Susan nodded. “His loss is acute.”
“Too acute given the slight provocation. That’s why I suspected abuse. It wasn’t just projection.”
“How could it be projection?” Harry said. “Your father didn’t abuse you.”
Susan shook him off. “Shut up for a second, Harry.”
“Be happy to,” he said, sitting down.
“You have to be Gene’s doctor. It’s important for you and Gene.”
“I can’t do it,” I said.
“What do you feel?”
“Scared.”
“Of what?”
“Failing.”
“Oh, heaven forbid,” Harry said.
“You have a right to fail. Your mistakes were minor. The transference, especially for one session, was excellent. And you have real empathy for him. Your intense dislike is an inversion of empathy.”
“He’s a boring case,” I said.
“What?” Harry said. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“I’m not even sure we should be treating him. He’s having some anxiety attacks, fucking up in school a little, okay, but we’ve got much more serious cases waiting for help.”
Harry gestured to Susan, like an emcee turning over the stage to a guest.
“You’re contradicting yourself,” she said. “You said before you believe he really needs treatment.”
“I’m talking triage. We’ve turned away people on the verge of nervous breakdowns. And he’s boring. Even a mediocre therapist could help him.”
“Rafe!” Susan said, ringing Pavlov’s bell.
“Yes?” I answered dutifully.
“Do you really think his problem is boring?”
It didn’t take long to see through myself on that one. “No. Somehow he’s too close to me, to my unresolved father issues. He’s a simple case for anyone but me. You should be his doctor. You could help him.”
“Not better than you can. And what’s more,” Susan put her long-fingered hand on my arm. Her grip was both insistent and reassuring. “He can help you.”
CHAPTER TWO
Defending the Ego
I CANNOT RECONSTRUCT THE NEXT TWO MONTHS OF GENE’S THERAPY with the kind of exact details I’ve given of our first meeting. I took meticulous notes that night after discussing it with Susan and Harry, for one thing, and for another, my work with Gene proceeded typically for a while. Getting his history was an easy process. He was forthcoming. Even his denials and repressions were, from a therapist’s point of view, straightforward.
At first, what attracted my attention was the unusual emphasis, for those days, on the father as a caregiver. Gene’s mother was really the family’s main financial support. Perhaps this was about to change thanks to his father’s successful exhibition, but certainly during Gene’s childhood she had the steady job; his father, at least in Gene’s memory, was the comforter, the nursemaid and cook, the mother-object. Not that Carol reversed sexual or emotional roles with her husband or he with her: she was clearly feminine, he clearly masculine. Thus the Oedipal dynamic was in place: Gene vied all the more for his mother’s attention because her work made it precious. However, he didn’t have to strive hard. Once she came home, Gene’s father abandoned the field to his son, vanishing into his darkroom. This led to an emotionally incestuous intimacy between Gene and his mother, hitting the Object Relations school’s central button: improper separation from the mother. [I was already distrustful of diagnosis and treatment based on theoretical constructs. I had had success — admittedly little at that time — by keeping to the specifics of my patients’ lives. For Gene, whether Freud or Horney or Sullivan or Erikson or Mahler would have been able to fit him neatly into their systems, the drama was the rivalry both mother and son felt with the father’s photography. His problem, I believed, was that this drama was entirely performed in his unconscious, his role as thoroughly repressed as if he had been locked out of the theater before curtain.]
Gene drew this picture of his childhood: during the week he spent most of his free time with Daddy, on the carpentry jobs or in the park or at home; when he lost his father, it was not to the mother, but to photography. That distinction was clearly defined in Gene’s mind from the beginning and continued to this day. He was allowed on the carpentry jobs before he could walk; as an adolescent, he was still forbidden from his father’s darkroom. The reasons given masked the real meaning of the distinction for Gene, reasons he couldn’t argue with, namely the dangerous chemicals, the lack of space, the fact that darkness had to be maintained. His father was unwilling to allow Gene to play with his expensive camera or his lenses and Gene didn’t care for substitutes, such as a Polaroid they gave him for his sixth birthday. It was far easier to let him hammer a nail into a spare piece of wood than allow him to waste a roll of film. And, in my mind, there was also the possibility that Gene simply hadn’t inherited a feeling for photography. This last consideration is heresy to most psychological theories. Gene’s lack of interest in photography has to be emotional, a rejection based on psychodynamics, rather than a matter of personal taste. I was unwilling to make that assumption. After all, the untouchable cameras, the forbidden darkroom, the unsuccessful rivalry for his father’s attention when it came to photography, could just as easily produce a profound affinity for it, rather than indifference. My instincts told me that Gene merely happened to prefer carpentry to photography. There are natural gaps between people: that a gulf isn’t self-manufactured doesn’t make it any less potent for the psyche. Indeed, it might be more painful to feel an incapacity for something that is so beloved by the beloved.
I didn’t make an effort to uncover this conflict for weeks, allowing Gene to paint as complete a “neurotic” picture of his life as he liked. I began to probe only when he completed his distorted canvas. (His condition didn’t seem urgent: after two sessions, Gene reported his anxiety attacks had diminished and he finished the English and science projects, late, but soon enough to get “passes” from his teachers for the first term.) It was a month into the therapy before I asked a provocative question. Did Gene remember the first time he was forbidden to enter the darkroom?
There was the usual denial, typical not only of Gene, but most patients. He said he had no memory of the first time. Therapy’s conjuring trick — it never fails to amaze me — happened a session later. Gene came in with a clear recollection from age four, not of his father barring the darkroom’s door, but his mother. Evidently he had wandered in and she found him opening a toxic fluid. From then on she insisted his father lock the darkroom at all times.
“Mom always worries about me being safe,” he commented and continued with a long diversion about her overprotectiveness in general. Gene portrayed her as a cartoon of fearful motherhood. But none of his anecdotes showed her to be excessive or unusually nervous, except with respect to the father’s photographic equipment. I didn’t confront this illusion right away. I disagreed with Susan’s impatient methods, in spite of their success with me. Gene wasn’t a suicide lying in a ward. I agreed with Freud: Gene needed to unearth his feelings with his own hands. I asked repeatedly about these early memories: his mother’s injunctions against the darkroom; her shrieks if he touched one of his father’s cameras; her insistence that Gene not accompany his father when he went out to take photographs. I allowed Gene to walk past the truth blindly over and over and instead explain Carol’s guarding of his father’s art as overprotectiveness of Gene. This was obviously false. She made no objections to Gene using saws, hammers, drills and the like, all potentially dangerous. She allowed Gene to swim in rough surf when they visited friends at the beach, to take the subway to school alone at age nine, and many other minor freedoms that a neurotic mother would not permit — or a normal but careful mother, for that matter. Gene, however, could recite those contradictory facts and continue to insist his mother’s sole concern in making rules against entering the darkroom or touching the photographic equipment was to protect him.