“You know what they did to the Iraqi soccer team when they lost under Saddam Hussein? They tortured them.” I wasn’t sure if China was recommending torture over steroids, but I began to suspect that there might be a method to her madness, and that all her television watching was some new Lacanian technique aimed at causing my long-repressed emotions to spew forth. I got the distinct feeling that she discounted the importance of my early years and my long-winded recollections of playing with those pink Spalding rubber balls in Kew Gardens. I wasn’t sure which parts of my past were of analytic significance, and with only a minute per session, it was often difficult to discriminate.
Only 32 minutes had passed, but I had already paid my bill for two months worth of sessions and I could feel a sea change in my personality. China had excused herself to go to the bathroom, and through the door I could hear her tinkling. In all my years of therapy, I had never seen or heard a shrink go to the bathroom, and there were times when I had the distinct feeling that, like parthenogenesis, in which fertilization occurs without the necessity of insemination, there were therapists who never went to the bathroom at all. China was plainly someone who pissed and shat as we all do. She was a real person.
At first I thought it was my imagination, but I started to notice that there were moments when China was actually paying more attention to me than to the television, and I wondered if her kindly gaze was showing far more than mere compassion for the sufferings of her patient. I wasn’t sure exactly what to do, but I realized that this was a situation in which all my years of paying for sex would come in handy — if only I could endure 16 more minutes before asking her if I could purchase some kind of sexual service along with the psychoanalysis. (It would be rude to interrupt in the middle of a billing cycle.)
There are many men and women for whom sex isn’t a financial transaction. After all, not all women are whores, even in a place like Rio. But a situation in which I was already paying for a woman’s services as a therapist segued naturally, in my mind at least, into offering her compensation to slake my carnal desires.
Despite the question of whether our analysis would evolve into prostitution, and the puzzle as to why China insisted on keeping the television on during our sessions, this early period of the analysis, especially the first 192 sessions (the equivalent of a year’s worth in a little over three hours), were some of the most fulfilling of all the work we would do together. In fact, we were so engrossed in the analysis that we both forgot about the erotomania lecture we were supposed to attend. About halfway through that first “year,” I discovered that China was not wearing underpants, and from what I could see, China’s vagina was a hairy one. The effect of her all-natural bush was rather dramatic in exciting the drives that were the essence of my manhood. It took me a while to get up the courage to talk to China about the fact that I could see her vagina and that it was having an effect on the analysis, but when I did she was remarkably calm in response, saying only, “I was wondering how long you were going to continue denying what was right in front of your eyes.”
Naturally, this also brought up childhood memories of my mother, whose vagina was visible to me through the diaphanous nightgowns she insisted on wearing around the house. But China crossed her legs and said, “We’ll continue next time,” just as I was about to address the memories that the constant exposure to my mother’s genitals elicited in me.
Even though the next session would start seconds later, it was always a major break in momentum for me. I found myself behaving as if I were a patient in any conventional therapy, first talking about how I was feeling that day before reviewing the themes I had brought up in previous sessions, if I could remember them. For years, my therapists and analysts had told me that the tendency to forget or repress is totally natural, but I found it upsetting that the frequent interruptions totally disrupted my chain of thought.
Of course, I could have proposed that we abandon the Lacanian approach and undertake a shorter number of sessions of the traditional 50-minute length, but I wanted to return from my vacation able to tell everyone I knew that I’d not only had sex with a lot of beautiful Brazilian Tiffanys, but that I’d undergone a complete analysis to boot.
At one point, China asked me if she reminded me of my mother. My first response was, “Why do you ask?” Analysts never answer when you pose a question, and never respond when you pour out your heart. In any case, the session was over before we could delve any further into the subject, and by the time we started our next session, I had forgotten why I’d even asked the question.
It struck me as obvious that she should ask me if she reminded me of my mother — after all, she was a woman and she was exhibiting her cunt to me just the way my mother had. If anyone was guilty of not being forthcoming, it was I. I was the one who was resistant to seeing the connection. I was the one who was avoiding analytic insight by posing the kind of rhetorical question a logical positivist might ask, rather than allowing my mind to soar to a vibrant state of free association. I was the one who was being literal, who didn’t understand the symbolic, metaphoric element that existed in all things. Of course, China didn’t look like my mother. She was much better looking.
Even in Lacanian analyses there are relatively long periods of time when nothing seems to happen. In my case, ten minutes passing could seem like a lifetime, since over ten sessions were involved. In actuality, the subject of the relationship between China and my mother’s vagina would eventually become more prominent and take up even more time than that. Psychoanalysis is often invidiously compared to short-term behavioral therapy or drug regimens, in which a good degree of affect modulation can become apparent in fewer than ten visits. My analysis with China was paradoxical, in that while it was nominally long-term analysis, it was taking place in much less time than your classic short-term therapy would. But, living in a universe in which the uncertainty principle was used to explain the facts of life, I was not at all surprised by the existence of such contradictions. All these ideas were swimming in my head, but I rarely had a chance to communicate them to China, who seemed constantly prepared to end a session the moment it began. There was no doubt that her insistence on keeping to the therapeutic regimen we had established was an attempt to make a point about the limits of what an analytic session could be.
I looked at this relatively long middle stretch of the analysis, which in the end must have added up to a full day’s work, as the period in which we forged a true therapeutic bond. I was learning to trust China even at those moments when she pulled her legs into her chest so that I was looking straight up her snatch. This is what is known in analysis as “working through.” I was coming to terms with the distrust I felt toward my mother during my childhood, a period of my life when I was powerless to do anything about the stimulation I experienced.
What was emerging from the therapeutic interaction was the notion that, under normal circumstances, if I met a woman like China who showed me her vagina, I was totally empowered to touch it. I could even enjoy the notion that I might like to stick my penis into it. I think we agreed that in a situation like this, it was imperative that I follow the laws of whatever land I was in, being careful to ask permission prior to insertion.
In retrospect, I think that seeing China’s vagina for so many sessions in a row, particularly in the early period of the analysis, had a profound effect on our relationship. Analysis has come a long way from the days when the analyst was regarded as a distant figure who rarely uttered a word. Many of the blatantly non-egalitarian elements of the relationship (in particular, the one in which the therapist gets to know everything about the patient, but the patient knows virtually nothing about the person treating him) have been legislated out of existence in some of the recent amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The study of transference can no longer be used as a vehicle for discriminatory behavior against patients. I am thankful to the great civil rights leaders of the ’60s, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who in bringing about racial equality also opened the doors for affluent analytic patients whose rights were being violated on the Upper East Side by double standards that evoked the plantations of the Old South. Patients in analysis were no longer treated like indentured slaves who toiled to pay for their therapy and often received little in return. On the other hand, what was going on between China and me was perhaps going a step beyond the liberties that had been envisioned by the courageous freedom fighters who had come before us.