Lying on the Couch (19 page)

fter Ernest's supervisory hour, Marshal Streider sat back in his chair and thought about victory cigars. Twenty years ago he had heard Dr. Roy Grinker, an eminent Chicago analyst, describe his year on Freud's couch. That was in the twenties, in the days when analytic respectability required a pilgrimage to the master's couch—sometimes for a couple of weeks, sometimes, if one dreamed of becoming an analytic mover and shaker, as long as a year. According to Grinker, Freud never concealed his glee when he made an incisive interpretation. And if Freud thought he had made a monumental interpretation, he opened up his box of cheap cigars, offered one to his patient, and suggested they have a "victory" smoke. Marshal smiled at Freud's lovable, naive handling of the transference. If he still smoked, he would have lit a celebratory cigar after Ernest's departure.

His young supervisee had been coming along nicely the past few months, but today had been a landmark session. Putting Ernest on

Lying on the Couch ^ i 2. i

the medical ethics board was nothing short of inspired. Marshal often thought that Ernest's ego was riddled with lacunae: he was grandiose and impulsive. Unruly bits of his sexual id jutted out at odd angles. But worst of all was his juvenile iconoclastic stubble: Ernest had far too little respect for discipline, for legitimate authority, for knowledge worked out over decades by diligent analysts with minds more penetrating than his.

And what better method. Marshal thought, of helping to resolve iconoclasm than appointing Ernest to judgeship? Brilliant! It was on occasions like this that Marshal yearned for observers, an audience to appreciate the work of art he had fashioned. Everyone recognized the traditional reasons for the analyst to be fully analyzed. But Marshal intended, sooner or later (his to-do list of papers had grown and grown), to write a paper about an unappreciated aspect of maturity: the ability to be creative year after year, decade after decade, in the absence of any external audience. After all, what other artists—who can still take seriously Freud's claim that psychoanalysis is a science?—can devote a lifetime to an art that is never viewed by others? Imagine Cellini casting a silver chalice of luminous beauty and sealing it into a vault. Or Musler spinning glass into a masterpiece of grace and then, in the privacy of his studio, shattering it. Horrible! Isn't "audience," Marshal thought, one of the unheralded but important nutrients that supervision provides for the not-yet-mature therapist? One needs decades of seasoning to be able to create sans spectators.

And true for life as well, Marshal reflected. Nothing worse than living the unobserved life. Again and again, in his analytic work, he had noted his patients' extraordinary thirst for his attention— indeed, the need for an audience is a major unsung factor in prolonged interminal therapy. In work with his bereaved patients (and in this he agreed with Ernest's observations in his book), he had often seen them fall into despair because they had lost their audience: their lives were no longer observed (unless they were lucky believers in a deity who had the leisure time to scrutinize their every action).

Wait! Marshal thought. 7s it really true that analytic artists work in solitude? Aren't patients an audience? No, in this matter they do not count. Patients are never sufficiently disinterested. Even the most elegantly creative analytic utterances are lost on them! And they are greedy! Watch how they suck out the marrow of an inter-

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pretation without an admiring glance at the magnificence of its container. What about students or supervisees^ Are they not audience? Only rarely is a student perspicacious enough to grasp the artistry of an analyst. Usually the interpretation is beyond them; later in their clinical practice, maybe months, even years afterward, something will jar their memory and suddenly, in a flash, they will apprehend and gasp at the subtlety and greatness of their teacher's art.

Certainly that would be true for Ernest. The time would come when he would arrive at understanding and gratitude. By forcing him now to identify with the aggressor, I've saved him at least a year on his training analysis.

Not that he was in a rush for Ernest to finish. Marshal wanted him around for a long time.

Later that evening, after he had seen his five afternoon analytic patients, Marshal rushed home only to find the house empty and a note from his wife, Shirley, saying dinner was in the fridge and she would be back from the flower-arranging exposition around seven. As always, she had left an ikebana arrangement for him: a long, tubular ceramic bowl containing a nest of gray, angular, bare, downward-facing euonymus branches. At one end of the nest emerged two long-stemmed Easter lilies facing away from each other.

Goddammit, he thought, as he shoved the arrangement down to, and almost over the end of, the table. / had eight patient hours and one supervisory hour today — fourteen hundred dollars — and she can't put dinner out for me because she's too busy with these fucking flower arrangements! Marshal's anger dissipated as soon as he opened the plastic containers in the fridge: gazpacho with a knockout aroma, a gaily colored salad nicoise made with fresh pepper-seared tuna, and a mango, green grapes, and papaya fruit salad in a passion fruit sauce. Shirley had taped a note to the gazpacho bowl: "Eureka! At last—a negative calorie recipe: the more you eat, the skinnier you get. Only two bowlfuls—don't disappear on me." Marshal smiled. But only for a moment. He vaguely recalled some other "disappearing" joke Shirley had made only a few days ago.

As he ate. Marshal opened the afternoon Examiner to the financial section. The Dow had risen twenty. Of course the Examiner only had the one p.m. quotes, and lately the market had gyrated wildly at the end of the day. But no matter: he enjoyed checking the quotes twice daily and would see the closing quotes in the Chronicle tomorrow morning. He held his breath as he hastily punched in

the rise of each of his stocks on his calculator and computed the day's profits. Eleven hundred dollars—and it could be more by the time the market closed. A warm flush of satisfaction swept over him, and he took his first spoon of thick, crimson gazpacho studded with small gleaming green-white cubes of onion, cucumber, and zucchini. Fourteen hundred dollars from clinical billings and eleven hundred from stock profits. It had been a good day.

After the sports page and a quick glance at the world news. Marshal hastily changed his shirt and charged out into the night. His passion for exercise almost equaled his love of profits. He played basketball at the YMCA on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays during his lunch break. On weekends he bicycled and played tennis or racquetball. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he had to fit in aerobic time any way he could—there was a meeting of the Golden Gate Psychoanalytic Institute at eight, and Marshal left early enough for the brisk thirty-minute walk to the institute.

With each powerful stride. Marshal's anticipation grew as he thought about the meeting that evening. It was going to be an extraordinary session. No doubt about it: there was going to be high drama. There was going to be blood spilled. Oh, the blood—yes, that was the exciting part. Never before had he so clearly apprehended the lure of horror. The carnival atmosphere at public executions in olden days, the peddlers hawking toy gallows, the buzz of excitement as the drums rolled and the doomed shuffled up the stairs of the scaffold. The hanging, the beheadings, the burnings, the drawing and quarterings—imagine a man's four limbs being tied to a team of horses who were whipped and spurred and cheered by onlookers until he was ripped into quarters, all major arteries gushing at once. Horror, yes. But someone else's horror—someone who provided a view of the precise juncture of being and nonbeing at the moment, the very instant, that spirit and flesh are wrenched asunder.

The grander the life to be annihilated, the greater the lure. The excitement during the Reign of Terror must have been extraordinary, as noble heads rolled and blood gushed crimson from royal torsos. And the excitement, too, about those sacred last words. As that juncture between being and nonbeing approaches, even freethinkers speak in hushed voices, listening, straining to hear the dying person's final syllables—as if in that very moment, when life is wrested away and flesh begins its transformation into meat, there will be a revelation, a clue to the great mysteries. It reminded Mar-

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shal of the avalanche of interest in near-death experiences. Everyone knew it was sheer charlatanism, but the craze lasted twenty years and sold millions of books. God! Marshal thought, the money made on that rot!

Not that there was regicide on that night's institute agenda. But the next best thing: excommunication and banishment. Seth Pande, one of the institute's founding members and a senior training analyst, was on trial and certain to be expelled because of diverse anti-analytic activities. Not since Seymour Trotter's excommunication many years ago for screwing a patient had there been an occasion like this.

Marshal knew his personal political position was delicate and that he had to proceed this evening with great caution. It was public knowledge that Seth Pande had been his training analyst fifteen years before and had been enormously helpful to Marshal both personally and professionally.

Yet Seth's star was waning; he was over seventy and, three years before, had had extensive lung cancer surgery. Always grandiose, Seth had considered it his privilege to disregard all rules of technique and morality. And now his illness and confrontation with death had freed him from any remaining strains of conformity. His analytic colleagues had grown increasingly embarrassed and irritated by his extreme anti-analytic positions on psychotherapy and his outrageous personal behavior. But he was still a presence: his charisma was so great that he was immediately sought out by the press and TV for statements on almost any breaking news story—the impact of TV violence on children, municipal indifference to the homeless, attitudes toward public panhandling, gun control, politicians' sexual imbroglios. About each of these Seth had some newsworthy, often scandalously irreverent comment. Over the last months it had gone too far and the institute's current president, John Weldon, and the old anti-Pande analytic contingent had finally worked up the guts to challenge him.

Marshal pondered his strategy: of late, Seth had so overstepped himself, been so flagrant in his sexual and financial exploitation of patients, that it would be political suicide to support him now. Marshal knew that his voice had to be heard. John Weldon was counting on his support. It would not be easy. Though Seth was a dying man, he still had his allies. Many of his present and past analysands would be present. For forty years he had played a leading intellec-

tual role in institute affairs. Along with Seymour Trotter, Seth was one of the two living founding members of the institute—that is, assuming Seymour were still alive. No Seymour sightings had been reported in years—thank God! The damage that man had done to the reputation of the field! Seth, on the other hand, was a living menace and had served so many three-year terms as president he would have to be crowbarred from power.

Marshal wondered if Seth could exist without the institute: it was so enmeshed with his identity. Banishing Seth would be like delivering a death sentence. Too bad! Seth should have thought about that before casting the good name of psychoanalysis into disrepute. There was no other way: Marshal had to cast his vote against Seth. Yet Seth was his former analyst. How to avoid appearing ruthless or parricidal? Tricky. Very tricky.

Marshal's future prospects in the institute were excellent. So certain was he of ultimate leadership that his only concern was how to make that happen as quickly as possible. He was one of the few key members who had entered the institute during the seventies, when the star of analysis appeared to be waning and the number of applicants had dropped off significantly. In the eighties and nineties the pendulum had swung back, and many had applied for candidacy in the seven- to eight-year program. Thus the institute essentially had a bimodal age distribution: there were the old-timers, the aging pundits headed by John Weldon, who had joined together to challenge Seth, and a number of novitiates, some of them Marshal's analysands, admitted to full membership only within the past two to three years.

In his own age bracket Marshal had little challenge: two of the most promising of the group had died untimely deaths of coronary artery disease. Indeed, it was their deaths that spurred Marshal's frantic aerobic attempts to flush out the arterial debris that was a consequence of the sedentary profession of psychoanalysis. Marshal's only real competition came from Bert Kantrell, Ted Rollins, and Dalton Salz.

Bert, a sweet guy but lacking any political sense, had compromised himself by his deep involvement with nonanalytic projects, especially his supportive therapy work with AIDS patients. Ted was entirely ineffectual: his training analysis had taken eleven years, and everyone knew he was finally graduated sheerly because of analytic fatigue and pity. Dalton had recently gotten so involved with envi-

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ronmental issues that no analyst took him seriously anymore. When Dalton read his idiotic paper on analyzing archaic environmental destructive fantasies—raping Mother Earth and pissing on the walls of our planetary home—^John Weldon's first comment was, "Are you serious or are you putting us on?" Dalton held his ground and ultimately—after rejection by every analytic journal—published the paper in a Jungian journal. Marshal knew all he had to do was wait and make no mistakes. All three of these clowns were fucking up their chances with no help from him.

But Marshal's ambition went much further than the presidency of Golden Gate Analytic Institute. That office would serve as a springboard for national office, possibly even head of the International Psychoanalytic Association. The time was ripe: there had never been a president of IPA who had graduated from an institute in the western United States.