Separate Hours

Seven Counter-Transference

As my marriage deteriorated, I became increasingly distracted with my patients. Drifting off into fantasy, confusing details and names, falling into private obsession. I found myself identifying with the mistreated lovers of certain women patients, with one in particular.

There was an inappropriate harshness in my voice as I pointed out to Melinda Gold hart that her behavior toward the boyfriend she complained endlessly about was provocative and self-fulfilling. “Don’t you see,” I threw at her like stones, “the man behaves badly because you want him to behave badly.”

She shook loose a tear. I was supposed to feel sorry for mistreating her. Instead, I felt annoyance, wanted to shake some real tears out of that calculating soul. I was also aware — dimly — that these feelings were inappropriate, that I was behaving unprofessionally, that I was out of control.

Why do I go on like this?

This is not a confession but an investigation into feeling. I am imperfect.

Melinda’s parents had refused all authority, had pretended to Melinda that she could do anything she liked. They had offered her a world without boundaries, a dazzling chaos. Every step was a step off a precipice into space. The simplest acts for Melinda engendered paralyzing anxieties.

When Melinda first went into treatment with me she rarely talked during the therapy session. She withheld speech willfully, talked to me in her head, as she later reported, but could barely articulate a complex sentence in my presence. She was afraid of exposing her secrets, she said. We tried different arrangements to make her feel less vulnerable. For a while, we sat with the backs of our chairs together. She worried when she couldn’t see me that I had gone away, or was reading a book, or had gone to sleep.

“What are you doing now?” she would ask from time to time.

“Why don’t you turn around and see for yourself,” I said.

She sometimes turned, sometimes didn’t.

The same or almost the same conversation repeated like an echo. The repetition seemed to comfort her like the routine of a game. I know it lulled me into a sense of false comfort. The routines we established between us broke down the feelings of strangeness, created a bond of familiarity.

We moved our chairs into a whole range of configurations. That too was part of the game. We could do anything in my office, I wanted her to see that, without real danger.

If I was Melinda’s parent in the sense that she imagined me as a parent, I was also much of the time a fellow child with her.

When Melinda began to talk in our sessibns, she talked non-stop, the words coming out in barrages like machine gun fire. She alternated between silence and prattle, the talk a disguised form of silence.

She sometimes talked to me as if she were talking out loud to herself.

In most of her relationships, Melinda felt herself to be the victim though in fact she tended to be the controlling one. She rarely allowed herself, despite her pretense that it was otherwise, to not be in control. A way to control situations, while at the same time not feeling responsible for her life, was to make herself appear to be a victim.

A victim needs a victimizer to complete the circle.

Melinda had been dating the same man for five years — she was twenty-three when she came to me — a man she complained about whenever his name came up in the conversation. He was insensitive to her feelings. She was repelled by much of his behavior and — this a recurrent obsession — his odor. The repulsion was uncharacteristic. Melinda was not ordinarily squeamish and was subject to few sexual taboos.

Why did she continue to see him if he repelled her?

She tended to ignore questions in areas of confusion or ambivalence, would take recourse in silence. It embarrassed her to admit there was any question she couldn’t answer.

On the evidence, it appeared that she continued to see the man in order to complain of his failings. He was her occasion for grievance.

Sometimes she would say no more than a dozen words in an entire fifty minute session.

I didn’t urge her to speak, not at first, not directly. I knew from our first meeting that to ask something directly of Melinda was to be denied. How did I know that?

“I want to be part of your life,” she told me on one occasion. “I want you to think of me when I’m not here.”

“Sometimes I do,” I said. “I think of all my patients.”

She mumbled something.

“What?…What?”

“It’s cold in here, Yuri. Would you turn off the air-conditioning please. I’d appreciate it if you would consider my comfort once in a while.”

“You sound as if you’re talking to a servant,” I said.

“I don’t think you like me,” she said. She had a sly smile on her face.

“If you don’t think I like you, why are you smiling?”

Melinda pushed the corner of her lips down with her fingers. “Am I ugly?” she asked with a slight stammer.

“You haven’t told me why you were smiling,” I said.

“I wasn’t,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand.

When she took her hand away, her tongue shot out at me. “Are you angry? I don’t want you to be angry with me.” She raised her eyes which had been averted.

“You’re a tease, Melinda,” I said. “That makes people angry.”

“Fuck you,” she said, shouted it at me.

Her outburst, because it seemed so uncharacteristic — she had always been exceedingly polite in our sessions — shocked me. My first impulse was to order her out of the office — I wanted to punish her for offending me. “Fuck you,” I said in return.

Her face broke. “I won’t be talked to that way,” she said. “You have no right to say that to me.”

“You handled that very well, Melinda,” I said.

She smiled joyously through her tears, wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand like a child. “Oh thank you,” she said.

We moved in these sessions between war and seduction, different faces of the same aggression.

Her accounts of experiences with the man she referred to as her boy friend were unvaryingly unpleasant. It worried me that I was encouraging her to disparage him, that I had a personal stake in her negative feelings toward other men.

I mention my difficulties with Melinda to Adrienne who says, under her breath, that my misunderstanding of the girl is symptomatic.

I ask her to explain this unflattering description but she is in another room, her attention focused elsewhere. When I persist she says, “What do you really want?”

“Human contact,” I say.

Adrienne laughs without amusement, laughs wryly, laughs with some measure of disdain.

Melinda protested again and again that I didn’t like her, that it was only because I wanted her money that I continued to see her.

I tried different responses, admitted on one occasion that I sometimes found her unbearable. My remark brought a smile to her face, a look of triumph.

She denied that she was smiling.

We were facing each other that day at my insistence. The denied smile persisted brazenly.

Did I say that Melinda was seductive? Have I mentioned it anywhere?

“I wish I had a mirror so that I could show you your face,” I said. “You continue to smile.”

“You too,” she said, her smile opening like a blossom.

I traced my lips with an imaginary finger. It was possible that our unacknowledged smiles mirrored one another.

I felt the strongest impulse to say something hurtful to her. My feelings must have expressed themselves in my face because she blanched, seemed almost to tremble.

“I have the feeling,” she said, “that this is the beginning of the end of our relationship.”

I was trembling, though I didn’t know why, did and didn’t. I was conscious of wanting to assure her that I had no intention of dropping her as a patient and conscious of withholding such assurance out of anger.

She turned her chair halfway around. “You want to be rid of me,” she said.

“I’m your therapist not your lover,” I said.

I had a dream about Melinda, a seemingly literal dream, not all of which I remembered. I wrote it down as soon as I awoke in a notebook I used to keep at bedside for just that purpose.

There is, I discover, only one chair in my office. The other chair, the patient’s chair, is at some shop being reuphol-stered. Why hasn’t it been returned? Melinda comes in conspicuously late, and asks indignantly where she is supposed to sit.

I offer her my seat. She remarks that I am still in it. It surprises me to discover that what she says is true. I am sitting in the very seat I offer her. It is wide enough for two, I say. At this moment, I’m not sure whether the ostensible patient is Melinda or Adrienne. She shakes her head coyly. I beckon to her with a finger. We are both standing. The chair is between us. It is not my office any longer but a bedroom, a room I had as a child. I point out the view from the window. The overgrown garden, the porcelain Cupids, the huge cherry tree just coming into blossom.

She says she admires the tree, though she is unable to believe that it actually produces cherries. Her breasts press against my back as she makes this announcement.

She says that the nipples of her breasts are real cherry buds.

I am leaning out the window trying to find a bud on the cherry tree to prove the tree’s identity. There are no buds, only faded blossoms.

I bring in a handful of crushed petals. These are cherry blossoms, I say. Melinda giggles, says not really.

Just take my word for it, I say. This is a cherry tree. It produces sour cherries. I take a bud from the tree and hold it out to her.

She puts my fingers to her lips, says poor man. I notice that there is a red stain on the back of my hand.

I’ve always wanted to taste your blood, she says.

You’re a liar, I rage. That’s your blood. That’s female blood.

Today was the fist time Melinda talked about her boyfriend, Phillip, by name.

She valued Phillip most when he ceased to be available. It was the pattern of their relationship. Melinda would mistreat Phillip, would reject and torment him until, provoked beyond endurance, he would stop seeing her. At that point she would decide that she was in love with him and plot obsessively to get him back.

When Phillip would return to her, as he did, she would feel contempt for him again as if such yielding were a failure of character. Any man foolish enough to love her was unworthy of her love.

I pointed this out to her, but for the longest time she refused to acknowledge it.

I tended to respond to Melinda’s complaints about Phillip as if they were complaints about me.

As an aspect of this identification, I found myself intensely attracted to her. Was this counter-transference or something else?

Melinda told me of a dream in which I appeared in the guise of a teddy bear named Swoosh whom she held in her arms while she slept. That’s all she offered of the dream.

I said the best way to remember dreams is to write them down as soon as she woke.

She pouted, said that most of her dreams were crazy and that it embarrassed her to think about them. The first three buttons of her gauzy blouse were open and I could see the lacy top of her pink undershirt. My impulse was to look away, but I didn’t. I was almost certain she wasn’t wearing a bra.

“I don’t have to tell you my dreams if I don’t want to,” she said. “I have a right to privacy. Do you tell everything? I don’t know anything about you, do I?” She turned her chair halfway around to offer me a view of only half her face.

Her gesture enraged me out of all proportion. “I’m not going to let you do that,” I said, getting to my feet.

“Don’t you dare touch me,” she said.

When I stood up she gasped as if in fright and shifted her chair part of the way back toward its original position.

“Put the chair back where it was or I’m going to discontinue the session,” I said.

She grudgingly moved her chair back into position, sulked.

I returned to my seat with an assumption of dignity, felt relieved that she hadn’t tested me further.

“Though I don’t like it, Yuri, it’s good for me to be treated that way.”

“How do you feel I treated you?”

“Your face is flushed,” she said. “Are you blushing?”

I repeated my question, had to repeat it several times to get a response.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” she said.

“Tell me what’s so funny,” I said.

“I can’t,” she whispered, lowering her eyes. “I’ll tell you when I know you better.”

Our sessions had the quality on occasion of lovers’ quarrels.

When I finally went to see Leo Pizzicati after several months of procrastination, I was in a state of intractable depression.

I sat down, somewhat disoriented, thinking myself in the wrong seat.

“Adrienne won’t sleep with me,” was the first thing I said, which was interesting because it was not what I had planned to say.

Leo seemed pained on my account, profoundly sad, which I immediately recognized as a projection.

I have the sense that I am making this up, recreating a scene out of a mix of memory and imagination. The ugly paintings on the wall, the tacky plastic furniture, the refusal to lay claim to style. There are a few inconsequential changes in his office (or maybe it’s just a lapse of memory) but in matters that count nothing has changed.

I talk about Adrienne despite my intention to avoid that subject, get lost in a maze of evasion.

“I came to talk to you about a counter-transference problem I’m having with a woman patient,” I say with about ten minutes left in the session.

“Are you fucking this patient?” he asks.

I laugh nervously at this abrupt perception, feel exposed and defensive. “I’m not fucking anyone,” I say.

“Are you feeling sorry for yourself?”

I am close to tears, though unaware of feeling sad. “She wants me to fuck her,” I say.

“And you can’t turn her down?” he asks. “Does she have a name, this patient? Yuri, you look as if you want to cry.”

I deny it, but the tears come in the wake of my denial. I refuse to cry, cover my face with my left hand, feel the tears prick my fingers. “Just a minute,” I hear myself say.

I’ve never fully worked through the feeling that it is unmanly to cry so suffer embarrassment at breaking down. I remove my hand as if to say it’s really nothing, a momentary aberration, but the crying continues and I am unable to speak.

When the fit is over, when I come back to myself, I begin to talk to Leo about my mother, though I have no new insights into that relationship. “What’s the point of my telling you this?” I ask him.

He removes his pipe, says nothing, puffs coded messages in smoke.

I know the answer. My relationship with my mother is a paradigm of my relationship with all women. “My mother thinks I’m perfect,” I say.

I should say something about that, not so much what I said to Leo, which is in a certain context, within a shared realm of assumptions, but say something about my mother, what she’s like, how I experience her. Last week I lost her at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, couldn’t find her for almost two hours. It is symptomatic. She had ways when I was a child of being there and not there. When she was missing we split up to search for her — Adrienne and Rebecca taking the first floor while I went upstairs. It was as if she had been claimed by some black hole. When she finally made herself available — she just seemed to appear — my mother refused to acknowledge that she had been lost. What I didn’t mention to Leo was that while I was searching for her, I had the urge to take off and leave her to her disappearance. I felt — how should I put it — burdened by the pressure of her absence.

Two facts. My mother lost in the Egyptian tombs of the Metropolitan Museum. Melinda sitting with her back to me.

Sometimes in bed in the morning Adrienne would see something in my face and say, “What?”

I am wary these days with Melinda, take a distant and paternal tone in our sessions. She comments on my apparent disaffection, says it hurts her that I no longer care for her.

Her left breast is slightly higher than the right, I notice. The disparity touches me, takes my breath away.

Her new phase is less confrontational. She seems to court my sympathy, wants me to be pleased by the progress she is making.

Am I getting ahead of myself? I have fallen into disorder, have lost the thread of events.

It is another time. The question comes up at an unexpected moment. “Do you find me attractive?” she asks, looking sagely skeptical, aware of performance.

“What did I tell you the last time you asked?” I say.

“I can’t trust your answer,” she says, looking up shyly under hooded eyes. “How could you say no? I mean, you’re trying to build up my sense of self-worth.”

It is not what she says — do I even remember it as precisely as I pretend? — but the unspoken context we share.

I ask her if there’s some way I can prove to her that I find her attractive.

The question enlists a sly smile and a delayed shrug. There are six minutes left in our fifty minute hour. I know that the next time we meet, which is two days from now, we will fuck. I have made an oblique offer and she has given oblique acceptance.

Reading over what I have written, I can see how melodramatic, even pathological, this all sounds. I knew what I was about to do was unethical and at the same time I felt driven to do it, felt the need to bust loose, to take what I had previously considered unacceptable risks. And maybe, said arrogance, in its nasty whisper, it would do us both some good.

I was resolved that it would happen once and once only, a demonstration of my attraction to her, and then we would use it as an area of exploration in her therapy. I have a predilection for being defensive so I will stop myself here to say that whatever the extenuating circumstances — I am imperfect, I am human — I am fully responsible for what happened with Melinda.

Outside of my professional commitments, I am a man of obsessive urges, sudden fixations, deep pockets of need. I have never learned to put off having the things I want. My tolerance for frustration is small. I sometimes, out of the blue, ache with undefined longing. Unaccountable things fill me with desire, present themselves as unavoidable needs. I barely slept the night before, was in a revved up state the next morning. Rebecca took note of it. “Daddy’s in a silly mood,” she said. Adrienne made an acerbic remark disguised as good natured teasing. “You used to be funnier,” she said, withdrawing herself, fading out of the picture.

Having decided on a course of action, I gave my attention to logistics, the where and how of the matter. The idea of making love to her in my office, on the couch or on the rug, gave me pause. Yet I couldn’t very well take her to a hotel without trashing the therapeutic situation altogether.

And then just before she was scheduled to arrive, I had a change of heart, decided not to pursue the matter further.

When she didn’t show up on time — she was not usually late — I assumed she wasn’t coming, assumed further that she had decided to break off treatment with me. I felt rueful.

I’m not very observant as to what women wear — it is the effect rather than the details that catch my attention — but I was aware that Melinda, when she made her belated entrance, was wearing a red dress with black trim. She didn’t sit down, stood alongside her chair as if keeping it company. My sense of her was that she was glowing, that she was absolutely radiant.

I disguised my anxiety in exquisite self-possession. Her reality testing may have been weak in other circumstances, but Melinda understood my intentions in the full flower of their confusion.

There is no point in going on with this, in recounting how we got from here to there.

We used the seldom-used analytic couch for our transaction — I was glad to find some service for it — then spent what remained of the hour talking about what it was like.

It was like: good for me. Like that.

I remember her saying this much. “I feel, you know, that I’ve corrupted you.”

With the putting on of my pants, I moved back into the role of therapist. “What makes you think you’re so powerful,” I said.

“I can get any man I want,” she said, blushing. “I got you, didn’t I?”

“Is that how it feels to you?”

“I feel used,” she said. “I feel that you’ve taken advantage of me. I feel that you don’t really like me. Not really like me. I feel that you shouldn’t have done what you did. I feel that I’ve ruined everything. I’ll never get well after this.” Her eyes filled with tears.

I maintained an appropriate distance, performed my role as it suited me to perceive it.

The next three sessions followed a similar pattern. Melinda would arrive late, offer a perfunctory greeting, then lie down on the couch with her skirt above her knees. Although it had been my conscious intent not to continue the physical relationship, I didn’t have the heart to deny either of us its melodrama. The sex was unexceptional, took place, we pretended, for the sake of the discussion in its wake.

What feelings did it excite? For me, it excited a sense of shame, a moderate not unbearable sense of shame. For Melinda: I no longer thought of Melinda’s feelings as apart from mine.

I was collaborating with Melinda’s fantasy, proving to her that she was capable of winning her therapist’s (and father’s) love. Can that be right? I am something of a literalist. I was not, despite the evidence of my behavior, lost to blind urge.

If I didn’t stop this affair, it was because I didn’t want to stop, was getting something from it that outweighed its disadvantages. It gave me a sense perhaps of power and accomplishment. Is that it?

I have the illusion that if I can say the right thing to Adrienne, she can’t help but love me again or recognize (in that vast backwater of repressed feelings) that she hadn’t stopped loving me. The words don’t come, refuse to announce themselves, though the illusion itself sustains me.

I feel surges of passion for Melinda when she isn’t there, particularly when she isn’t there, my need for her compromised by her actual presence.

Melinda misses her appointment, leaves a garbled message with my answering service about some prior commitment. I feel vaguely needy the rest of the day, lack energy, doze during one of my sessions at the hospital. The patient, a lingerie fetishist, is so self-absorbed that I could put a mannequin in the room with him and he would go on with his obsessive story. Peter told me when he had an affair with a patient he felt so guilty he expected to be pulled out of bed at night — he once actually heard footsteps — and be carted off to jail.

I have a dream the next night of dying, wake in a state of grinding anxiety, barely able to breathe. I haven’t felt this vulnerable since the early days of analysis — my first analysis. (First analysis=first love.)

Melinda comes in, coughing, huddled over, removes her scarf and coat and, without acknowledgement of me, begins to talk about an experience with her boy friend, Phillip. No reference is made to what’s gone on the past three — three or four — sessions with us. It’s as if I’m hardly in the room with her, as if she’s talking in a dream.

I listen to her in an analytic way, try to pick up the real issue of the monologue. She is putting me in an intricate double bind. If I admit to feeling jealous, I lack the appropriate distance to deal with her problems, disqualify myself as her therapist. If I am not jealous, it indicates that I don’t care for her sufficiently. My impulse is to pull down my pants and take her on the floor while she babbles on about Phillip’s fear of making commitments.

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

She blinks her eyes in mock innocence. “What do you mean, Yuri? I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“You know very well what I’m asking,” I say. “Something is going on with us that you’re conspicuously avoiding.”

She pouts childishly, flutters her hands. “Are you saying that all I can talk about here is you?”

“Melinda, why did you miss your last session?”

“I was sick,” she says. “You’ll say it’s hysterical, I know, but the fact is I had a splitting headache. I almost didn’t come today. I had to drag myself here. I just don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“Why did you come today?”

She shrugs, starts to say something and doesn’t. “Because I’m in love with you,” she whispers.

Leo has no answers for me, refuses to give advice, though I can tell from his face that he’s worried about me. I can tell from the sorrowful pinch at the corner of his eyes that he suspects I am lost. I grieve for the person he sees.

“Another therapist couldn’t have helped her as much as I have,” I say.

His mouth moves into a smile that is gone the moment I perceive it. “You see the sex, do you, as part of a therapeutic program?”

“I no longer believe in therapy,” I shout at him. “If I had any courage, I’d give it up and do something more honorable.”

“Yes? What would you do? What is this honorable profession you have in mind for yourself?”

“If I gave up therapy,” I say, “I think I’d give up psychology altogether.”

“If you do, you do,” he says, as if my defection from the science of the soul were not a serious issue.

Leo is unimpressed with my threat to give up the faith, and I am disappointed that he has no solace for me, come away from the session unimproved.

He doesn’t tell me, as he might, that I am making a serious mistake. It is what I want from him and what he refuses to give me.

UPTOWN SHRINK CAUGHT WITH PANTS DOWN (Headline in The New York Post)

I was having difficulty sleeping through the night. I would wake periodically and look at Adrienne asleep or pretending to be asleep, turning in her sleep. I would move from back to side, from side to back, hoping to send tremors of my presence to her, to wake her to affection after this long sleep of rejection and denial. “When I moved she also moved. When I turned toward her she would turn away as if there were some mechanism between us that had gone awry.

I looked at her sleeping form — her feigned sleep perhaps — and thought of the things I might do to her, was unable to separate the sexual from the violent. Pain short-circuited awareness. The moment I got in touch I was out of touch, lost to feeling, dead to myself. I imagined Adrienne in a fatal car crash, or crushed by the wheels of a train, or snuffed by a sniper’s bullet, or falling from a high window. I suffered her loss, mourned her death as she slept next to me (or pretended to sleep) blissfully unaware. I was in a fever of madness.

I feel myself in some kind of helpless limbo, some deadly inertia. I talk to myself as though I were a robot. Move, I say. Sit. Eat. Stand. Right. Left. Turn. Move. Do something. Why aren’t you moving? The answer is: I am. From outside and only from an exterior vantage is there the illusion of paralysis.

I go alone to the Virgin Islands for a week, a way of getting myself together, lie impatiently in the sun. I read detective stories and psychology journals, keep a fragmented record of my thoughts and feelings, interior dialogues, the story of my soul. It worries me that for seven days not once do I concern myself with the well-being of my patients. Melinda barely touches my consciousness. I consider at times not returning, going somewhere else, starting over. The truth is, I am homesick.

When I get back, Adrienne and Rebecca embrace me like a returning hero.

I feel a constant buzz of irritation in her presence as if faced by unwanted news. We talk only to transact the business of the house, act as if the other were a moving shadow, a false image.

Melinda comes for another week, for two weeks, for three, seems eager to please, talks of the improvements in her life. I suggest that she see another therapist and, to my surprise and disappointment, she agrees without further discussion.

It is the same thing, the same experience, the same silent presence, the same oppressive house, the same feeling of hopelessness. Despite appearances, despite the extent of our dislocation, I am convinced that the deepest ties of feeling between us remain unbroken.

I decided to put down the story of my marriage as a means of investigating its peculiarly contemporary neurotic pattern. For months after Melinda leaves treatment with me, I feel the pull of her attraction — a tug on the sleeve of feelings from an invisible hand.

I made arrangements for her to see someone else, a therapist I knew only by reputation. She refused my choice.

After that she isn’t available when I want her, except on rare occasions when she is, Melinda choosing the occasions. And then not at all. My need for her when she is not available is twice (is ten times) what it was when she was there for me.

She tells me in a letter that I was the best therapist she ever had. I am both amused and made anxious by the implications of the pun.