It was the supernumerary father I’d had to struggle with back then. He was anxious for me in my ambitiousness and cockiness. He had seen less of me as a child-off in the store all day, and in bad times selling roofing and siding for his brother-in-law door to door at night-and understandably he had some trouble when he first discovered that the little bird’s beak he’d been feeding all those years had been transformed overnight into a yapping adolescent mouth that could outtalk him, outreason him, and generally outsmart him with the aid of “logic,” “analogy,” and assorted techniques of condescension. But then came my four-year scholarship to Brown, and that crown of crowns, straight As in college, and gradually he too gave in and left off even trying to tell me what to think and do. By my seventeenth year it was already pretty clear tiiat I did not mean to use my freedom from parental constraint and guidance to become a bum, and so, to his credit, he did the best an aggressive entrepreneur and indestructible breadwinner and loving father could, to let me be.
Spielvogel wouldn’t see it that way. He questioned my “fairly happy childhood,” suggesting that people could of course delude themselves about the good old days that had never been. There might be a harsher side to it all that I was conveniently forgetting-the threatening aspect of my mother’s competence and vigor and attentiveness, and the “castration anxiety,” as he called it, that it had fostered in her baby boy, the last, and emotionally the most fragile, of her offspring. From my descriptions of Morris’s life and my few vivid childhood recollections of him, Dr. Spielvogel concluded that my brother had been “constitutionally” a much tougher specimen than I to begin with, and that tins biological endowment had been reinforced in his formative years when he had virtually to raise himself while my mother was off working most of each day in the store with my father. As for Joan, it was Spielvogel’s educated guess that as the ugly duckling and the girl in the family she had hardly been in danger of being overwhelmed by my mother’s attention; to the contrary, she had probably felt herself at the periphery of the family circle, neglected and useless as compared with the hearty older brother and the clever younger one. If so (he continued, writing his Tarnopol family history), it would not be surprising to find her in her forties still so avid to have-famous friends, modish beauty, exotic travels, fancy and expensive clothes: to have, in a word, the admiration and envy of the crowd. He shocked me by asking if my sister also took lovers with such avidity. “Joannie? It never occurred to me.” “Much hasn’t,” the doctor assured the patient.
Now I for one had never denied that my mother might have been less than perfect; of course I remembered times when she seemed to have scolded me too severely or needlessly wounded my pride or hurt my feelings; of course she had said and done her share of thoughtless things while bringing me up, and at times, in anger or uncertainty, had like any parent taken the tyrannical way out. But not until I came under the influence of Dr. Spielvogel could I possibly have imagined a child any more valued or loved than Mrs. Tarnopol’s little boy. Any more, in fact, and I really would have been in trouble. My argument with this line the doctor began to take on my past was that if I had suffered anything serious from having had a mother like my own, it was because she had nourished in me a boundless belief in my ability to win whatever I wanted, an optimism and innocence about my charmed life that (now that I thought about it) could very well have left me less than fortified against the realities of setback and frustration. Yes, perhaps what made me so pathetic at dealing with Maureen in her wildest moments was that I simply could not believe that anybody like her could exist in the world that had been advertised to me as Peter’s oyster. It wasn’t the repetition of an ancient “trauma” that rendered me so helpless with my defiant wife-it was its uniqueness. I might as well have been dealing with a Martian, for all the familiarity I had with female rage and resentment.
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.