A Natural History of Love (54 page)

“Suppose I fall head over heels in love with him, body and soul, hot and heavy?”

“That would be both agonizing and very helpful. True, you would find yourself in a diabolically painful, unrequited relationship with a man you feel physically rejected by, and yet have to meet regularly. You’d be sitting across from him, face-to-face, knowing that he knows how desperately you love him, and also knowing that he doesn’t want you—it can’t get much more humiliating than that. But you’d also have the unique luxury of being able to analyze your pain with him, pick out which elements hurt and why, which are based on reality, which are exaggerations and distortions, which reflect scars you are carrying from childhood or past relationships with other men.”

“But there I would be, dying to have a real relationship with him, to do things together, to make love …”

“Let’s suppose you get your wish. He gets sexually involved with you, and for a while that seems fabulous. He’s most likely married, and the odds are that he’s not going to leave his wife. I say this because statistically that’s the picture—roughly 7 percent of male therapists have affairs with their clients, but only .01 percent of that figure go on to marry them. Soon enough all sorts of man/woman problems would arise. There you would be, having another bad relationship with a man. His job is not to add to your list of unsatisfactory relationships; it’s to help you learn from them and avoid them. To that extent, he would have betrayed your trust. And, of course, it would make continuing therapy impossible. How would you feel if you were paying a man you were having sex with? Wouldn’t that make you feel exploited? You would almost certainly end up in therapy with someone else just to deal with your bad relationship with your first therapist.”

“All right, let’s suppose I don’t fall in love with him. A long time ago, I was in therapy briefly with a woman, and I couldn’t bear the broken relationship at the end. Here you have this intense intimacy with someone you care for and trust, and then suddenly the reverse is true and you never see them again. I felt so disposed of; it was crushing.”

“From the therapist’s point of view, I guess that’s the safest course to follow. Sometimes in novels or movies, strangers meet on a train and don’t even tell each other their full names. But they have the freedom to be unparalleled lovers, acting out any fantasy, feeling unjudged and totally uninhibited. They can reveal anything, be anything. Psychotherapy is like that. Most therapists feel that they cannot become friends with their clients—even after therapy ends—because it would prevent that intense, liberating anonymity if the client should ever need to return for help. So their policy is: once an intimate always a stranger. Freud himself didn’t practice this principle; over the years, he became dear friends with a few of his patients whom he particularly liked. They often socialized, and neither he nor they reported any problems resulting from the fullness of their friendship. Indeed, I know a psychiatrist in Manhattan, a wonderful woman in her seventies, who has outside friendships with some of her patients; and they rave about her as a person and as an effective therapist. But that requires remarkable people who can compartmentalize exceptionally well, and most therapists can’t manage that, or don’t want to as a general principle. In any case, you are having the most intimate relationship of your life with him, but he is having intimate relationships with many people. His day is filled with tumultuous human dramas and towering moments of empathy. Dealing with them often requires pinpoint concentration. After hours, he undoubtedly wants to clear his mind of all that, and for his own mental health he needs to. Probably the last thing he wants is to fill his leisure time with the same psychic carnage, or even with people who remind him of it. I very much doubt that many therapists have relationships with their friends—or for that matter with their families—which are as intense as the ones they have with their clients.”

“And yet you still believe it’s worth doing, despite everything, despite the ordeal.”

“Because of the ordeal. Because learning how to love in a way that’s not self-destructive is essential for survival. At this point, your world seems littered with hidden snares and bombs, some of which life dropped when you weren’t looking, and some of which you have set for yourself. Defusing them is an ordeal. How could it be otherwise? But the world will be a safer place for you if you
can
defuse them.”

   I knew I was sending her to her salvation, but perhaps also to considerable torment. In the ancient hieroglyphic poems, love is a secret. It is so obsessive, so all-consuming, so much like insanity, that one is ashamed to admit how much life one has surrendered. Caught in the undertow of a powerful transference, Carol might not be able to reveal to her therapist how much of her mental and emotional life he consumes. Because she has a sensitive and tender heart, she will love him honestly, beautifully, with all the ampleness of her spirit, but because he will not return that love, or even comfortably acknowledge its seriousness and proportions, it will seem shameful. She may feel self-hatred, since it seems to be heir fault alone for loving him so one-sidedly. She will not understand that the love has formed—to use Stendhal’s image—as naturally as a crystal of salt does on a branch in a sealed salt mine. She could not have stopped it; it did not arise because of some defect in her. It is an entity that sometimes grows in the caverns of psychotherapy, particularly if the therapist encourages it to flourish. But it will burn in her open wounds, it will torture her.

Carol may walk willingly into the primeval forest of deep transference, but will she be able to get out safely? Although neither is simple or without peril, it’s marginally easier to leap onto a dragon’s back than to climb off it. Dragons come naturally to mind because transference love is, in many ways, medieval in structure. It’s a love heightened by obstacles, taboos, and impossibilities, as was courtly love. That makes it all the more delectable. The therapist is like a knight who must prove his devotion by
not
lying down with his lady. Or rather, in effect, by lying down with her but not touching her. That was, after all, the final and truest test of a knight’s love, if he could steal into his lady’s chamber and climb into bed beside her, while her naked body appealed to all his normal male appetites, without laying a hand on her. In therapy, the patient lies down—literally or figuratively—and is more naked than naked, more exposed than mere nudity could ever reveal. The therapist proves his devotion by not responding sexually. His quest is to restore what has been lost or stolen from the castle of her self-regard. It is a difficult task, which they both construe as a journey fraught with obstacles and danger and strife. There are dragons to slay. There are whirlwinds to tame. There are enemies without. There are monsters within.

ON THE LOVE OF PETS

One Saturday morning in midsummer, at the Farmer’s Market down by the lake, a young woman was walking her pet ferret on a leash. Many people stopped to inquire about the animal. They stroked its wiry fur, commented on its pungent odor, studied its small black eyes which flashed like hot licorice. In time, she strolled on and a man arrived walking his two Irish wolfhounds. Well-mannered and tightly leashed, each dog stood almost four feet high. Roughly the size of small Shetland ponies, they ate ten pounds of food each day, and no doubt their defecations filled the fields behind their home. Both owners shone with pride about their animals. What special favor does a pet convey? Is it the controlled lawlessness implied by walking unmolested beside a wild animal? In admiration and relief, are we reminded of what we share, and don’t share, with other creatures?

We live in a panic about our origins, we fear our animal nature as if it didn’t belong to us, as if it were a predator that could steal our humanity when we turn off the lights. We prey on ourselves. Civilization has made us schizophrenic and we live double lives—animal and not-animal—each one frightened of dying at the hands of the other. Our desperation to distinguish ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom is so violent that many people reading this sentence will wince even at hearing themselves described as animals. The thought is unbearable. It suggests that human life is irrational, savage, unplanned. We struggle to prove to ourselves that we are not “mere” animals, that no hyena lurks in the bathroom mirror, that we will not revert to the animal inside. We picture such a fate as a carnal circus of predators and prey where one is never strong enough to best the bigger, stronger beast around the corner. “Raise up your young to be fiends and teach them to be sly, teach them to be brutal,” might be an adage for a mother in such a world. As I imagined that scenario, in the back of my mind I saw vague, human-dingolike creatures; but what interests me more is that they moved in darkness. The night world, where our senses falter and our reason is of little help, scares us all. Other creatures master that world—bats, cats, snakes, rats, insects, lions. To make hell seem all the more loathsome, theologians depicted it as a dark world lit only by the flickering confusion of flames. Actually, an overly bright world of compulsive order, repetitive forms, and suffocating cleanliness would be equally hellish.

We see it grazing in a field: some lost version of what we were or who we are—animal. We do not know our future. Animals such as albatrosses and porpoises have always seemed to us messengers and portents, full of oracular magic, able to offer us a companionship we crave, but somehow cannot give to one another, an antidote to our terrible loneliness in our alabaster cities, a connectedness with our primitive past. We look at them and know they dwell in a realm somewhere between us and our beginnings. We have littered our myths and homes with images of animals, which accompany us throughout our lives; they are the first crib toys we give to our children; women sometimes marry them in fairy tales; we use them as zodiacal signs to count the hours in our days. We understand how animals fit into the scheme of nature. As for ourselves, we aren’t so sure who we are, or where we’ve come from, and even less what we wish to become.

When we hold the gaze of a wild animal, it assumes that we mean to bedevil it in some way, either to devour or to mate with it. Small wonder it charges or turns tail and dashes away. The best way to sneak close to grazing deer is not to make eye contact with them, but to pretend to graze idly in the soft morning light, while casually drifting closer. Hold a pet’s gaze too long, and it assumes you expect something from it. It becomes unsettled, it shifts its eyes askance, then it bolts. We are used to having cats and dogs as companion animals, warm-blooded creatures that enjoy affection and some eye contact. They help bridge that no-man’s-land between us and Nature, between apehood and civilization. We are still apes, of course. It is still a wilderness. We attempt to cross it with camera lens or idea, but the deeper we penetrate the frontier the vaster it seems. We long to merge with nature, and yet we also struggle to keep it at arm’s length.

The imminent encroachment of nature alarms us, the weeds on the lawn, the sowbugs creeping in, the bacteria everywhere. We try to obliterate all of it, and keep the house “sanitary,” neat and clean. We scrub away our own sweat and the sweat of our houses. Then we just as obsessively fill the house with potted plants and clean our floors with pine-scented liquids. Could anything be more contradictory? We build walls to keep out the elements; then we equip our homes with furnaces, lamps, and air conditioners, so that we live in a perpetual breeze or bake. To be safe from wild animals, we build fences and set traps. Even a groundhog or raccoon alarms us. A harmless garter snake loose in the house causes havoc. An invasion of ants or daddy-long-legs leads to chemical warfare. But something deep inside us remembers being accompanied by animals. We have worn the same costumes, we have heard the same outcries, we have known the same square dance in our cells. Their journey is our journey. We adopt pets and, if a cat sitting on a couch doesn’t look or smell exactly like a lion resting at a watering hole, well, perhaps it’s close enough. Just as we do with the elements, or with smells, we make animals tidy by putting them on leashes or in zoos. We project our values onto them, giving them dishes to eat from, sweaters and rhinestone-studded collars to wear, and we prefer it when they’re well behaved.

An animal on a leash is not tamed by the owner. The owner is extending himself through the leash to that part of his personality which is pure dog, that part of him which just wants to eat, sleep, bark, hump chairs, wet the floor in joy, and drink out of a toilet bowl. We still need a pack to travel with, and sometimes we create our own group. In a world of increased helplessness and intersecting hierarchies as arbitrary as they are impenetrable, at least we can be the alpha male or female in our own house, the top dog in the eyes of our pets. Their relative stupidity makes us feel exceptionally smart. They do not seem to judge us, as children don’t when they’re small, and yet they need and look up to us. Acting submissive, they treat us as the ultimate top dogs. We are their kidnappers, we keep them locked away from their kind. It’s no surprise that, like prisoners of war, they turn to us for food, comfort, acceptance, and affection.