The Golden Condom (19 page)

Helen was unable to access her own clinical skills to understand what was going on or recognize the impact of her own behavior on the man she idolized. She did not see that she threatened and overwhelmed Nate as much as she impressed him. Her desperate desire to break through to him was driven by an unconscious need to be acknowledged by him as her own father had never done. “There were many ways in which my father seemed not to be interested in me, and he never told me he loved me,” she said. “I can't believe a feeling is real unless it's put into words.” She could not endure being Nate's heiress unapparent; she had to have it spelled out.

Nate, for his part, could not approach Helen directly and declare his intention that she should succeed him because that would have been a frightening admission of what she meant to him. Reticence and avoidance of intimacy characterized all his relationships—“
Everybody
has a fucked-up relationship with Nate,” a more experienced colleague told her, to her great relief—but the unacknowledged physical attraction that he felt for her
3
made it worse. (Nate was married with children.) He inconsistently kept her at arm's length to fight the urge to take her in his arms.

Only in retrospect was Helen able to understand what each party contributed to their excruciating union. “It took me years to realize that watching him tune in to patients made me long not just to learn to do that myself but to be understood by him as he understood them,” she said. The girl who had never seen “the gleam in her father's eye”
4
—the delighted, loving sense of specialness every child needs—longed for her mentor to bestow it upon her as an adult. “I wanted to say, ‘Turn your high beams on me.'” Her raw desire for his undivided attention terrified Nate and made him flee, lest he be unable to resist.

In her fourth year of residency, Helen was appointed a chief resident and given a title that coincidentally resembled Nate's, and she no longer reported to him. He let her know that he was shocked that she took the job, as though she was usurping his position. (Of course, she intended no such thing, but he could not see that.) Helen took the risk of going to his home office to discuss it. “For the first time, I broached the subject of us, but he immediately shut down the conversation by saying, ‘We have no context or form to work on this.'” Nate deflected her by hiding behind the administrative hierarchy—he couldn't stand the thought of more personal contact between them—and Helen felt so rejected she did not think to say,
No context? How about the context of two people who have a long, complicated history?
She left and wrote Nate a letter—what she called “the most courageously honest letter of my life”—addressing their folie à deux. “‘I see you as man of great integrity and great reserve, but I'm in this transference vortex and I'm having trouble coming out.'” Of course, he never answered, by post or in person.

*   *   *

At the end of her psychiatric training, Helen finally separated from Nate by falling in love, getting engaged, and following her fiancé to Wisconsin. This move, and the reason she made it, did not please her mentor; she could tell by his demeanor that he was crushed that she was leaving. A colleague jocularly warned her, “Tell your husband to watch out. Don't be surprised if a courtly gentleman sneaks into your bedroom and tries to stab him.”

When they were 150 miles apart, Nate became slightly less distant. He came to Helen's new hometown to attend a professional meeting, and she called him. “I said, ‘Nate, I miss you,' and he took me to dinner at this unbelievable restaurant, the best in the state. I decided to talk about ideas, and we had a wonderful evening, although he repeatedly mentioned his wife.” But Helen finally mentioned her and Nate. “I told him that I had realized things about our relationship, that I was ashamed of my longing, which had made me behave in confusing ways, and he actually said, ‘Are there things that I did that made this hard for you?'

“‘I wanted you to love me and care about me,' I said.”

His explanation was convoluted. He said, “I didn't want the group to punish you for being my favorite, so I protected you against being special to me. I never assumed we'd stay in touch—we don't know each other that well.” Helen did not buy this. “Although I felt like a kicked puppy, I said, ‘You were of singular importance to me—how could we not have a lifelong relationship?'” To this, he had no reply. Denial is a powerful force that even the most seasoned psychoanalyst can fail to recognize when he is in its throes himself.

The last time they met was an unexpected encounter at the funeral of a mutual colleague. His guard was down, and his behavior, perhaps because of the occasion, was considerably more revealing than usual. “Nate saw me, seemed shocked, collected himself, and then greeted me. We shook hands, and he kept holding mine.” She told him what he meant to her. “I want you to know that everything I do is your legacy. Watching you all those years changed me. You taught me to return the outcast into the circle of humanity.” Her guard was down too, so she also told him how trying he was. “You never meet
me
. I make myself so vulnerable and you never show up—you've been crazy too.” But the moment passed, and he retreated once more into silence. This time, she was fully prepared never to hear from him again. Their exchange, she assumed, would trail off, as in a Henry James short story, never to be fulfilled.

But she was wrong. Two years later, Helen got an unexpected “Friend” request on Facebook. It was from Nate. “I almost fell off my chair,” she told me. A little research revealed that he had opened his account just hours earlier and that she had been one of the first people he contacted. She accepted, with the old anticipation but with more insight than she had when they were working so closely together at the same hospital. Time, distance, and maturity have sharpened her perceptions but not severed her tie to him or diminished the intensity of her distress over his elusiveness. Maybe, she hopes, she will finally see the real Nate—Facebook to Facebook, even if not face to face. Or has she already seen all that there is? Has age—he is now seventy-five—mellowed him? Will the protective shield of the Internet allow him to reveal more of himself to his former acolyte? The jury is still out. Sometimes the second act between mentors and protégés is every bit as curious, compelling, and unpredictable as the first.

*   *   *

In Greek mythology, the bandit Procrustes had an iron bed in which he forced every passerby to spend the night. If the victim was too short, Procrustes stretched him to fit, and if he was too tall, Procrustes chopped off his legs to make him fit; everyone who slept in his bed was killed because nobody fit exactly. Many mentors—particularly narcissistic ones—have procrustean standards, requiring their protégés to be exact replicas of themselves. They fall in love with what they believe is their own reincarnation. When that reincarnation turns out to be a different person, the mentor feels betrayed and enraged and can turn childish, cowardly, and vengeful. While such a mentor does not literally murder the offending protégé, he punishes, banishes, or disowns him, arbitrarily blaming the former favorite for being himself.

One of the most embarrassing examples of a mentor-protégé relationship gone horribly wrong occurred between the founding titans in my own field, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. Their passionate friendship and collaboration began in 1906 and ended in very public grief and rage six years later. At the start, Freud was a renowned fifty-year-old Jewish Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist who was in the midst of founding psychoanalysis, and Jung, a Swiss Christian, was a brilliant thirty-one-year-old psychiatrist on his way up, with a knack for treating psychotic patients and a taste for the occult. Their love affair began when Jung sent Freud a book he had written in which he praised Freud's insights. Freud, who had a lifelong hunger for adulation and whose ideas were still being scoffed at in orthodox psychiatric circles, was delighted, grateful, and impressed. It did not hurt that Jung was one of the very few non-Jewish friends of psychoanalysis, which its founder desperately wanted to be more widely accepted and not hobbled by the medical establishment's anti-Semitic prejudice. They talked for thirteen hours the first time they met. Very soon, Freud was referring to Jung as his “adopted son,” “crown prince,” and “successor.” With his adoptive “father's” backing, Jung was made editor of the psychoanalytic society's annual publication and then became chairman for life of the International Psychoanalytic Association—an appointment that was fated to last only two years.

After the first thrill of mutual discovery died down, each began to notice worrisome differences from the other, among them the utility of religion, the centrality of sexuality, and the nature of the unconscious. Jung, a minister's son, wrote that “human nature is by nature religious.” Freud, an atheist and rationalist, thought that religion was an infantile delusion. Repressed sexual desire and incestuous wishes, along with aggression, were the central causes of neurotic suffering for Freud, and he believed that “sublimating” these impulses (“Where id was, there ego shall be” was his later formulation of this idea) was the way to freedom. Jung thought that “individuating” and integrating opposing aspects of the “self” was the proper goal. He discerned a “collective unconscious” of “archetypes” beneath the “personal unconscious” where repressed impulses resided; Freud never accepted this. In addition to their theoretical differences, Jung was already chafing at his role as acolyte by 1912. Both were strong and exceptionally gifted personalities and original thinkers who needed to be in charge.

The growing tension between them reached the breaking point when Jung published
The Psychology of the Unconscious
—an unconscious that was nothing like Freud's. Freud dealt with his disciple's apostasy by writing him cold, wounded letters and pointedly avoiding seeing Jung when he took a trip to Switzerland to visit another colleague in a nearby town. Jung responded by writing enraged, infantile letters of his own to Freud, in one of which he said he would “pluck the Prophet by the beard.” Hell hath no fury like two analysts scorned.

The bitterness of their estrangement and mutual sense of personal betrayal made it impossible to keep their inevitable parting of the ways from disintegrating into name-calling. They detested each other for the rest of their lives, and many of their followers continue to do so to this day. Freud was deeply pained by their break, but Jung suffered a near-psychotic episode. In later years, the former crown prince diverged radically from his mentor's ideas and became renowned as the founder of what he called “analytical psychology.” Ultimately, the only person who could succeed Freud was one whose loyalty was unassailable, with whom he did not need to compete because her mind was shaped by him in his own image,
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and she was his designated and self-designated keeper of the flame: his daughter Anna.

THE ENFANT TERRIBLE AND THE BOY GENIUS

When Jung parted ways with Freud, he at least had a large practice, a growing reputation in his own right, and a position at a famous clinic. He and his former mentor and now nemesis also lived in different countries. Deposed protégés whose mentors are their bosses don't have it so easy.

The protégé, who began writing for his idol, the editor in chief, when he was fourteen, went to work for him and his journal of opinion as soon as he graduated from college. A year later, when the protégé was only twenty-three, his new boss took him to lunch at the fancy Italian restaurant that served as his cafeteria. As soon as they raised their first glass of wine, the famous journalist announced his verdict. “I have decided that you are going to succeed me.”

The recipient of this declaration was beyond astonishment. “The best word to describe what he did was ‘breathtaking,'” he recollected thirty-six years later in far more tranquility than he had felt at the time. “It was completely unexpected; I had no hint. I was the most junior member of the staff, just out of school. First I was to be made the youngest senior editor in the history of the magazine”—this was announced with due pomp soon afterward—“and later I would become managing editor so I could learn how to run it.” He was also informed that he would own the magazine outright when his mentor stepped down and that, along with the title, he was inheriting 100 percent of the stock. The current owner had a son of his own who was also a writer, though not a political one; since he did not aspire to the post, the arrangement would not be contested.

Why did the editor in chief, who was fifty-two at the time, at the height of his renown and influence and with no plans to retire, drop this bombshell when he did and the way he did? “I was thinking of going to law school, and he wanted to head off my leaving with a grand gesture; he specialized in grand gestures,” said the protégé. “A good way to keep somebody in the building is to offer him the keys to the building.”

The building and its contents would be the least of it, he realized with apprehension at the time. To inherit this mantle was to become the spokesman of the political movement of which the magazine was the bible and the editor in chief the messiah, with the attendant duties (defining the mission of the magazine and representing it in the media), responsibilities (endlessly finding and feting donors to the cause), and perks (a glamorous public life) of the role, all of which were utterly alien to the heir's temperament and experience and nothing he had aspired to in his wildest dreams. A gifted writer he already was, but becoming a pundit, celebrity, bon vivant, and media star by fiat seemed inconceivable. How would he ever fill his mentor's shoes? He was so overwhelmed by the job he was summarily informed that he was being groomed for and so in thrall to the man who currently held it—who had, in fact, created it in his own larger-than-life image—that he never dared ask himself whether he wanted to do it, let alone express any doubts about his similarity to the personage whose identity he was slated to assume.