Erica Jong - Fear Of Flying

“I don’t believe what you believe,” I yelled, “and I don’t respect your beliefs and I don’t respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I’m straggling with? I don’t want to live by the things you live by. I don’t want that kind of life and I don’t see why I should be judged by its standards. I also don’t think you understand a thing about women.”

“Maybe you don’t understand what it means to be a woman,” he countered.

“Oh God. Now you’re using the final ploy. Don’t you see that men have always defined femininity as a means of keeping women in line? Why should I listen to you about what it means to be a woman? Are you a woman? Why shouldn’t I listen to myself for once? And to other women? I talk to them. They tell me about themselves-and a damned lot of them feel exactly the way I do-even if it doesn’t get the Good Housekeeping Seal of the American Psychoanalytic.”

We went back and forth like that for a while, both of us shouting. I was hating myself for sounding so damned much like some sort of tract and for being forced into simple-mindedly polarized positions. I knew I was neglecting the subtleties. I knew that there were other analysts-my German analyst, for instance-who didn’t pull this misogynous routine. But I was also hating Kolner for his narrowness and for wasting my time and money with warmed-over clichés about woman’s place. Who needed that? You could get that out of a fortune cookie. And it didn’t cost $40 for fifty minutes either.

“If you really feel that way about me, I don’t know why you don’t quit right now,” Kolner spat out. “Why stick around and take this shit from me?”

That was Kolner exactly. When he felt he’d been attacked, he became nasty and threw in a four-letter word to show how hip he was.

“Typical small-man complex,” I muttered.

“What was that?”

“Oh nothing.”

“Come on, I want to hear it. I can take it.” Big brave analyst. “I was just thinking, Dr. Kolner, that you have what is known in psychiatric literature as a ‘small man complex.’ You get feisty and start hurling four-letter words around when somebody points out that you aren’t God Almighty. I know it must be tough on you to be only five foot four-but supposedly you were analyzed and that should make it easier to bear.”

“Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me,” Kolner snarled. He had regressed all the way to second grade. He thought he was being very witty.

“Look-why is it that you can throw stale clichés at me- and I’m supposed to be grateful for your superior insight and even pay you for it-but if I do the same to you-which surely is my right, given all the bread I push in your direction-then you get furious and start talking like some spiteful seven year old.”

“I simply said you ought to quit if you feel that way about me. Leave. Walk out. Slam the door. Tell me to go to hell.”

“And admit that the past two years and the thousands of dollars that have passed between us have been a total loss? I mean maybe you can write it off that way-but I have a somewhat greater stake in deluding myself that something positive went on here.”

“You can work it all out with your next analyst,” Kolner said. “You can figure out what went wrong from your point of view…”

“My point of view! Don’t you see why so many people are getting so fucking fed up with analysis? It’s all the fault of you stupid analysts. You make the process like some sort of Catch-22. The patient goes and goes and goes and keeps paying in her money and whenever you guys are too dense to figure out what’s going on or whenever you realize that you can’t help the patient, you simply up the number of years they have to keep going or you tell them to go to another analyst to figure out what went wrong with the first analyst. Doesn’t the absurdity of it even strike you?”

“The absurdity of my sitting here and listening to this tirade certainly does strike me. So I can only reiterate what I said before. If you don’t like it, why don’t you just get the hell out?”

As in a dream (I never would have believed myself capable of it) I got up from the couch (how many years had I been lying there?), picked up my pocketbook, and walked (no, I did not quite “saunter”-though I wish I had) out the door. I closed it gently. No Nora-slamming-the-door routine to undercut the effect. Goodbye Kolner. For a moment in the elevator I nearly cried.

But by the time I’d walked two blocks down Madison Avenue I was jubilant. No more eight o’clock sessions! No more wondering was-it-helping as I wrote out the gargantuan check each month! No more arguing with Kolner like a movement leader! I was free! And think of all the money I didn’t have to spend! I ducked into a shoestore and immediately spent $40 on a pair of white sandals with gold chains. They made me feel as good as fifty minutes with Kolner ever had. OK, so I wasn’t really liberated (I still had to comfort myself with shopping), but at least I was free of Kolner. It was a start anyway.

I was wearing the sandals on the flight to Vienna, and I looked down at them as we trooped back into the plane. Was it stepping on with the right foot or with the left that kept the plane from crashing? How could I keep the plane from crashing if I couldn’t even remember? “Mother,” I muttered. I always mutter “Mother” when I’m scared. The funny thing is I don’t even call my mother “Mother” and I never have. She named me Isadora Zelda, but I try never to use the Zelda. (I understand that she also considered Olympia, after Greece, and Justine, after Sade.) In return for this lifetime liability, I call her Jude. Her real name is Judith. Nobody but my youngest sister ever calls her Mommy.

Vienna. The very name is like a waltz. But I never could stand the place. It seemed dead to me. Embalmed.

We arrived at 9 a.m.-just as the airport was opening up. willkommen in wien, it said. We shuffled in through customs dragging our suitcases and feeling dopey from the missed night of sleep.

The airport looked scrubbed and gleaming. I thought of the level of disorder, dirt, and chaos New Yorkers get used to. The return to Europe was always something of a shock. The streets seemed unnaturally clean. The parks seemed unnaturally full of unvandalized benches, fountains, and rose bushes. The public flowerbeds seemed unnaturally tidy. Even the outdoor telephones worked.

The customs officials glanced at our suitcases, and in less than twenty minutes we were boarding a bus which had been booked for us by the Vienna Academy of Psychiatry. We boarded with the naive hope of making it to our hotel in a few minutes and going to sleep. We didn’t know that the bus would snake though the streets of Vienna and stop at seven hotels before coming to ours almost three hours later.

Getting to the hotel was like one of those dreams where you have to get somewhere before something terrible happens but, inexplicably, your car keeps breaking down or going backward. Anyway I was dazed and angry and everything seemed to irritate me that morning.

It was partly the panic I always felt at being back in Germany. I lived longer in Heidelberg than in any city except New York, so Germany (and Austria, too) was a kind of second home to me. I spoke the language comfortably-more comfortably than any of the languages I had studied in school-and I was familiar with the foods, the wines, the brand names, the closing times of shops, the clothes, the popular music, the slang expressions, the mannerisms… All as if I had spent my childhood in Germany, or as if my parents were German. But I was born in 1942 and if my parents had been German-not American-Jews, I would have been born (and probably would have died) in a concentration camp-despite my blond hair, blue eyes, and Polish peasant nose. I could never forget that either. Germany was like a stepmother: utterly familiar, utterly despised. More despised, in fact, for being so familiar.