inside(r) psychoanalysis

i harbor a tremendous sorrow.

can it really take a lifetime to learn that one never stopped fending for one’s mother?

i don’t blame her; i don’t blame anyone. i tethered myself to her, she hung on to the tether for dear life.

she tried with my sisters, too, but they knew she had me, so they let go.

there is a tether waiting to be untied, a simple knot one can loosen in a few minutes, but it’s a knot that means “being alive” to me, at the same time as it means “being dead,” and i can’t let go of being alive through being dead.

but i am. i am letting go. i am forming new connections. different connections. see, in some sense, i have always formed the same kind of connection. this of course is an exaggeration, but the meaningful connections, the ones that drew me most strongly, that meant the most, were all tagged “being dead = being alive.” they all sought to reproduce the lifelong tether that connects my mother to me and me to her.

i owe a debt of infinite gratitude to my therapist, who lent the entirety of her soul to give me a chance at a different connection. that’s what she did.

a. she recognized my desperate need to be alive without simultaneously being dead.

b. she recognized that i couldn’t be alive without creating a life-bond with another.

c. she said, “let it be me.”

d. she held fast when i tried to draw her into the only connection i knew.

e. she didn’t push the “being alive = being alive” connection on me. she just waited for me to find it inside myself, inside her.

f. she would have waited forever.

g. she was in no hurry.

h. i writhed and screamed in terror and pain.

i. she held fast and soft, oh so soft.

j. she trusted the process, the stumbling of a desperate psyche in a very dark place, the surety with which light-seeking souls will find souls that are lit even in the darkest, most tumultuous inner weather.

l. she gave everything.

k. she is still giving everything.

m. she wants me to trust that she’ll keep on giving everything.

…

that i cannot do.

…

yet.

…

but this is what i see. i see a reorganization of all my relationships. a shifting of balances. new dynamics.

it’s easier with new relationships, harder with established relationships.

i have strong friends. my traveling companions are patient, solid, and soft too.

…

i harbor a tremendous grief. will my mother be okay? will she miss me? will she survive without me?

i speak to her on the phone. i try to keep the same rhythms we have grown used to, three times a week. but i can’t. it’s sliding to two times. she is always the one calling these days. she says, “it’s been a few days.” i think, “really? wow, time went fast.” our conversations have become shorter. i speak to her as if from a great distance, a place of terrible exhaustion.

we spoke yesterday in the morning. at night, the memory of our conversation had acquired the same quality as a dim dream memory. sometimes dreams are very vivid. this dream was dim. dull. heavy. opaque.

i harbor a terrible sorrow because i love my mom. she loves me. and yet, just like i jumped in to save her and carried her in utter aloneness (with death as my companion), now i’m loosening up the knot, one mm at a time, and i am, as i have always been, all alone. it’s our knot, my mom’s and mine, and she’s going to hang on to it for dear life, because, like i used to, she doesn’t know any other way to live.

Last night I had a dream that was a hallucination. I have never had a dream like this or a hallucination this hallucinatory, so it was all pretty strange and startling for me. I woke up, as I always do, with the help of my bladder. My bladder has taken upon itself the kind task of yanking me out of difficult dreams, and for this I am thankful, even though the awakening is often much, much worse than the dream.

The hallucinatory quality of the dream (I’m calling it a dream only because I was asleep) consisted in the fact that I was entirely inside myself, emotionally and sensorily.

It was the end of humanity, the dissolution of the world and reality as we knew it, and a substantial part of my body, a significant piece of my flesh, was hurtling at faster-than-light speed through visual landscape that contained no objects but only blurry configurations of color and darkness. As I moved at this extremely fast speed I was aware of moving through worlds, physical or non-physical, that humanity had never seen or experienced. Often there were stretches of pure darkness. I was terrified. The movement was entirely outside of my control. Sometimes it stopped. When I stopped the ragged stump of my body huddled as tight as a fist, hurt and confused and scared, and waited in misery and terror for the next thing.

Someone was following me, maybe other humans, maybe non humans. I knew I had to avoid them, and the hurtling through spacial/color scapes was also a flight for survival.

Yet, once or twice, someone who was behind me and from whom I was escaping caught up with me. We were in a very dark tunnel — maybe not a physical tunnel (the whole flight was taking place as in a tunnel, and I was burrowing) — I was huddled against the dark and the earth when this someone, a woman, reached me; it was horrifying, but she immediately said something that indicated to me that she was a friend, and I felt an intense feeling of well-being. I have never felt such well-being in the midst of terror, either awake or asleep. This happened a couple of times. The well-being stemmed not from the fact that the woman who reaches me was a friend instead of a foe, but from the fact that we were close and together. Or maybe it was something else entirely. The pleasure was unbelievable in the soothing and well-being it provoked in me.

I woke up and automatically got out of bed and went to the bathroom. I was aware, even as I went the short distance between my room and the bathroom, that i might soon be overcome by intolerable terror. I called the dog to come with me, but she is not used to following me to the bathroom in the middle of the night so it took three commands to make her move. This woke up S. He said, What’s going on?  I said, Come to me. I sat on the bed with my head on S.’s shoulder and the dog on my lap. The dog knew something was wrong because she was intensely close to me. I felt very comforted by the softness and physical malleability of the dog. She fit me like a very soft object.

Ultimately I didn’t get the terror, even though, for good measure, I took .5 mg ativan. I sat huddled against S. and the dog and thought of the well-being I had felt in my terrifying dream. I also thought about what it all meant.

Yesterday morning I recounted to my therapist a dream I had the night before that woke me up (same way, bladder) and caused me to experience a panic/terror attack that was quite painful and ended up lingering all day. Since I was drained from telling the dream — the telling brought back feelings of terror and helplessness and I had to fight to get through it — I did some associating but then asked my therapist to do the associating and interpreting herself. She interpreted the dream in a way that was so far from my way of understanding dreams, it felt almost ludicrous. She saw the dream as a full-fledged metaphor of something very good that is going on in my life, and interpreted the terror I experienced afterward, upon waking up (I  felt very fearful during the dream, too) as a reaction to the therapeutic progress the dream indicated.

I find it bizarre that dreams should be interpreted not as containing independent clues that point to this or that psychic reality, but, rather, as coherent metaphors, their various elements symbolizing various elements of the fully-constructed metaphor. It seems to me that our minds don’t work like that, or, at the very least, that mine doesn’t. It seems to me that we feel, dream, and think in clues and arrows, little fragments of thoughts and feelings pointing to memories. But my therapist’s interpretation, absurd as it sounded, was also extremely positive, a narrative of progress and increase in mental health, and it did wonders in lowering my anxiety and fear over the dream.

When I was lying against S. and the dog last night I thought about my therapist’s interpretation of my previous dream and how it fit with this dream, which was also a dream of moving forward, of progress (and also of palpable, exquisite well-being). In fact, the moving forward was so radical that it involved entirely new worlds.

I think this is the first time (many first times here!) that the terror comes with a complement of genuine, delicious well-being.

This afternoon, during a long nap, I had another dream which is too convoluted to report here, but which contained this significant small element. At some point I looked through a window and saw the early childhood trauma that I cannot remember but haunts me (I don’t know if there is in fact such a trauma, but it’s hard to imagine there might not be): inside the window was a dormitory and everyone in the dormitory was being exterminated. They were my people. I survived the extermination because someone told me how. Children were in any case supposed to survive the extermination because, unlike adults, they were being hit with arrows in their fingers rather than in body parts whose injury caused death. Still, even though there were other children, I was the only one who got away. Maybe I was the only one who wasn’t pierced by an arrow at all, even in my fingers. Children were swimming in blood on the floor with their fingers pierced, but I was watching safely from the window.

Then a little child who was both my younger sister and me was suddenly there, hugging me around my waist and burying her face in my body. I held her while I watched the spectacle that unfolded inside the window. The young child contained all the pain of the early trauma and of the revived memory. It was nice that I was able to see what had happened to me and hold the child who was so hurt by the recollection.

Other things happened in this dream, most notably a sexual attack by a woman on another woman in the middle of a woman-on-woman act of prostitution, and the rescuing of the attacked woman by a fellow prostitute who had felt suspicious about the client and had hung around to make sure everything went okay. It was all set in a Western constext, and the client, although identifiably butch in the way she bore herself, had a long gown. I was both watching and being the attacked lesbian prostitute.

I could not possibly imagine that the move to the new office would have been so painful. I had no idea. I think it hit me a couple of days into the week, after two  sessions. On the first day, I was genuinely excited to see the new office and I loved it.

I have used the mental image of myself in my therapist’s office as a life-saver. When things get rough, my mind goes there. I didn’t know this was happening until it couldn’t happen any more. I mean, I knew that I was thinking about seeing my therapist as something I could look forward to, something that might and would save me, but I didn’t know that the specific image of the two of us in that office was what was doing the saving.

We think in images. Maybe I do. When the image changed there was no life-saving. I kept on sinking. I kept on drowning.

This is part of what I was talking about in my previous post when I discussed the physicality of the therapist-patient relationship.

My analyst points out to me all the time things that are peculiar to me, or to people who are like me in some significant ways, so maybe the physicality of the therapist-patient relationship does not apply, or apply equally, to everyone. Maybe I’m like a child who needs props — a reassuring and reliable environment. I know I like repetition. I have always known this.

Thinking of myself with my therapist in the new office was so unfamiliar, so un-reassuring, so un-lifesaving that I didn’t bother going.

I discovered in me, I think, a child who hangs on to rooms, carpets, dolls, blankets, sheets, curtains, colors, shapes, because that’s all there is to her world.

This is a child who plummets into unfettered, unprocessed terror quite easily. Sometimes I want this child dead.

Today we moved office. Psychoanalysis puts a lot of stock on the embodiment, the physicality of the psychoanalytic couple — most of it, it seems to me, in negative terms. Since it privileges words and symbols so starkly, often psychoanalysis ends up cutting off avenues of expression that are non-verbal and non-symbolic, and this seems to me a shame. That any expression of feelings between analyst and patient should be “cut off” seems to me, in fact, awful. Cutting off anything in the course of analysis is bound to cause damage. Yet, it happens all the time. I think analysts should give a lot of thought to this, and work really hard at not cutting off.

The fact of the matter is, physicality is so hugely present in the therapeutic relationship — so essentially present — that it should be dealt with with great attention, care, sensitivity, and interest.

The office we just left was in an old two-story building with a nice layered personality. Apparently, the building used to be GI housing built after World War II. It was a rough building, with creaky doors, thin walls and floors, rickety A/C, rough wall surfaces, and rather nice molding around the ceiling. My therapist had painted her office blue and green and there was something endearingly homemade about it. The hardwood floor, though in good shape, was a bit scuffed; the office was small; the furniture entirely unfancy. The waiting room was so scuzzy as to be disgraceful, but the rest of the office was nice in a simple and homey way.

The new office is brand spanking new, large, and, to my really bumpkinish eyes, super fancy-looking. You can imagine really expensive furniture there and it would be entirely fitting. Two walls are covered by large widows, a couple of them floor to ceiling, so there is a ton of light and airiness. You can see the fabulous southern sky in all its summer glory: imposing cloud formations, sun, birds, airplanes.

I guess the three therapists who share the suite thought this would be their chance to gift themselves a major decorative makeover, and there is a palpable sense of quality-jump. One feels this is an office in which fees will be way higher than they were in the previous one (this may be entirely not true, but that’s the feeling). If I had walked into this office three years go, when I was therapist-shopping, I would have expected a price I could not afford then and can afford even less now. I would have sat on the edge of my chair rehearsing my exit speech, which would have gone something like this: “Look, I only came here because I’m going through the list of psychoanalysts or psychodynamically trained psychotherapists who work in this city, not to get a consultation, and since it’s obvious from the price you quoted to me that I will not work with you, I think I should leave now and not be asked to pay your full fee. If you had told me how much you charge on the phone, I would not have come at all.”

Clearly, as a patient, this raises a lot of issues. This is one: would these three therapists go back to their old office? From what my therapist told me, they would happily have stayed there forever, but one has a sense that, now, that would be such a downgrade, it would feel like returning to just-out-of-grad-school digs.

This place is professional, baby.

Look, it is entirely inevitable that such a change should cause all sorts of anxieties, and I’m sure a lot of our time together in the upcoming weeks will be spent talking about this. But let me focus now on the issue of embodiment.

The office is the therapeutic couple’s little home, the one tangible, physical object they both touch. The doors, the chairs, the couch, the lamps, the floor are intermediaries in the physical love-dance between the analyst and the patient. There is a ton of touching that goes on through them. The chair I’m sitting in now is a chair she may well be sitting in a few minutes after I leave the office. The carpet I step on with my bare feet touches her feet, too. Etc. I don’t know what other patients do, but I have touched just about everything in my analyst’s office. In the first excruciating, torturous, I-don’t-know-how-I-made-it year, I would touch the walls really slowly, with my hand fully open, feeling its texture (it had a ton of texture) on my palm and fingers, feeling its color.

I would get almost transfixed during this mesmerizing, intense, painful process of touching. I would think: “She painted this. She touched this.” I was starved for touch the way someone who is on the point of death from hunger is starved for food. I was in an agony of pain I had never experienced before and I hope to God never to experience again.

I have touched everything in my therapist’s old office. I have touched her chair (I have sat in both of her chairs for whole stretches of time till they came to feel entirely mine). I have touched the carpet (lain on it, rolled on it, felt it, got a number of rug-burns from it, too), the floor (same, burns included), the straight-backed chair, the edges of the desk, the computer, the lamps, the side-tables, the vase, the plants (lots and lots of time spent fingering leaves), the door. I have run my hand on just about every surface in the whole damn place.

I don’t know what a more traditional psychoanalyst would have done with this. A fabulous psychoanalyst I saw previously invited me to try to keep still. But I think ultimately he would have let me touch things the way my current, wonderful analyst lets me touch things. She looks at me watchfully and quietly while I touch things.  This watchfulness is a gaze of attention and love. It says, “I see what you are doing; I’m looking at you; I want to be here with you; I want to know you; I want to see you; you are wonderful.” To say that this means the world to me is very inadequate. It means life to me. It means air, water, food. It is the very matter of survival and, possibly, eventually, thriving.

So, about the new office. I love the new office. I haven’t touched everything yet but maybe I will. I don’t know how I feel about it, yet. I have just met it. But this is what troubles me. If the old office was my and my therapist’s chaperon, the physical intermediary of our love dance, the clothing of a someone you love but are not ready to make love to, so you focus on the colors and textures and shapes of their clothing and, if you are close enough, the feel, and sometimes touching a sleeve or a hem feels as intimate as kissing, well, if this is the case, and my therapist is choosing new shapes and designs for her office, where does that leave me? Was i always the subordinate even as I thought we were dancing together through these objects, and even though they are clearly hers they belonged to me, too, in some very important way?

I wonder what role the patient plays in the construction of a new office in the middle of a really intense, close, involved analysis. I have some thoughts about this. Here are the thoughts.

Ultimately, this is my therapist’s office. She is paying for it (though, honestly, I am paying a little for it, too, but that’s a complex matter, so let’s just say that she is paying for it and leave it at that), she’s got her name on it, she sees people I don’t know in it, I spend much less time in it, etc. This is point one. I think point one is a very valid point that could be belabored at length, but let’s just say that there is a very important line between me and my therapist, and this line is the line of our separateness, and the office lies on her side of this line.

At the same time, if I were a therapist, would I want to do something that is radically different with my office? Would I want to tell my patients, who know me and feel comfortable with me, hey, this is my new me, how do you like it? I don’t know. Of course, it might be very exciting for me, the therapist, to have a great new space to decorate and, in the process of decorating it, be able to reinvent myself, change style entirely, go a little bit crazy (this is very much NOT what my therapist wants to do; I’m thinking about the whole idea of redecorating a therapist’s office in general terms). But it seems to me (I may be wrong), if you are a therapist this is something you do with your own home, not with your office. The space you share with people, you keep it welcoming and universal. I am not saying bland, but bland is not very far from what I am saying.

And now I realize that I have skipped a ton of steps. I was talking about continuity, now I’m talking about a therapist’s space in general. Maybe I’m thinking of my therapist’s old office as “bland” in a tasteful, reassuring, comfortable, professional way. And I think I want it to stay that way. I don’t want the space to be telling me so much about my therapist that I feel excluded. I want the space to be open to me, to other patients who may be very different from me, to rich people, to poor people, to people with a flamboyant sensibility and people with a conservative sensibility — to signal welcome instead of a strong presence that boldly asserts THIS IS WHO I AM AND THIS IS MY OFFICE.

And I think this is all I have to say on the subject for now.

People say things about others that, in some sense, are most accurate and true, yet also intensely relative to that person’s perception or just the fact of their presence (their simple being there, among the people they assess). I knew someone once who told me that a certain department in a certain university was ruthless and cutthroat. Later, I met someone who experienced directly the ruthlessness of that department and reported to me about it in ways that corroborated the first person’s experience. Later yet, I met two more people who ended up not getting tenure in that department but who nonetheless described it as a lovely and supportive place. And then, by a strange turn of circumstances, I made friends with quite a few members of that department and what everyone had told me about it through the years seemed perfectly accurate — that it was ruthless and cutthroat and that it was lovely and supportive — and I could see perfectly well why each of these people would describe that department the way they did, and it wasn’t confusing at all.

So now, in my mind, that department is both wonderful and cruel, and I think I would know what people would find it preponderantly cruel and what people would find it preponderantly wonderful, and why. And if someone asked me, “Do you think I’d fit well in that department?” I’d have to say, “I don’t know, it depends very much on who you are.” But if they entered the department and then told me all about its duplicity and Machiavellian nature, I’d say, “I know,” and if they told me instead how caring and interesting everyone is, I’d say the same.

This is all to say that you can sincerely and non-condescendingly sympathize with everyone when they tell you how they feel about something or someone, but you shouldn’t form an opinion on the people they are talking about before you experience them yourself.

Maybe there are serious psychological studies out there about the kind of people who become ardent Republicans and the kind of people who become ardent Democrats. In general, the choice of political allegiance and belonging seems to me to say very much about the way people relate to themselves, others, the world, and God. I wouldn’t want for a second to suggest that there is some kind of psychological determinism in place here. But one’s history and the ways one finds to negotiate one’s relationship with the world shape very much how one views the world and what one thinks works best to make the world a better, more acceptable, more orderly place.

There is certainly a very complex interaction between psychology and morality, and reducing one in terms of the other would be facile, silly, and unfair (though people do it all the time, especially now that evolutionary psychology is oh-so-popular).  I don’t claim to begin to understand the vagaries of this interaction, but I think we should all make great efforts to eschew simple explanations and always aim for the complex, the difficult, and the tentative.

Sometimes psychic pain is so intense that the mind goes into red alert and summons up all of its resources, police, firetrucks, paramedics rushing to the scene of hurt blaring deafeningly and cacophonously. sadness morphs into rage morphs into terror. terror wins the day. terror is the mind in definite, intolerable overload.