Philip Roth - My Life As A Man

I admitted readily to Dr. Spielvogel that of course I had been reduced in my marriage to a bewildered and defenseless little boy, but that, I contended, was because I had never been a bewildered little boy before. I did not see how we could account for my downfall in my late twenties without accounting simultaneously for all those years of success and good fortune that had preceded it. Wasn’t it possible that in my “case,” as I willingly called it, triumph and failure, conquest and defeat derived from an indestructible boyish devotion to a woman as benefactress and celebrant, protectress and guide? Could we not conjecture that what had made me so available to the Bad Older Woman was the reawakening in me of that habit of obedience that had stood me in such good stead with the Good Older Woman of my childhood? A small boy, yes, most assuredly, no question about it-but not at all, I insisted, because the protecting, attentive, and regulating mother of my fairly happy memories had been Spielvogel’s “phallic threatening mother figure” to whom I submitted out of fear and whom a part of me secretly loathed. To be sure, whoever held absolute power over a child had inevitably to inspire hatred in him at times, but weren’t we standing the relationship on its head by emphasizing her fearsome aspect, real as it may have been, over the lovingness and tenderness of the mother who dominated the recollections of my first ten years? And weren’t we drastically exaggerating my submissiveness as well, when all available records seemed to indicate that in fact I had been a striving, spirited little boy, nicknamed Peppy, who hardly behaved in the world like a whipped dog? Children, I told Spielvogel (who I assumed knew as much), had undergone far worse torment than I ever had for displeasing adults.

Spielvogel wouldn’t buy it. It was hardly unusual, he said, to have felt loved by the “threatening mother”; what was distressing was that at this late date I should continue to depict her in this “idealized” manner. That to him was a sign that I was still very much “under her spell,” unwilling so much as to utter a peep of protest for fear yet of reprisal. As he saw it, it was my vulnerability as a sensitive little child to the pain such a mother might so easily inflict that accounted for “the dominance of narcissism” as my “primary defense.” To protect myself against the “profound anxiety” engendered by my mother-by the possibilities of rejection and separation, as well as the helplessness that I experienced in her presence-I had cultivated a strong sense of superiority, with all the implications of “guilt” and “ambivalence” over being “special.”

I argued that Dr. Spielvogel had it backwards. My sense of superiority-if he wanted to call it that-was not a “defense” against the threat of my mother, but rather my altogether willing acceptance of her estimation of me. I just agreed with her, that’s all. As what little boy wouldn’t? I was not pleading with Spielvogel to believe that I had ever in my life felt like an ordinary person or wished to be one; I was only trying to explain that it did not require “profound anxiety” for my mother’s lastborn to come up with the idea that he was somebody to conjure with.

Now, when I say that I “argued” or “admitted,” and Spielvogel “took issue,” etc., I am drastically telescoping a dialectic that was hardly so neat and narrow, or so pointed, as it evolved from session to session. A summary like this tends to magnify considerably my own resistance to the archaeological reconstruction of my childhood that began to take shape over the first year or so of therapy, as well as to overdraw the subtle enough means by which the doctor communicated to me his hypotheses about the origin of my troubles. If I, in fact, had been less sophisticated about “resistance”-and he’d had less expertise-I might actually have been able to resist him more successfully. (On the basis of this paragraph, Dr. Spielvogel would undoubtedly say that my resistance, far from being overcome by my “sophistication,” has triumphed over all in the end. For why do I assign to him, rather than myself, the characterization of my Mother as “a phallic threatening figure,” if not because I am still unwilling to be responsible for thinking such an unthinkable thought’?) Also, had I been less desperate to be cured of whatever was ailing me, and ruining me, I probably could have held out somewhat longer-though being, as of old, the most willing of pupils, I would inevitably, I think, have seriously entertained his ideas just out of schoolboy habit. But as it was, because I so wanted to get a firm grip upon myself and to stop being so susceptible to Maureen, I found that once I got wind of Dr. Spielvogel’s bias, I became increasingly willing to challenge my original version of my fairly happy childhood with rather Dickensian recollections of my mother as an overwhelming and frightening person. Sure enough, memories began to turn up of cruelty, injustice, and of offenses against my innocence and integrity, and as time passed, it was as though the anger that I felt toward Maureen had risen over its banks and was beginning to rush out across the terrain of my childhood. If I would never wholly relinquish my benign version of our past, I nonetheless so absorbed Spielvogel’s that when, some ten months into analysis, I went up to Yonkers to have Passover dinner with my parents and Morris’s family, I found myself crudely abrupt and cold with my mother, a performance almost as bewildering afterward to me as to this woman who so looked forward to each infrequent visit that I made to her dinner table. Peeved, and not about to hide it, my brother took me aside at one point in the meal and said, “Hey, what’s going on here tonight?” I could not give him anything but a shrug for a reply. And try as I might, when I later kissed her goodbye at the door, I did not seem to have the wherewithal to feign even a little filial affection-as though my mother, who had been crestfallen the very first time she had laid eyes on Maureen, and afterward had put up with the fact of her solely to please me, was somehow an accomplice to Maureen’s vindictive rage.

Somewhere along in my second year of therapy, when relations with my mother were at their coolest, it occurred to me that rather than resenting Spielvogel, as I sometimes did, for provoking this perplexing change in behavior and attitude toward her, I should see it rather as a strategy, harsh perhaps but necessary, designed to deplete the fund of maternal veneration on which Maureen had been able to draw with such phenomenal results. To be sure, it was no fault of my mother’s that I had blindly transferred the allegiance she had inspired through the abundance of her love to someone who was in actuality my enemy; it could be taken, in fact, as a measure of just how gratifying a mother she had been, what a genius of a mother she had been, that a son of hers, decades later, had found himself unable to “wrong” a woman with whom his mother shared nothing except a common gender, and a woman whom actually he had come to despise. Nonetheless, if my future as a man required me to sever at long last the reverential bonds of childhood, then the brutal and bloody surgery on the emotions would have to proceed, and without blaming the physician in charge for whatever pain the operation might cause the blameless mother or for the disorientation it produced in the apron-strung idolatrous son…Thus did I try to rationalize the severity with which I was coming to judge my mother, and to justify and understand the rather patriarchal German-Jewish doctor, whose insistence on “the phallic threatening mother” I sometimes thought revealed more about some bete noire of his than of my own.