guide or that previously acquired skills were useless.]

The waiter had returned. Gene occupied himself with taking his change and leaving a tip. He hadn’t acknowledged my sympathy. He stood up, feet wavering from the alcohol.

“It must have been hard on you.”

Gene pressed his lips in and nodded. “I thought about calling you.”

“You could have. I hope I made it clear—”

“Oh yeah. I knew that.” He was so unsteady on his legs that he reached for the wing chair with his left hand. “But what could you say? She didn’t last long. They caught it late. Cathy got me through it. And then Pete was born. I was just sorry Mom never got to see him.” He looked down and was a sad sight, in his prep school clothes, seemingly on the verge of tears. The frantic energy of the computer triumph was gone. “Well,” he said with a sigh. “Time to go home.”

I walked him downstairs to the lobby, pausing near the doors. I asked him if he wanted me to recommend therapists near his home.

“You got a network, huh?” Gene said with a laugh.

“I can ask around and—”

“Thanks,” he lightly touched my shoulder and immediately let go. “Everything’s okay now. Really. I gave you the wrong impression. If Flash II had been a bust, I would need help, but now I’ll be fine.” I got one of his sideways glances: his eyes were bloodshot and, to my mind, scared. The doorman asked if Gene wanted a cab. He said yes and offered me his hand. “Thank you for everything. That’s what I wanted to say.”

I shook his hand and said, “Wait.” I removed a card from my wallet. “Here’s where you can reach me. Call if you want me to recommend someone to see in your area. Or just to talk, of course.”

Gene declined with a shake of his head, eyes down. “I’m okay.” Then he accepted the card. “Okay. Thanks.” He hurried out the revolving door, stumbling when he reached the curb. The doorman took his elbow for a moment. Gene looked back before entering the cab and waved, still, to my eyes, a little boy bravely going to school.

I knew it was only a matter of time before I would hear from him again. He called a few months later, in the spring. He said he was having trouble sleeping. “We worked like madmen on Flash II,” he told me. “Eighteen, twenty hours a day. Sometimes I didn’t sleep for two nights running. I guess I can’t get back to norm, I can’t unwind. Is there someone I can see who will give me some sleeping pills?”

Obtaining sleeping pills, unfortunately, is easy in America, the land of instant gratification, so I assumed this was a smoke screen. I wondered why Gene was embarrassed to admit he needed help. Did he feel he was letting me down? “Let me make some calls and get a few names for you. I want to make sure I can tell you something about them so you have a basis for making a choice.”