Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Gene left. The receptionist buzzed me to say my group of teenagers were waiting in the Group A room. I opened my desk drawer and turned off the hidden tape recorder, ejecting an audio record of the session. I wrote Gene Kenny on the strip of paper attached to the cassette’s spine with the date and the number “one,” then put it into my briefcase for reviewing later during my late afternoon session on the health club’s treadmill.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I said to myself before going to my real work.

THREE MONTHS LATER I WAS ARGUING WITH MY OLD CHILDHOOD FRIEND Joseph Stein about dreams. We were double-dating. I brought Diane. Our relationship became so deep and satisfying since our summer trip that, as winter approached, we found ourselves wondering why we shouldn’t marry or at least move in together. Joseph brought his steady boyfriend, a young jazz musician named Harlan Daze, a stage alias. After we saw a movie in the Village, had pizza nearby at John’s, we walked the ten blocks to Joseph’s garden apartment for coffee.

In 1982, Joseph and I had renewed our friendship thanks to television. (We were chosen by a talk show host to represent opposing sides of an argument raised in my book, The Soft-Headed Animal. I had criticized the use of Ritalin and neuroleptic drugs on children; Joseph was there to explain their effects and disagree with me. To the host’s dismay, he agreed that, in practice, they were overprescribed.) As a neurobiologist engaged in basic research into the human brain — this is old news to anyone with a superficial interest in science — Joseph, in addition to his chair at Columbia, was consultant to a major pharmaceutical firm on the development of neuroleptic drugs. His theoretical breakthroughs led to practical experimentation and yielded tangible results. Prozac, a very specific serotonin enhancer reputed to have milder side effects than drugs then in use, had debuted earlier in the year. It rapidly became the most widely prescribed antidepressant in the United States. Joseph was far from being the only person responsible for Prozac’s development but he was acknowledged as a necessary component of its creation.

“Dreams are nonsense,” Joseph said, not for the first time that evening or in the second incarnation of our friendship for that matter. We disagreed so completely on the causes of human behavior that we had a pact to avoid the subject as much as possible. Unfortunately, it was a treaty that Joseph was frequently guilty of violating.

Harlan lifted a cup of espresso off an elegant Chinese lacquer tray and handed it to me. Harlan would not have seemed gay to someone with a stereotyped notion of homosexuals — specifically, Joseph’s mother. She was widowed now and still lived in Washington Heights, one of the many reasons Joseph, although his lab and teaching duties were at Columbia, lived way downtown, putting a distance of one hundred and seventy blocks between them. Joseph told me he lived in terror of accidentally running into his mother while with a boyfriend. Harlan, ten years Joseph’s junior, hardly seemed, with long blond hair tied in a pony-tail, black jeans torn at the knees and a white T-shirt, like a colleague or a graduate student. Still, Joseph’s mother would never have suspected him of being gay. His tall lean frame was always hunched; he moved like a prowling panther. A cigarette (that Joseph complained loudly of) seemed to hang perpetually from his lips, and his voice was as deep and rarely used as a cowboy’s. I liked him for at least two reasons. First, he made Joseph happy. And second, I enjoyed that Harlan often pricked my old friend’s arrogance and pomposity, both of which were rapidly inflating that year thanks to his success. “Maybe your dreams are nonsense,” Harlan said in a mumble and smiled at Diane.

She had been uncomfortable so far that evening, silent before the movie and all through dinner afterwards. I assumed this was because the previous three times she had met Joseph, she didn’t like him. She said she felt she didn’t exist for him. “I don’t mean sexually,” she added. “I mean he acts like I’m not there at all.” I understood. To Joseph, all women were his suffocating, perpetually cleaning and cooking mother, especially a strong-willed Jewish woman like Diane. He was as sexist as Pat Buchanan, quite different from the cliché of the homosexual who is especially sympathetic and understanding of the plight of women. I wondered how he treated his women graduate students and associates; or how many he took on, for that matter. And I also contemplated the irony of a mother whose grip was so tight on a famous scientist’s life that he chose lovers who would be invisible to her.

“You’ve read Allan Hobson’s paper?” Joseph said to me, ignoring Harlan.

I nodded. “It’s sophistry.”

“Did you study the data?” Joseph emptied his cup of espresso in a single gulp. He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “I bet you skipped the numbers, right? Psychiatrists,” Joseph added, addressing this comment to Diane, much to my and her surprise. “They’re pseudoscientists. I bet he didn’t even understand Hobson’s argument.” Diane stared at him blankly. “Hello?” Joseph said to her.

“I’m a psychiatrist and I—” she began. Diane is a short, thin energetic woman, her black curly hair as fiercely complicated and indomitable as her personality. She has a pert nose, pale skin covered with freckles and bright brown eyes that are unfortunately dulled somewhat by eyeglasses. (She refuses to wear contacts.) Her alert, friendly manner and smallness lend her an uncanny youthfulness — at thirty-four she was still carded by bartenders — and also a benign quality to her anger. Her tone was furious and irritated, but I could see Joseph was unaware of danger. I knew she was about to fire off an angry and much deserved reproach that I also knew Joseph was ill equipped to handle without firing back, so I interrupted. In a war between Diane and Joseph surely I would be the casualty.

“All Hobson’s data shows is how dreams are created by the brain,” I said over Diane.

“Oh you missed the point! I knew it!” Joseph leaned forward and dropped his cup and saucer before they were level with his oak coffee table. The cup clattered and slid off, tipping over.

“Jesus,” Harlan mumbled. He righted the cup and waved a scolding finger at Joseph. “And this is the good china.”

“No I didn’t,” I answered and heard anger in my voice. “Because science can identify how we mechanically produce dreams doesn’t speak to whether they are meaningful or generated by emotional conflict. It’s a false argument.”

“Oh, I see.” Joseph appeared quite amused. “So you’re telling me that Prozac’s success doesn’t prove we’ve identified what causes depression.”

This was his real point in fussing over the meaning of dreams. Prozac had received final approval from the FDA only four months before, and Joseph was very proud of the remarkable hoopla with which it had been covered by the general press. I had said nothing to him about it, except for routine congratulations. Apparently he felt he had decisively proved me wrong in our long-standing argument over whether drugs or talking therapy were more effective and wanted to hear me cry uncle.

I considered letting his breach of our treaty pass, but I couldn’t. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. No amount of successful drug manipulation of mood proves that depression or dreams or anything else isn’t generated by conflict and feeling. Masking symptoms isn’t the same as a cure.”

“I don’t believe this.” Joseph slapped both hands on his thighs and twisted away from me. Again he addressed Diane. “He actually said it. I can’t believe it.”