Love's Executioner (36 page)

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Authors: Irvin D. Yalom

Tags: #Psychology, #Movements, #Psychoanalysis, #Research & Methodology, #Emotions

BOOK: Love's Executioner
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“In fact,
just asking the question,
‘What helped in the past?’ was helpful because it assured me that there was a way I could get better. Also, it helped that you didn’t get into your role of the wizard letting me guess about questions you know the answers to. I liked the way you admitted you didn’t know and then invited me to explore it together with you.”
Music to my ears! Throughout my year of work with Marge, I had only a single real rule in my work—treat her as an equal. I had tried not to objectify her, to pity her, or to do anything that created a gulf of inequality between us. I followed that rule to the best of my ability, and it felt good now to hear that it had been helpful.
The project of psychiatric “treatment” is fraught with internal inconsistencies. When one person, the therapist, “treats” another, the patient, it is understood from the beginning that the treatment pair, the two who have formed a therapeutic alliance, are not equals or full allies; one is distressed and often bewildered, while the other is expected to use professional skills to disentangle and examine objectively issues that lie behind that distress and bewilderment. Furthermore, the patient pays the one who treats. The very word
treat
implies non-equality. To “treat” someone as an equal implies an inequality which the therapist must overcome or conceal by behaving as though the other were an equal.
So, in treating Marge as an equal, was I merely pretending to her (and to myself) that we were equals? Perhaps it is more accurate to describe therapy as treating the patient as an adult. This may seem like scholastic hairsplitting, yet something was about to happen in Marge’s therapy that forced me to be very clear about how I wanted to relate to her or, for that matter, to any patient.
About three weeks later, three weeks after my discovery of the importance of the therapeutic act, an extraordinary event occurred. Marge and I were in the midst of an ordinary hour. She had had a rotten week and was filling me in on some of the details. She seemed phlegmatic, her skirt was wrinkled and twisted, her hair unkempt, and her face lined with discouragement and fatigue.
In the middle of her dirge, she suddenly closed her eyes—not in itself unusual since she often went into an autohypnotic state during the session. I had long before decided not to take the bait—not to follow her into the hypnoidal state—but instead would call her out of it. I said, “Marge,” and was about to utter the rest of the sentence, “Will you please come back?” when I heard a strange and powerful voice come out of her mouth: “You don’t know me.”
She was right. I didn’t know the person who talked. The voice was so different, so forceful, so authoritative, I looked around the office for an instant to see who else might have entered.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Me! Me!” And then the transformed Marge jumped up and proceeded to prance around the office, peering into bookcases, straightening pictures, and inspecting my furniture. It was Marge, but it was not Marge. Everything but the clothing had changed—her carriage, her face, her self-assurance, her walk.
This new Marge was vivacious and outrageously, but enjoyably, flirtatious. The strange, full contralto voice pronounced: “As long as you’re going to pretend to be a Jewish intellectual, you might as well furnish your office like one. That sofa cover belongs at the Goodwill store—if they’d take it—and that wall hanging is decaying rapidly—thank God! And those shots of the California coast. Spare me any more psychiatrists’ home photos!”
She was savvy, willful, very sexy. What a relief to have a break from Marge’s droning voice and relentless whining. But I was beginning to feel uneasy; I enjoyed this lady too much. I thought of the Lorelei legend, and though I knew it would be dangerous to tarry, still I visited awhile.
“Why have you come?” I asked. “Why today?”
“To celebrate my victory. I’ve won, you know.”
“Won what?”
“Don’t play dumb with me! I’m not her, you know! Not every thing you say is maaaaaarvelllous. You think you’re going to help Marge?” Her face was wonderfully mobile, her words delivered with the broad sneer one would expect from the villain of a Victorian melodrama.
She continued in a derisive, gloating manner: “You could have her in therapy for thirty years, but I’d still win. I can tear down a year’s work in a day. If necessary, I could have her step off a curb into a moving truck.”
“But why? What do you get out of it? If she loses, you lose.” Perhaps I was staying longer with her than I should. It was wrong to talk to her about Marge. It was not fair to Marge. Yet this woman’s appeal was strong, almost irresistible. For a brief time I felt a wave of eerie nausea, as though I were peering through a rent in the fabric of reality, at something forbidden, at the raw ingredients, the clefts and seams, the embryonic cells and blastulas that are, in the natural order of things, not meant to be seen in the finished human creature. My attention was riveted to her.
“Marge is a creep. You know she’s a creep. How can you stand to be with her? A creep! A creep!” And then, in the most astounding theatrical performance I have ever seen, she proceeded to imitate Marge. Every gesture I had witnessed over the months, Marge’s every grimace, every action, passed in front of me in chronological order. There was Marge timidly meeting me for the first time. There she was curled up in the corner of my office. And there with large, panic-filled eyes, pleading with me not to give up on her. There she was in an autotrance, eyes closed, flickering eyelids covering frenetic REM-like activity. And there with her face in spasm, like Quasimodo’s, horribly distorted, barely able to talk. There she was cowering behind her chair as Marge was wont to do when frightened. There she was complaining melodramatically and mockingly of a dreadful stabbing pain in her womb and breast. There she was ridiculing Marge’s stutter and some of her most familiar comments. “I’m soooooooo g-g-g-g-glad you’re my psychiatrist!” On bended knee: “D-d-d-o-o-o you like me, D-D-D-Doctor Yalom? D-d-d-don’t leave m-m-m-me, I d-d-d-d-d-disappear when you’re not here.”
The performance was extraordinary: like watching the curtain call of an actress who has played several roles in an evening and amuses the audience by briefly, perhaps for just a few seconds, slipping back into each of them. (I forgot for a moment that in this theater the actress was not really the actress but only one of the roles. The real actress, the responsible consciousness, remained concealed backstage.)
It was a virtuoso performance. But also an unspeakably cruel performance by “Me” (I didn’t know what else to call her). Her eyes blazed as she continued to defile Marge who, she said, was incurable, hopeless, and pathetic. Marge, “Me” said, should write her autobiography and entitle it (here she began to chuckle) “Born to Be Pathetic.”
“Born to Be Pathetic.” I smiled despite myself. This Belle Dame sans Merci was a formidable woman. I felt disloyal to Marge for finding her rival so attractive, for being so bemused by her mimicry of Marge.
Suddenly—presto!—it was over. “Me” closed her eyes for a minute or two and, when she opened them, she had vanished and Marge was back, crying and terrified. She put her head between her knees, breathed deeply, and slowly regained her composure. For several minutes she sobbed and then finally talked about what had happened. (She had good recall of the scene that had just occurred.) She had never before split off—oh yes, there had been one time, a third personality named Ruth Anne—but the woman who came today had never appeared before.
I felt bewildered by what had happened. My one basic rule—”Treat Marge as an equal”—was no longer sufficient. Which Marge? The whimpering Marge in front of me or the sexy, insouciant Marge? It seemed to me that the important consideration was my relationship with my patient—the betweenness (one of Buber’s endless store of awkward phrases) of Marge and me. Unless I could protect and remain faithful to that relationship, any hope of therapy was lost. It was necessary to modify my basic rule, “Treat the patient as an equal,” to “Be faithful to the patient.” Above all, I must not permit myself to be seduced by that other Marge.
A patient can tolerate the therapist’s being unfaithful outside of the hour that is the patient’s own. Though it is understood that therapists embrace other relationships, that there is another patient waiting in the wings for the hour to end, there is often a tacit agreement not to address that in therapy. Therapist and patient conspire to pretend that theirs is a monogamous relationship. Both therapist and patient secretly hope that the exiting and the entering patients will not meet one another. Indeed, to prevent that from happening, some therapists construct their office with two doors, one for entering, one for exiting.
But the patient has a right to expect fidelity
during
the hour. My implicit contract with Marge (as with all my patients) is that when I am with her, I am wholly, wholeheartedly, and exclusively with her. Marge illuminated another dimension of that contract: that I must be with her most central self. Rather than relating to
this
integral self, her father, who abused her, had contributed to the development of a false, sexual self. I must not make that error.
It was not easy. To be truthful, I wanted to see “Me” again. Though I had known her for less than an hour, I had been charmed by her. The drab backdrop of the dozens of hours I had spent with Marge made this engaging phantom stand out with a dazzling clarity. Characters like that do not come along often in life.
I didn’t know her name and she didn’t have much freedom, but we each knew how to find the other. In the next hour she tried several times to come to me again. I could see Marge flicker her eyelids and then close them. Only another minute or two, and we would have been together again. I felt foolish and eager. Balmy bygone memories flooded my mind. I recalled waiting at a palm-edged Caribbean airport for a plane to land for my lover to join me.
This woman, this “Me,” she understood me. She knew that I was weary, weary of Marge’s whimpering and stuttering, that I was weary of her panics, her curling up in corners and hiding under desks, and weary of her thready childlike voice. She knew I wanted a real woman. She knew that I only pretended to treat Marge as an equal. She knew we were not equals. How could we be when Marge acted so crazy and I patronized her by tolerating her craziness?
“Me’s” theatrical performance, in which she regurgitated all those snippets of Marge’s behavior, convinced me that both she and I (and
only
she and I) understood what I had gone through with Marge. She was the brilliant, beautiful director who had created this film. Though I could write a clinical article about Marge or tell colleagues about the course of therapy, I could never really convey the essence of my experience with her. It was ineffable. But “Me” knew. If she could play all those roles, she must be the concealed, guiding intelligence behind them all. We shared something that was beyond language.
But fidelity! Fidelity! I had promised myself to Marge. If I consorted with “Me,” it would be catastrophic for Marge: she’d become a bit player, a replaceable character. And that, of course, is precisely what “Me” wanted. “Me” was a Lorelei, beautiful and intriguing, but also lethal—the incarnation of all Marge’s rage and self-hatred.
So I stayed faithful and, when I sensed “Me” approaching—for example, when Marge closed her eyes and began to enter a trance—I was quick to jar her awake by shouting, “Marge, come back!”
After this happened a few times, I realized that the final test still lay ahead: “Me” was inexorably gathering strength and desperately trying to return to me. The moment demanded a decision, and I chose to stand by Marge. I would sacrifice her rival to her, pluck her feathers, pull her asunder, and, bit by bit, feed her to Marge. The feeding technique was to repeat one standard question, “Marge, what would ‘she’ say if she were here?”
Some of Marge’s answers were unexpected, some familiar. One day when I saw her timidly scanning the objects in my office, I said, “Go ahead, speak, Marge. Speak for ‘her.’”
Marge took a deep breath and revved up her voice. “If you’re going to pretend to be a Jewish intellectual, why not furnish your office like one?”
Marge said this as though it were an original thought, and it was apparent that she had not remembered
everything
“Me” had said. I couldn’t help smiling: I was pleased that I and “Me” shared some secrets.
“All suggestions are welcome, Marge.”
And, to my surprise, she offered several good ones. “Put a partition, perhaps a hanging fuchsia plant, perhaps a standing screen, to separate your cluttered desk from the rest of the office. Get a quiet dark brown frame for that beach picture—if you must have it—and above all, get rid of that ratty tapa-cloth wall hanging. It’s so busy that it gives me a headache. I’ve been using it to hypnotize myself.”
“I like your suggestions, Marge, except that you’re being tough on my wall hanging. It’s an old friend. I got it thirty years ago in Samoa.”
“Old friends may feel more comfortable at home than the office.”
I stared at her. She was so quick. Was I really talking to Marge?
Since I hoped to establish a confederacy or fusion of the two Marges, I was careful to stay on the positive side of each. If I antagonized “Me” in any way, she would simply take her revenge on Marge. So I took pains, for example, to tell Marge (I assumed “Me” heard everything) how much I enjoyed “Me’s” insouciance, vitality, brashness.

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