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.
But that suspicion was not one that I cared, or dared, to pursue. I was far too much the needy patient to presume to be my doctor’s doctor. I had to trust someone if I hoped ever to recover from my defeat, and I chose him.
I had, of course, no real idea what kind of man Dr. Spielvogel was outside of his office, or even in the office with other patients. Where exactly he had been born, raised, and educated, when and under what circumstances he had emigrated to America, what his wife was like, whether he had children-I knew no more about these simple facts of his life than I did about the man who sold me my morning paper; and I was too obedient to what I understood to be the rules of the game to ask, and too preoccupied with my own troubles to be anything more than sporadically curious about this stranger in whose presence I lay down on a couch in a dimly lit room for fifty minutes, three afternoons a week, and spoke as I had never spoken even to those who had proved themselves worthy of my trust. My attitude toward the doctor was very much like that of the first-grader who accepts on faith the wisdom, authority, and probity of his teacher, and is unable to grasp the idea that his teacher also lives in the ambiguous and uncertain world beyond the blackboard.
I had myself been just such a youngster, and experienced my first glimpse of my doctor riding a Fifth Avenue bus with the same stunned disbelief and embarrassment that I had felt at age eight when, in the company of my sister, I had passed the window of a neighborhood barbershop one day and saw the man who taught “shop” in my school getting a shine and a shave. I was four months into my analysis on the drizzly morning when I looked up from the bus stop in front of Doubleday’s on Fifth Avenue and saw Spielvogel, in a rainhat and a raincoat, looking out from a seat near the front of the No. 5 bus and wearing a decidedly dismal expression on his face. Of course years before I had seen him in his yachting cap sipping a drink at a summer party, so I knew for a fact that he did not really cease to exist when he was not practicing psychoanalysis on me; I happened too to have been acquainted with several young training analysts during my year of graduate work at Chicago, people with whom I’d gotten along easily enough during evenings in the local student bar. But then Spielvogel was no casual beer-drinking acquaintance: he was the repository of my intimate history, he was to be the instrument of my psychic-my spiritual-recovery, and that a person entrusted with that responsibility should actually go out into the street and board a public vehicle such as carried the common herd from point A to point B-well, it was beyond my comprehension. How could I have been so stupid as to confide my darkest secrets to a person who went out in public and took a bus? How could I ever have believed that this gaunt, middle-aged man, looking so done in and defenseless beneath his olive-green rainhat, this unimpressive stranger on a bus, could possibly free me from my woes? And just what in God’s name was I expected to do now-climb aboard, pay my fare, proceed down the aisle, tap him on the shoulder, and say-say what? “Good day, Dr. Spielvogel, it’s me-you remember, the man in his wife’s underwear.”
I turned and walked rapidly away. When he saw me move off, the bus driver, who had been waiting patiently for me to rise from my reverie and enter the door he held open, called out, in a voice weary of ministering to the citizenry of Manhattan, “Another screwball,” and drove off, bearing through an orange light my shaman and savior, bound (I later learned, incredulously) for an appointment with his dentist.
It was in September of 1964, at the beginning of my third year of analysis, that I had a serious falling out with Dr. Spielvogel. I considered discontinuing the therapy with him, and even after I decided to stay on, found it impossible to invest in him and the process anything like the belief and hope with which I had begun. I could never actually divest myself of the idea that I had been ill-used by him, though I knew that the worst thing I could do in my “condition” was nurse feelings of victimization and betrayal. Six months ago, when I left New York, it was largely because I was so disheartened and confounded by what Susan had done; but also it was because my dispute with Dr. Spielvogel, which never really had been settled to my satisfaction, had become again a volatile issue between us-revived, to be sure, by Susan’s suicide attempt, which I had been fearing for years, but which Spielvogel had generally contended was a fear having more to do with my neurotic personality than with “reality.” That I should think that Susan might try to kill herself if and when I should ever leave her, Spielvogel had chalked up to narcissistic self-dramatization. So too did he explain my demoralization after the fear had been substantiated by fact.