“How about today?” I finally asked him. “Do you think your mother is still worried you’ll accidentally poison yourself?”
Gene was silent. He pushed his lips in and out — a persistent manifestation of resistance.
I waited. I trusted that Gene’s desire to please, or perhaps to get well, would eventually overcome these quiet rebellions. He was silent for a long time and then said, “What did you ask? I forgot.”
I repeated the question exactly.
He snorted, “No.” Then he mumbled, “Well … She’s worried I’ll mess something up and Dad’ll get angry.”
“What would happen if your father got angry?”
“What!” he said. Symptoms of alarm appeared: his right leg rose up, his head twisted to look in my direction, the expressive eyebrows lowered, his voice cracked. In our sessions so far, there had been no mention of anger from his father. I made a note of it, remembering Carol’s fear of her husband’s reaction to learning of the therapy. Until then I had assumed Carol barred Gene from contact with the photographer-husband out of rivalry, her own unresolved Oedipal conflict, since she wasn’t permitted in the darkroom either, or invited on picture-taking walks. Why should Gene be allowed to share in what she was denied? Maybe that was wrong. Maybe she was afraid that if Gene entered the forbidden darkroom, the father would hurt Gene. It could be she was shielding Gene from encountering a man she genuinely feared, preserving the fiction of the benign carpenter working in the light of day and banishing the dangerous artist to his lair.
“What would happen if your father got angry at you?” I asked again.
Gene remained frozen in his startled pose, hardly breathing.
“What’s your father’s name?” I asked. My instinct was: let’s make him a man. Let’s bring him into the room as a person, not an archetype.
[I was green when I treated Gene, making mistakes left and right. The above, however, is a foreshadowing of my later methods. How can we ask a patient to look realistically at his own life if we only mirror the distorted images of his neurosis? Susan was right to abandon the dogma of uncritical listening, although I think she was sometimes too quick to intervene. There’s a middle ground, a way of being neither a mirror nor a cop, but a signpost pointing to a new direction when the patient can see only the well-worn dead end.]
“Uh …” Gene’s right leg dropped. “Um …” He let out an embarrassed laugh. “I can’t think of anything but Daddy.”
“You can’t think of your father’s name?” I said gently.
“It’s crazy,” Gene said, wonderingly, impressed.
I made a note of this, learning something for myself, as well as about him. It may seem trivial to the reader, but I was struck by how this simple technique helped make Gene aware of his own awe, the mythic quality of his father.
Gene slapped the couch and the name came out: “Don. His name is Don.”
“People call him Don or Donny?”
“Donny?” Gene was amused. “No.”
“Don,” I said in a deep voice, giving the name grandeur and power.
Gene laughed again. “Yeah, right.”
“So what happens when Don gets angry?”
“Huh?” His leg went up again and he twisted his head. I waited. “Well, he gets angry,” Gene said, annoyed.
“Does he yell?”
“Of course he yells.” Then silence.
“Does he curse?”
“Curse?” I waited. “Yeah, he uses bad words.”
Bad words, indeed. “What bad words?”
Gene snorted. “You know …” His legs moved up and down. He shifted his torso also, squirming. He wanted out of this: it was so much more comfortable in his fantasy of a mother protecting him from dangerous chemicals.
“Tell me anyway.”
“He says — shit.”
“That’s it?”
“You know.” Gene moaned. He turned toward the back of the couch, hiding.
“Does it embarrass you to repeat them?”
No answer. I waited. Gene talked to the cushions in a monotone, “He says, shit, fuck, motherfucker, asshole.”
“To you?”
“Not often.” Gene’s voice was low. “He says it more to himself. ‘I’m an asshole,’ he says. ‘That motherfucker wants me to fail.’ Dad thinks his friends want him to fail. He always—”
“What does he say to you when he’s angry at you?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“How is that stupid?”
“No. He says to me, ‘Don’t be stupid.’” Gene didn’t laugh at my mistake. Am I feeling stupid? I wondered. Pay closer attention, I wrote in my notes.
“Does he call you a motherfucker?” I asked. Talk about a loaded question, I thought to myself.
“No,” Gene said. “He once called me a stupid shit.”
“What about?”
“Huh?”
“When did he call you a stupid shit?”
“I don’t remember when. I was a kid. I don’t know how old.”
The resistance was, for Gene, quite strong. “I mean, what provoked Don to call you a stupid shit?”
“Oh. I dropped a box of nails in an elevator.” At last Gene shifted onto his back, no longer speaking to the cushions. “You know, an open one in a loft building. They all spilled down to the bottom.” Gene wasn’t happy about this memory, of course, but there didn’t seem to be much tension. His legs had relaxed, his face was smooth. I noted that the incident recalled involved the good father, the loving carpenter.
[With some amusement, I see now, looking over my notes from that session, that I jotted down: “Good father — Jesus. Photographer — Satan?” Since Gene’s father was raised Catholic and his mother Episcopalian, presumably I was considering the symbolic quality of the good father as carpenter. I hope professionals will forgive me for my disorganized and pretentious thinking — I was twenty-five after all.]
“Did Don get angry at you about handling his camera or being in his darkroom?”
“No way.” Gene’s defensive annoyance had returned. He brought up both legs and hugged his knees.
“Why not?”
Gene yawned. More tension. He let go of his legs and they flopped on the couch. “I never touched him.”
“Him?”
“Them. I never touched them.”
“You said, him.”
“No, I didn’t.”
To this day the beauty of a Freudian slip never fails to amaze and delight. I feel it’s his most elegant and profound observation. If that had been Freud’s only accomplishment he would deserve to be honored. Gene never touched him, the photographer, the real father hidden in his darkroom.
“What do you think would have happened if you had touched Don’s camera?”
“He would have told me to leave it alone.”
“Leave it alone?”
“Not touch it.” Gene was angry. His tone was grim, and he was fidgeting, rubbing his face, feet restless.
“Has your mother ever touched his camera?”
“No,” Gene said.
“Never?”
Gene shook his head. “She’s scared shell break them.”
“So he’s never gotten angry at her either?”
“He gets angry at her. Just not about his stuff. We don’t mess with it.”
I was ready to wind this down. There was so much material here, including the phallic implications, it was pathetic and almost funny. Gene and his mother abandoned every night by Don, disappearing with his long lenses that they couldn’t “touch” into a darkroom with toxic fluids, living in so much fear of his anger if they intruded that neither dared to test it. Besides, Gene had had enough of this troubling exploration. He was exhausted and still resisted mightily. He had done plenty of digging for one session. I tried what I thought — here with a beautifully unconscious move of my own — was a safe way out for both of us.