Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (2 page)

by

Rafael Neruda, M.D.

A Note on the Organization of the Text

This study is divided into three parts. Part One is an account, in memoir form, of my own psychological history. Part Two is a case history, covering fifteen years, of one of my patients, Gene Kenny. Part Three is a record of my investigation into the cause of the catastrophic failure of his therapy, the results of that investigation, and my radical alternative treatment.

—R
AFAEL
N
ERUDA
, M.D.

PART ONE

Psychological History
of the
Therapist

C
HAPTER
O
NE
Magic Thoughts

I
AM GOING TO PRESENT THESE TWO CASE HISTORIES IN LAYMEN’S TERMS
. Perhaps that will render them useless to psychiatrists and psychologists. It shouldn’t. If I have learned anything from the ghastly tragedy I must explain, it’s that life is lived in laymen’s terms.

The dirty secret of analysis is that for the collaboration to succeed the doctor has to be gifted. Not only with the ability to decode a patient’s unconscious. Not only to have an illuminating and healing insight specific to that patient’s experience of psychological trauma, thus inspiring civil disobedience against his illness. The above are certainly necessary—yet they are insufficient. The therapist must also supply insight at the right moment; when, as it were, the security police are asleep. A talking cure succeeds only partly because it aids self-awareness; most of the work is accomplished through a sensitive and precise management of the healing relationship. What the analyst feels is as crucial as the analysand’s sorrows. Thus it follows that there is a fatal flaw in all scientifically presented case histories because they are solely concerned with the patient’s life and character. To understand why the treatment proceeded the way it did one must also know about the doctor—his brilliancies, his mistakes, and his own psychology. The true story of a therapeutic exchange begins not with the patient’s present problem but with the healer’s past.

I, Rafael Guillermo Neruda, was born in New York in 1952. My mother, Ruth, was Jewish; my father, Francisco, what sociologists now call Hispanic. For the first eight years of my life we lived in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood at the northern extreme of Manhattan. In those days the Heights were predominantly Jewish. So much so, my father had to show the landlord Ruth’s birth certificate to prove she was Jewish before he was allowed to rent our modest apartment. Although I was accepted by my mother’s family, my Jewish friends and their families, they were quick to remind me that I was half alien to them.

I spent summers with my father’s parents in Tampa, Florida. My father’s people were the children of Spanish and Cuban immigrants who moved there in the 1880s to earn their living as cigar-makers. Although my grandparents were American born, they had been raised in an insulated Spanish-speaking ghetto of Tampa called Ybor City (pronounced E-BORE). They spoke English with heavy accents and were distrustful of the white and black Americans who surrounded them. My grandparents were too timid and superstitious to travel to New York, thus I had to be sent down to Ybor City during summer vacation for them to admire and display me to a seemingly endless parade of cousins, aunts and uncles. While summering—baking would be more accurate—with the Latins of Florida, I was accepted as a beloved object of pride; yet there were frequent reminders that I was half alien to them.

Interestingly, neither the Jews nor the Latins made an overt play for my loyalty. I stress
overt.
There was one notable exception. Samuel Rabinowitz was seventy-five years old when I was born. My mother was his youngest daughter. She gave birth to me at the age of thirty-six, late in life for a woman of the 1950s. I have a single vivid memory of Papa Sam, an encounter at my Uncle Bernie’s on the first night of Passover in 1960, in which he claimed me as a Jew and defined my fate. I imbued this event with the magical thinking of a child, a magic that after all became real, because it called into being the ambition of my life.

That morning my mother and I took the train out to Uncle Bernie’s Great Neck estate to attend the Rabinowitz family Seder. Bernie was Papa Sam’s oldest son. He was a multimillionaire thanks to real estate ventures that had taken advantage of the postwar boom in New York City for low- and middle-income housing. Bernie possessed the capital for these investments thanks to the profits he made from selling powdered eggs to the government to distribute to our troops during World War II. My uncle was able to make a huge profit because the eggs he powdered for our boys were the rotten throwaways of upstate farmers and thus Bernie’s only cost was the processing.

By 1960 Uncle Bernie was worth nearly one hundred million dollars. His great wealth was regarded with awe by my mother’s side of the family and indeed the world—with the exception of my mother. The rest of the Rabinowitzes did not agree with my mother’s analysis of her brother’s moneymaking, namely that Bernie had lived through the best two decades to be in business in American history, that anyone who entered the war years with substantial capital trebled it, that the riskier and more foolish the investment made then, the greater the return. Even if they
had
shared my mother’s interpretation of economic history, my uncle’s staggering accumulation of wealth beyond the status of mere millionairehood would have convinced them his success was due to more than just good timing. But the abundance did not persuade my strong-willed mother of her brother’s genius. Quite the contrary. To her it was a proof of his lack of character. Among many explanations for her attitude I should note that she was a member of the Communist Party. (My training analyst once noted in an ironic mumble, “Your family history is a little complicated.” Here’s another taste of its strange flavor: my father hadn’t come with us to the 1960 Seder because he was living in Fidel’s Cuba, doing research for a book sympathetic to the brand-new revolution. He hoped to help forestall an economic boycott by the U.S., which he believed would soon prove fatal.)

Uncle Bernie was also admired for his generosity and philanthropy. And with good reason. From the age of eighteen on he supported his parents, two brothers and four sisters with direct gifts as well as jobs for them or their spouses. He contributed millions to Israel, Brandeis, two major hospitals, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He virtually paid singlehandedly to build a new temple near his mansion in Great Neck. In 1960 and ’61, for example, Bernie gave away more than ten million to various charities and causes. All praised him; all believed he was great; except, as noted, for Ruth, my artistic mother, the youngest sibling, and also the only one who did not live off Bernie’s largess. She refused her brother’s offers to employ her freelance husband, just as she had refused years before when Uncle Bernie offered to support her if only she would give up her intention to marry my Latin father.

Ruth’s unwillingness to accept her brother as a paragon did not begin when Bernie opposed her marriage to Francisco Neruda. No, it originated (what does not?) in childhood. She felt slighted by their parents in his favor from infancy on; and she felt slighted by Bernie her entire life. Her gift for music and acting wasn’t taken seriously and was sometimes actively thwarted by their immigrant parents. Later Bernie himself, when he was father pro tem, insisted Ruth give up the dance and music lessons she was taking after school and get a part-time job. Of course, Bernie received nothing but praise and encouragement from their parents.

My mother believed that she and Bernie battled as children because he had usurped the role of their father. Bernie believed paternal responsibility was thrust upon him. The rest of the Rabinowitz siblings believed Bernie had saved them from a family calamity in the midst of a national disaster. The event in dispute was Bernie’s assumption of the role of breadwinner following Papa Sam’s non-fatal, but temporarily crippling heart attack. His coronary was blamed, in those days, not on Papa’s relish of chicken fat, but the failure of his third grocery store in the Bronx. It was the trough of the Great Depression. Bernie, accustomed to putting in long hours after school at the family store, was sent out to work full-time. He was thirteen. For four years he was to be the household’s sole support—until his brother was old enough to help. By then, although only seventeen years old, Bernie was well on his way to making his first million. All their lives Ruth and Bernie considered each other opposites; everyone who knew them thought they were as different as could be. As early as age eight, I would have disagreed. I think their natural conflict was intensified because they were so much alike. It was simply unfortunate for my mother that she was born into a society that discriminated against independent and innovative women while Bernie was born into a culture that favored men who were bold and determined.

By 1960, Uncle Bernie had led the Rabinowitz Seder for more than two decades. That year, after the ritual was over, as two uniformed black women began to serve the real food, he shocked the assembled parents with an announcement. He said the reward for finding the
Afikomen
(a piece of the blessed matzo hidden by the Leader during the early part of the ritual and then hunted for by the children later on) would be twenty dollars. In previous years it had never been more than five—already an extravagant prize.

“Twenty dollars!” Aunt Sadie exclaimed. She covered her mouth with a hand; whether to stop a criticism or to express shock, I couldn’t tell.

I didn’t know much about the relative value of money at eight. Anything over twenty-five cents was a lot. Anything over a dollar was infinite. My older cousins (whom I envied and loved and wanted to impress) cued me that twenty dollars was in the upper range of the infinite category. They made a collective sound of their longing to win—a chorus whose parts were gasps, giggles, wows, and one piercing whistle from my cousin Daniel. He was two years older than I, Aunt Sadie’s youngest. I admired Daniel. He seemed to disdain me; he delighted in besting me, especially at such things as football or tennis, sports which, coming as I did from a working-class city neighborhood, I had never played before. Earlier that day we had competed in both games on Uncle’s grounds. I was so bad at them, particularly tennis, that Daniel said I was a spaz—short for “spastic.” This hurt my feelings and my pride. Not only because I knew it to be unjust (I was good at the athletic games of my class: handball and stickball) but because I longed—with the passionate heart of a child—for Daniel to like me.

“Well,” Uncle Bernie said. He pushed himself a little ways from the long Seder table. The gold wedding ring on his left hand, fashioned with twists like a sailor’s knot, rested on the shiny white tablecloth. The yellow metal called my attention to his fingers. The skin was dark. Above the knuckles were long tufts of black hair; the same thick black hair covered his large round head. When he smiled—bright teeth against olive skin—his wide features stretched and gave him the friendly appearance of a well-fed baby. Not that his nose or eyes or mouth were infantile. On the contrary. But there was an oval beneficence to the general shape. The deep brown eyes, however, were keen with authority, calculation and a gleam of mischief. “I have a reason for making the reward so high,” Bernie said. He played the table with the fingers of his left hand. Not an impatient drumming, but a pianist’s melody. That kept his ring in motion. I was fascinated by how the gold encircled the finger’s tuft of hair. The fine silky hairs were gathered into a knot underneath the ring; once free of the band they fanned out. I tried to remember if my father had that much hair on his fingers. Francisco had been away in Havana for only a month, but to an eight-year-old a month is very long. At that moment I couldn’t remember my father’s face that well, much less details of his fingers. The answer happened to be no; my father’s fingers were virtually hairless. In fact I have never met a man whose hairs had such length and thickness as Bernie’s. Again, I don’t mean to suggest there was anything ape-like about my uncle. Rather the tufts were cropped and handsome in appearance. I wondered if they had been intentionally groomed to be decorative.

“It’s a test,” Uncle said. He surprised me by looking right at me. Surprised because, during all the time I had been in his presence that day—from the gathering in the den for the adults to drink cocktails and fuss about the children having messed up their clothes playing, to the transition to the table and the start of the Seder—Bernie hadn’t looked at me. I was glad because there was too much of him. His voice was too resonant, his head too large, his gray suit’s fabric too thick, especially on that day, an unusually hot April day. (In fact while playing tennis with Daniel I took off my shirt. “You sweat like a spic,” Daniel commented.) Bernie’s stare at me, as he told Aunt Sadie the hunt for the
Afikomen
was a test, seemed to be the first time he noticed me at all.