“I hate this Oedipal stuff. It’s psychobabble,” I blurted. “You know the Sandinistas? Well, you sound like a Jargonista. It’s always the same stuff with loving the mother and hating the father. My father wasn’t even in the picture. He was no match for me. It was all about my mother and me. I thought that Lacanians were supposed to be more linguistically orientated. I thought we would be talking about post-structuralists like Barthes, Foucault, and Kristeva. This is the same stale stuff that the classic Freudians were peddling back in the ’50s, to go with the Danish modern furniture in the waiting rooms. Sure I loved my mother. Everyone wants to fuck his mother. You don’t have to be a patient in psychoanalysis to learn that. I’m actually quite functional. I love women and I simply need to find the right whore to settle down with.”
“Do you mind if I suck your cock?” China interjected placidly.
“Sure, but I insist on paying.”
China didn’t bother to respond as she got down on her knees and started to unzip my fly. When she finally got my dick out, she paused for a moment to listen to a roar from the Brazilian soccer fans on the television, as their goalie made an improbable save. Then she placed me in her mouth.
“You’re very eloquent,” she said. The words were muffled by the fact that my penis was between her lips, so it would have been dishonest for me to return the compliment. China really knew how to suck a cock, and unlike some Tiffanys she looked you straight in the eye as she did it. Her eyes were actually welling up as she stared at me, as if she were experiencing some powerful emotion.
Perhaps more was happening for her than the simple application of a blowjob. I have to say that I remained curiously rational, despite the oceanic pre-Oedipal feelings that she was stirring up in me. I was painfully aware that my desire was due to the powerful transference that had taken place, and that, like many an analytic patient before me, I had simply fallen in love with my analyst. This is something that is generally more prevalent with women patients, who fall in love with their handsome or fatherly male analysts. But it’s perfectly natural for a man to turn his mother figure into a whore. The fact that by blowing my brains out China was giving up her veneer of analytic neutrality complicated matters, but still, all the feelings that were transpiring between us were an inevitable part of the analytic work, and in fact totally appropriate at this stage of the process.
“I just find that you are the most interesting patient I have ever had. You are very special,” China said, momentarily ejecting me from her mouth like a DVD. I noted that she was very special too, particularly in regard to her ability to perform psychoanalysis and fellatio at the same time.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to say things like that. Every patient always thinks they are special and has a fantasy that the analyst likes him more than all the others.”
“But what if I told you that a part of our analysis might be the recognition that you are very special to me, and that I have fallen in love with you.”
“But I just want you to be my whore. I want to continue paying you for the sex as well as the analysis.”
“I never said you weren’t going to pay.”
In many ways I was the typical sex tourist. I had come to Rio for the whores, not for love. I’d never even thought of paying for love, but perhaps that was just another way of looking at marriage. You pay a whore for sex and a wife for love. I still had a hunch I was going to be better off paying the whore for sex. Lots of guys I know got married and paid for love, without getting any sex in the bargain.
“I have begun to realize that I have fallen in love with you even if you are my patient,” China reiterated. Our session ended just a few seconds later. Normally, I would have been troubled if an analyst dropped such a heavy revelation on me at the end of the session, but in this case all I had to do was walk out of the hotel room, wait ten seconds, then ring the buzzer and come back in.
“Don’t you have to work on your counter-transference before you know if you really love me,” I began.
“You’re using a lot of big words. Why don’t you just tell me how you feel?”
That was precisely the problem: my intellectuality is a defense that I often use to avoid confronting my issues. I still play the good student, coming home to mommy and looking for approval. I have always tried to impress my analysts with how much I know about analytic theory. But it’s not limited to psychoanalysis. I know just as much about automobile repair as I do about analysis or prostitution. For instance, when I had a problem with the knocking sound coming from the engine of my beat-up, old Ford, I was more knowledgeable about what was going on with the distributor than the mechanic. Like the old comedian Professor Irwin Corey, I’m one of those guys who tries to be the “world’s foremost authority,” but sometimes I actually succeed. That was part of the problem. Not only was I gratifying my fantasy of being the best and most interesting patient China had ever had in her practice, I also felt that I could one-up her at her own game. I might not have been able to be a good whore, but I did have the disconcerting feeling that I might have out-analyzed my own analyst. If indeed she had fallen head-over-heels in love with me, as appeared to be the case, I could conceivably be more on top of the situation than she was. Even if I had also fallen for China, I’d been able to maintain my neutrality as a patient. In other words, if she hadn’t gotten down on her knees and sucked my cock, I certainly would have been able to curb the turbulent emotions China had aroused in me by exposing the organ that rhymed with her namesake.
“Have you run all this by Schmucker?” I inquired.
“Of course. He’s my lover.”
A sudden burst of homicidal jealousy served as a good indicator of the depth of my passion for China. While it was considered a breach of professional ethics for an analyst to have sex with his or her patient, there had been many celebrated cases of such goings-on, especially in the early years of analysis, the most famous involving a young woman named Sabina Spielrein, who had been a patient of Jung’s.
“He’s also your supervisor, isn’t he?” I said, thinking that China might consult with Schmucker about me, in the way that Jung had consulted Freud about Spielrein. As I listened to China try to address both my amorous and competitive fantasies, I began to think that someday I might use all the knowledge I’d gained through the painful and joyous experiences of my time in Rio to help other people. I might not become a full-fledged analyst, as Spielrein had, but at the very least I had enough onsite experience to become a counselor to prostitutes.
I’d read about the movement toward intersubjectivity in analysis, in which the notion of the analyst as a distant tabula rasa on which the patient projects his or her fantasies had been questioned. It was widely acknowledged that the benefits of neutrality are often outweighed by the inequities of a one-sided, at times authoritarian relationship. I wondered if the changing relationship between China and me wasn’t reflective of some of the new currents in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic communities. Even though we had only been seeing each other for a relatively short period of time, it was obvious that there was a sea change between our first few minutes together and what was now beginning to transpire. Whether the deeper changes in analytic theory were affecting us or not, there was no doubt that China needed me as much, if not more, than I needed her. One of the by-products of this particular analysis was that the patient and the analyst had reversed roles, with the patient now performing a therapeutic and healing function for his own analyst.