The Dream of the Broken Horses (26 page)

As the hour was now nearly over and since her key dream had recurred the night before, I asked her to relate any new particulars she'd found memorable.

She said that in this latest rendition, the lone pursuing faceless hooded horseman was revealed, when the wind blew back his hood, to be the pursuing horsewoman whose hood was lined with flaming red silk.

When I asked her to describe the features and/or expression on this pursuing horsewoman's face, she said the woman appeared cold and grim, "kind of like my mother watching a race when she had a lot of money riding on a horse."

Considering this a major breakthrough, I urged her to give me her associations to the red-lined hood. Her response was immediate: "It's like the hood of a clitoris."

"So," I said, pursuing the interpretation, "the face of the pursuing horseman turns out to be like your mother's, peering at you out of her clitoris."

Mrs. F, accepting that, urged me to go on.

"And the horseman you're pursuing — did you see him a little better last night?"

She said she did get a couple of good glimpses of him before their horses broke.

And what did she see?

Not much, she said. Just that he was big, broad-shouldered, and was wearing a black, hooded duster that covered him completely from the rear. Also that his horse was black.

"Could he be Blackjack?" she suddenly asked. "Not the horse I'm riding, but the horse and rider ahead?"

I assured her that indeed he could be Blackjack. As it was now the end of the hour, I added that I felt that her being pursued by her mother while in the act of pursuing her father was a key to opening the meaning of her dream, a key I hoped we would turn together next time.

"You think it really happened, the dream?" she asked.

I told her that I felt that the way she reworked the dream material in different ways suggested she was circling some dreaded and real traumatic event that she'd repressed and that she was now attempting to bring to the surface.

A NEW APPROACH TO A TRANSFERENCE CRISIS IN PSYCHOANALYSIS: "ENTERING IN":
Sexual seduction was Mrs. F's game, her stock-in-trade. It was also the clearest manifestation of her neurosis. By attempting to draw me into her web, she was acting out in accordance with the very compulsions that made her so unhappy. The pitiful Dr. L, whom she'd so quickly seduced in her college days, was but one of a string of
seductees
used and then discarded as she veered ever more rapidly into a sexual maelstrom that, as it turned out, would lead to her destruction. {At this point, it would be disingenuous not to mention certain difficult counter-transference issues that arose in the course of this analysis. Mrs. F, it should be remembered, was a woman of stunning attractiveness with well-honed and well-practiced techniques of seduction at her command. Though I, an experienced analyst, understood exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it, I nevertheless felt it incumbent to seek special counseling from my former training analyst in order to forestall reactions on my part that could hinder the analysis of this anguished and highly vulnerable patient. I recommend such counseling to colleagues who find themselves facing a similar dilemma. The stresses of such provocations must not be underestimated. In such situations, normal analytic techniques may be insufficient to deflect the patient's fantasies, and the strain upon the analyst's professional demeanor, not to mention his/her ego, can be crushingly intense. For me to have yielded in any fashion to her campaign (and it truly was a campaign, waged by her the way a military commander marshals resources while waging war) would not only have vitiated any gains made during the analysis, but also would likely have served to hasten the breakdown toward which this astonishing patient appeared to be heading. She was spinning her web around me the way the predatory black widow spider spins a web about its sexual mate, with the purpose of luring me into an affair or even a single sexual act that would "break" me just as it had broken the unfortunate Dr. L. Such breaking, I believed, was akin to the "breaking" of the horses in her dream.}This analytic dilemma was made all the more acute by the possibility that real harm could come upon Mrs. F on account of her risky engagements—back-to-back affairs with a naive, young man disarmed by her guile, and an insanely jealous lover with underworld connections and a reputation for violence. And I had to take seriously my own role should a tragedy occur: that her provocation (i.e., taking on T as a lover), though clearly directed at me, might also provoke C into a violent response. { As I put it to my former training analyst: To what extent was I obliged to step out of my role as analyst and directly warn Mrs. F of the danger she was courting? The answer was not so obvious. By stepping out of my analytic role, I could, by that single stroke, dismantle the entire substructure of the analysis. But by maintaining "analytic distance," I might not only be acquiescing but also contributing toward a possible tragic denouement. Left with such a difficult choice, I set upon a course of action (see following) that, though unorthodox in the extreme, I believed was the only course open to me in what I considered to be urgent circumstances. Having received counseling against this course from my most respected colleague, I undertook it nevertheless and take full responsibility for all its consequences, foreseen and unforeseen. I raise the matter here not as a mea culpa nor to anticipate criticism of my handling of the case, but simply to suggest the complexities that may arise in an analysis in which the transference/counter-transference phenomenon reaches proportions beyond the normal range.}For these reasons, I decided to embark upon a new approach. { My first step was to quickly determine whether Mrs. F was telling the truth, whether, in fact, she really was conducting two simultaneous affairs or whether this was a fantasy or a claim contrived to arouse me. Though I believed her story was real, I needed to know for certain in order to evaluate the hazards inherent in her situation. Using information she'd given me, I staked out the motel where, she'd told me, she and T met for their afternoon rendezvous. (I hope colleagues will forgive my use of a word normally associated with detective fiction; in fact, as Freud himself pointed out numerous times, much of what we do in our profession is akin to detective work.)While doing this, I was careful not to be seen, well aware of the risks both to my professional reputation and to the analysis itself. Confirming by sight that indeed she was meeting T at the motel, I put my plan into play.}At our next session, anticipating the usual sexual provocations, I told Mrs. F, the moment she lay down on the couch, that I'd been thinking of her a great deal lately and not only in an analytic way.

"Perhaps," I told her, "my regard for you is not so cool as you think."

At this, just as I anticipated, she twisted around so she could meet my eyes. "God! What are you telling me?" she asked.

"Look, we've agreed you've been trying to seduce me. I'm telling you you've succeeded. Consider me seduced. Think of me dreaming about you, getting horny thinking of you, masturbating with you in mind. Think about that. How does that make you feel?"

Still staring at me, she started to blink. Clearly I'd taken her by surprise. "Well, I don't know," she said. "I mean . . . how should I feel?"

"Victorious?"

"A little maybe."

"Satisfied?"

"We'd have to make love for me to feel that."

"Ambushed?"

"Yes," she smiled, "a little." She peered at me. "Are you putting me on, or is this for real?"

"Sounds like you're confused?"

"Yes . . . yes I'm confused," she admitted.

At this point, I urged her to assume her normal position on the couch. We were, I reminded her, still in session and our exchanges were part of her therapy.

"Doesn't sound very orthodox to me," she opined.

I told her that even in so rigorous a discipline as psychoanalysis, extraordinary situations may require extraordinary methods. I'd decided, I told her, to depart from normative technique because I felt that was the best way to access the unconscious processes inherent in her dream.

"What I want you to do," I told her, "is to imagine you've been successful, that I've been thoroughly seduced. With that as a given.. I'm hopeful you'll dispense with further efforts along those lines and proceed into fresh territory, territory that may be truly fearful but which for your own good we must explore."

"Okay, I get it now," she said. "It's like a game, isn't it?"

"What's your fantasy about us?" I asked.

"Oh, Doctor, we're being prurient again!" she said. But launching into her sex fantasy, she quickly gave up her sarcastic tone as highly charged descriptions of the most lascivious acts spewed from her mouth.

I won't record the whole gamut here. In our practices, many of us have experienced similar onslaughts. Of course what was important was not the particular content of Mrs. F's fantasies but the fact she was finally able to let loose with them in a manner at odds with all her earlier braggadocio. Now, at last, with her feelings out of control, she was involved in true associative work. She was, so to speak, "clearing the air," or, perhaps better put, cleaning the cobwebs from her id. When, finally, she stopped, it was clear this outpouring had been cathartic. Her forehead was moist, her blouse was soaked, her body was trembling on the couch.

"Guess what, Doctor?" she said. "I think I've...well, can you believe it? I've been touching myself all this time while I've been talking and...I believe I've had...an orgasm."

By this latest display, Mrs. F, it seemed, had, at least in her own mind, successfully trumped my new approach to her treatment. But I quickly countered with a ploy of my own, which, I admit, under the duress of her provocation, I improvised on the spot. I told her: "What you've just done is try to sabotage our

A
t this point, in mid-sentence, Dad's draft case study suddenly breaks off.

"I
t's all in the final footnotes, David. His madness is in those footnotes."

Dr.
Isadore
Mendoza gazes at me intently. We're sitting in the living room of his house on
Taschen
Drive, a house he and his late wife built in the 1950s, one of only a dozen private residences designed by Eric Lindstrom, Calista's famous mid-century architect.

Izzy, as my father called him, is eighty now. His hair still hangs across his forehead, but now the bangs are white, giving him the appearance of
 
Roman senator. His blue eyes sparkle fire no less than on those evenings when he and Mrs. Mendoza would come to our house for Sunday dinner. Founder of the Calista Psychoanalytic Institute, he had been my father's mentor and training analyst.

"Of course Tom had Freud's
The Case of the Wolfman
in mind," Izzy continues, "the most famous case study in psychoanalytic literature. He believed that with Mrs. Fulraine he'd latched onto a case of equal importance that would propel him into the top rank of our profession. Was that grandiose? I think so . . . though the case was certainly interesting. I told him as gently as I could that I thought his draft was promising, but his enormous counter-transference problems were standing in his way. I loved him as a son. I wanted desperately to help. But I believe he was beyond any kind of help I could give. After Mrs. Fulraine was killed, he completely fell apart, fell into a deep depression."

As Izzy peers at me, I detect traces of an old grief. Perplexity too, for even after so many years he still hasn't reconciled himself to Dad's suicide.

I wrote him, as I did to my old art teacher, Hilda Tucker, to say I'd be back in Calista over the summer and hoped he'd find time to meet with me and talk. Izzy answered right away. He remembered me well, he wrote, was sorry to hear of my mother's passing. My father, he wrote, had been his most promising protégé, the man he'd hoped would build upon his legacy.

Izzy's
gaze is kindly. "You look so much like him, David. Uncannily so. Even your gestures and the way you hold your head. I understand why you changed your name, but to me you'll always be Tom Rubin's boy."

There's only one piece of art in the room. It hangs above the fireplace: a large black and white etching of six wolves' heads peering out of the branches of a tree, with the words "The
Wolfman's
Dream" inscribed across the bottom in brilliant red.

As we talk, my eyes keep wandering to this picture. What is it, I wonder, about the Wolfman Case that so intrigued Dad? Izzy notes my interest.

"The etching's by Jim Dine, a gift from colleagues when I gave up directorship of the Institute. Perhaps you know that the patient Freud called The Wolfman made his own sketch of the wolves he saw in his famous dream. Here Dine reinterprets that vision, matching, I think, the artistry one finds in Freud's case study. Freud, of course, wrote many great papers, but in certain ways for us in the profession, The Case of the Wolfman is the holy grail." Izzy pauses. "How arrogant of Tom to think his analysis of Mrs. Fulraine could match such a dazzling penetration."

Izzy, I know, is a generous man. And he truly loved Dad as he said. But in this last remark, he shows his ambivalence. Dad, it seemed, had overreached, dared to fly too close to the sun, and so he had fallen—literally, in fact, from the window of his office into a snow-covered doctor's parking lot below.