Love's Executioner (41 page)

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Authors: Irvin D. Yalom

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

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Obviously, the foundation was in place for major oedipal problems in Marvin’s relations with women. His relationship with his mother had been exclusive, overly intimate, prolonged in its closeness and had disastrous consequences for his relationship with men; indeed, he imagined he had, in some substantial way, contributed to his father’s disappearance. It was not surprising, then, to learn that Marvin had been wary of competition with men and inordinately shy of women. His first real date, with Phyllis, was his last first date: Phyllis and he kept steady company until their marriage. She was six years younger, equally shy and equally inexperienced with the opposite sex.
These anamnestic sessions were, to my mind, reasonably productive. I grew acquainted with the characters who peopled Marvin’s mind, and identified (and shared with him) certain important repetitive life patterns: for example, the way he had re-created part of his parents’ pattern in his own marriage—his wife, like his father’s wife, wielded control by cutting off sexual favors.
As this material unfolded, it was possible to understand Marvin’s current problems from each of three very different perspectives: the
existential
(with a focus on the ontological anxiety that had been evoked by passing a major life milestone); the
Freudian
(with an emphasis on oedipal anxiety which resulted in the sexual act being welded to primitive catastrophic anxiety); and the
communicational
(with an emphasis on how the marital dynamic equilibrium had been unsettled by recent life events; more about this was to emerge shortly).
Marvin, as always, worked hard to produce the necessary information, but, though his dreams had requested it, he soon lost interest in past origins of current life patterns. He commented once that these dusty events belonged to another age, almost another century. He also wistfully noted that we were discussing a drama in which every character, save himself, was dead.
The dreamer soon gave me a series of messages about Marvin’s reaction to our historical forays:
I saw a car with a curious shape, like a large, long box on wheels. It was black and patent-leather shiny. I was struck by the fact that the only windows were in the back and were very askew—so that you could not really look through them.
 
 
There was another vehicle with problems with the rear-vision mirror. It had rear windows with a kind of filter that slid up and down but it was stuck.
 
I was giving a lecture with great success. Then I started having trouble with the slide projector. First, I couldn’t get a slide out of the projector to put in another. It was a slide of a man’s head. Then I couldn’t focus the slide. Then people’s heads kept getting in the way of the screen. I moved all over the auditorium to get an unobstructed view, but I could never see the whole slide.
The message I believed the dreamer was sending me:
“I try to look back but my vision fails. There are no rear windows. There is no rear-vision mirror. A slide with a head in it obstructs the view. The past, the true story, the chronicle of real events, is unrecoverable. The head in the slide—my head, my vision, my memory—gets in the way. I see the past only filtered through the eyes of the present—not as I knew and experienced it at the time, but as I experience it now. Historical recall is a futile exercise in getting the heads out of the way.
 
 
“Not only is the past lost forever, but the future, too, is sealed. The patent-leather car, the box, my coffin, has no front windows either.”
Gradually, with relatively little prompting from me, Marvin began to wade into deeper waters. Perhaps he overheard scraps of my discourse with the dreamer. His first association to the car, the curious black box on wheels, was to say, “It is not a coffin.” Noticing my raised eyebrows, he smiled and said, “Was it one of you fellows who said you give yourself away by protesting too much?”
“The car has no front windows, Marvin. Think about that. What comes to you?”
“I don’t know. Without front windows you don’t know where you’re heading.”
“How would that apply to you, by what you’re facing ahead of you in your life now?”
“Retirement. I’m a little slow, but I’m beginning to get it. But I don’t worry about retirement. Why don’t I
feel
anything?”
“The feeling is there. It seeps into your dreams. Maybe it’s too painful to feel. Maybe the pain gets short-circuited and put onto other things. Look how often you’ve said, ‘Why should I get so upset about my sexual performance? It doesn’t make sense.’ One of our main jobs is to sort things out and restore the feelings to where they belong.”
Soon he reported a series of dreams with explicit material about aging and death. For example, he dreamed of walks in a large, unfinished, underground concrete building.
One dream, in particular, affected him:
I saw Susan Jennings. She was working in a bookstore. She looked depressed, and I went up to her to offer my sympathy. I told her I knew others, six others, who felt the same way. She looked up at me, and her face was a hideous mucous-filled skull. I woke up extremely frightened.
 
Marvin worked well with this dream.
“Susan Jennings? Susan Jennings? I knew her forty-five years ago in college. I don’t think I’ve thought of her once till now.”
“Think about her now. What comes to mind?”
“I can see her face—round, pudgy, large glasses.”
“Remind you of anyone?”
“No, but I know what
you’d
say—that she looks like me: the round face and oversized spectacles.”
“What about the ‘six others’?”
“Oh, there’s something there, all right. Yesterday I was talking to Phyllis about all our friends who have died and also about a newspaper article about people who die immediately after retirement. I told her that I had read an alumni bulletin and noted that six persons in my college class have died. That must be the ‘six others who felt the same way’ in the dream. Fascinating!”
“There’s a lot of fear of death there, Marvin—in this dream and in all the other nightmares. Everyone’s afraid of death. I’ve never known anyone who wasn’t. But most people work on it over and over throughout the years. With you it seems to have exploded all at once. I feel strongly that it’s the thought of retirement that’s ignited it.”
Marvin mentioned that the strongest dream of all was that first dream, six months ago, of the two gaunt men, the white cane, and the baby. Those images kept drifting back into his mind—especially the image of the gaunt Victorian undertaker or temperance worker. Perhaps, he said, that was a symbol for him: he had been temperate, too temperate. He’d known for a couple of years that he had deadened himself all his life.
Marvin was beginning to astonish me. He was venturing into such depths that I could scarcely believe I was talking to the same person. When I asked him what had happened a couple of years ago, he described an episode he had never shared before, not even with Phyllis. As he was flipping through a copy of
Psychology Today
in a dentist’s office, he was intrigued by an article suggesting that one attempt to construct a final, meaningful conversation with each of the important vanished people in one’s life.
One day when he was alone, he tried it. He imagined telling his father how much he had missed him and how much he would have liked to have known him. His father didn’t answer. He imagined saying his final goodbye to his mother, sitting across from him in her familiar bentwood rocker. He said the words, but no feelings came with them. He gritted his teeth and tried to force feelings out. But nothing came. He concentrated on the meaning of
never
—that he would
never, never
see her again. He remembered banging his fist on his desk, forcing himself to remember the chill of his mother’s forehead when he kissed her as she lay in her casket. But nothing came. He shouted aloud, “I will
never
see you again!” Still, nothing.
That
was when he learned that he had deadened himself.
He cried in my office that day. He cried for all that he had missed, for all the years of deadness in his life. How sad it was, he said, that he had waited until now to try to come alive. For the first time I felt very close to Marvin. I clasped his shoulder as he sobbed.
At the end of this session, I was exhausted and very moved. I thought we had finally broken through the impenetrable barrier: that finally Marvin and the dreamer had fused and spoken with one voice.
Marvin felt better after our session and was highly optimistic until, a few days later, a curious event occurred. He and Phyllis were just commencing sexual intercourse when he suddenly said, “Maybe the doctor is right, maybe all my sexual anxiety
is
really anxiety about death!” No sooner had he finished this sentence, than—whoooosh!—he had a sudden, pleasureless premature ejaculation. Phyllis was understandably irritated by his selection of topics for sexual small talk. Marvin immediately began to berate himself for his insensitivity to her and for his sexual failure and toppled into a profound depression. Soon I received an urgent, alarmed message from the dreamer:
I had been bringing new furniture into the house, but then I couldn’t close the front door. Someone had placed a device there to keep the door open. Then I saw ten or twelve people with luggage outside the door. They were evil, awful people, especially one toothless old crone whose face reminded me of Susan Jennings. She also reminded me of Madame Defarge in the movie
A Tale of Two Cities—
the one who knitted at the guillotine as heads were lopped off.
 
The message:
“Marvin is very frightened. He has become aware of too much, too fast. He knows now that death is waiting for him. He has opened the door of awareness; but now he fears that too much has come out, that the door is jammed, that he will never be able to close it again.”
 
Frightening dreams with similar messages followed rapidly:
It was night, I was perched high on the balcony of a building. I heard a small child crying below in the darkness, calling for help. I told him I would come because I was the only one who could help, but as I started down into the darkness, the stairwell grew more and more narrow and the flimsy banister came off in my hands. I was afraid to go farther.
 
The message:
“There are vital parts of me that I have buried all my life—the little boy, the woman, the artist, the meaning-seeking part. I know that I deadened myself and have left much of my life unlived. But I cannot descend now into these realms. I cannot cope with the fear and the regret.”
 
And yet another dream:
I am taking an examination. I hand in my blue book and remember that I haven’t answered the last question. I panic. I try to get the book back, but it is past the deadline. I make an appointment to meet my son after the deadline.
 
The message:
“I realize now that I have not done what I might have done with my life. The course and the exam is over. I would have liked to have done it differently. That last question on the exam, what was it? Maybe if I had taken a different turn, to have done something else, to have become something else—not a high school teacher, not a rich accountant. But it is too late, too late to change any of my answers. The time has run out. If only I had a son, I might through him spew myself into the future past the death line.”
 
Later, the same night:
I am climbing a mountain trail. I see some people trying to rebuild a house at night. I know that it can’t be done, and I try to tell them but they can’t hear me. Then I hear someone calling my name from behind. It is my mother trying to overtake me. She said she has a message for me. It is that someone is dying. I know that it is me who is dying. I wake up in a sweat.
 
The message:
“It is too late. It is not possible to rebuild your house at night—to change the course you have set, just as you are preparing to enter the sea of death. I am now my mother’s age when she died. I am overtaking her and realize that death is inevitable. I cannot alter the future because I am being overtaken by the past.”
 
These messages from the dreamer drummed louder and louder. I had to heed them. They forced me to take my bearings and to review what had been happening in therapy.
Marvin had moved fast, too fast perhaps. At first he was a man without insight: he could not, would not, direct his sight inward. In the relatively short period of six months, he had made enormous discoveries. He learned that his eyes, like those of a newborn kitten, had been closed. He learned that deep inside there is a rich teeming world which, if confronted, brings terrible fear but also offers redemption through illumination.

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