His accusation seemed particularly ironic because, if there were one conviction I had about him, it was that sex was
not
the source of his difficulty.
“But it’s
your
dream, Marvin. And your cane. You created it, what do you make of it? And what do you make of the allusions to death—undertakers, silence, blackness, the whole atmosphere of dread and foreboding?”
Given the choice of discussing the dream from the perspective of death or of sex, Marvin, with dispatch, chose the latter.
“Well, you might be interested in something sexual that happened yesterday afternoon—that would be about ten hours before the dream. I was lying in bed still recovering from my migraine. Phyllis came over and gave me a head and neck massage. She then kept on going and massaged my back, then my legs, and then my penis. She undressed me and then took off all her clothes.”
This must have been an unusual event: Marvin had told me he initiated sex almost all of the time. I suspected that Phyllis wanted to expiate her guilt for refusing to see a couples therapist.
“At first, I wouldn’t respond.”
“How come?”
“To tell you the truth, I was scared. I was just getting over my worst migraine, and I was afraid I’d fail and get another migraine. But Phyllis started sucking my cock and got me hard. I’ve never seen her so persistent. I finally said, ‘Let’s go, a good lay might be just the thing to get rid of some of this tension.’” Marvin paused.
“Why do you stop?”
“I’m trying to think of her exact words. Anyway, we started making love. I was doing pretty well, but just as I was getting ready to come, Phyllis said, ‘There are other reasons for making love than to get rid of tension.’ Well, that did it! I lost it in a second.”
“Marvin, did you tell Phyllis exactly how you felt about her timing?”
“Her timing is not good—never has been. But I was too riled up to talk. Afraid of what I’d say. If I say the wrong thing, she can make my life hell—turn off the sexual spigot altogether.”
“What sort of thing might you say?”
“I’m afraid of my impulses—my murderous and sexual impulses.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you remember, years ago, a news story of a man who killed his wife by pouring acid on her? Horrible thing! Yet I’ve often thought about that crime. I can understand how fury toward a woman could lead to a crime like that.”
Christ! Marvin’s unconscious was closer to the surface than I thought. Remembering I hadn’t wanted to take the lid off such primitive feelings—at least not this early in treatment—I switched from murder to sex.
“Marvin, you said you’re frightened also by your sexual impulses. What do you mean?”
“My sex drive has always been too strong. I’ve been told that’s true of many bald men. A sign of too much male hormone. Is that true?”
I didn’t want to encourage the distraction. I shrugged off the question. “Keep going.”
“Well, I’ve had to keep it under rein all my life because Phyllis has got strong ideas about how much sex we will have. And it’s always the same—two times a week, some exceptions for birthdays and holidays.”
“You’ve got some feelings about that?”
“Sometimes. But sometimes I think restraints are good. Without them I might run wild.”
That was a curious comment. “What does ‘running wild’ mean? Do you mean extramarital affairs?”
My question shocked Marvin. “I’ve never been unfaithful to Phyllis! Never will be!”
“Well, what
do
you mean by ‘running wild’?”
Marvin looked stumped. I had a sense he was talking about things he had never discussed before. I was excited for him. It had been one hell of an hour’s work. I wanted him to continue, and I just waited.
“I don’t
know
what I mean, but at times I’ve wondered what it would have been like to have married a woman with a sex drive like mine, a woman who wanted and enjoyed sex as much as me.”
“What do you think? Your life would have been very different?”
“Let me back up a minute. I shouldn’t have used the word
enjoy
a few minutes ago. Phyllis enjoys sex. It’s just that she never seems to
want
it. Instead, she . . . what’s the word? . . . dispenses it—if I’m good. These are the times when I feel cheated and angry.”
Marvin paused. He loosened his collar, rubbed his neck, and rolled his head around. He was getting rid of tension, but I imagined him to be looking around the room, as though to assure himself no one else was listening.
“You look uncomfortable. What are you feeling?”
“Disloyal. Like I shouldn’t have been saying these things about Phyllis. Almost like she’ll find out about it.”
“You give her a lot of power. Sooner or later we’re going to need to find out all about that.”
Marvin continued to be refreshingly open during the first several weeks of therapy. All in all, he did far better than I had expected. He was cooperative; he relinquished his pugnacious skepticism about psychiatry; he did his homework, came prepared for the sessions, and was determined, as he put it, to get a good return on his investment. His confidence in therapy was boosted by an unexpected early dividend: his migraines mysteriously almost disappeared as soon as he started treatment (although his intense sex-spawned mood swings continued).
During this early phase of therapy, we concentrated on two issues: his marriage and (to a lesser extent, because of his resistance) the implications of his retirement. But I was careful to tread a fine line. I felt like a surgeon preparing the operative field but avoiding any deep dissection. I wanted Marvin to explore these issues, but not too searchingly—not enough to destabilize the precarious marital equilibrium he and Phyllis had established (and thus drive him immediately out of therapy) and not enough to evoke any further death anxiety (and thus ignite further migraines).
At the same time as I was conducting this gentle, somewhat concrete therapy with Marvin, I was also engaged in a fascinating discourse with the dreamer, that vastly enlightened homunculus housed—or, one might say, jailed—by Marvin, who was either ignorant of the dreamer’s existence or allowed him to communicate with me in a spirit of benign indifference. While Marvin and I strolled and casually conversed on superficial levels, the dreamer drummed out a constant stream of messages from the depths.
Perhaps my discourse with the dreamer was counterproductive. Perhaps I was willing to permit Marvin a slower pace because of my encounter with the dreamer. I remember beginning every hour not with excitement about seeing Marvin, but with anticipation about my next communiqué from the dreamer.
Sometimes the dreams, like the first ones, were frightening expressions of ontological anxiety; sometimes they foreshadowed things to come in therapy; sometimes they were like subtitles to therapy, providing a vivid translation of Marvin’s cautious statements to me.
After the first few sessions, I began to receive hopeful messages:
The teacher in a boarding school was looking around for children who were interested in painting on a large blank canvas. Later I was telling a small, pudgy boy—obviously myself—about it, and he got so excited he began to cry.
No mistaking that message:
“Marvin senses he’s being offered an opportunity by someone—undoubtedly you, his therapist—to start all over again. How exciting—to be given another chance, to paint his life all over again on a blank canvas.”
Other hopeful dreams followed:
I am at a wedding, and a woman comes up and says she is my long-forgotten daughter. I’m surprised because I didn’t know I had a daughter. She’s middle-aged and dressed in rich brown colors. We had only a couple of hours to talk. I asked her about the conditions of her life, but she couldn’t talk about that. I was sorry when she left, but we agreed to correspond.
The message:
“Marvin, for the first time, discovers his daughter—the feminine, softer, sensitive side of himself. He’s fascinated. The possibilities are limitless. He considers establishing ongoing communication. Perhaps he can colonize the newfound islets of himself.”
Another dream:
I look out the window and hear a commotion in the shrubbery. It is a cat chasing a mouse. I feel sorry for the mouse and go outside to it. What I find are two baby kittens who have not yet opened their eyes. I run to tell Phyllis about it because she’s so fond of kittens.
The message:
“Marvin understands, he really understands, that his eyes have been closed, and that he is finally preparing to open them. He is excited for Phyllis, who is also about to open her eyes. But be careful, he suspects you of playing a cat-and-mouse game.”
Soon I received more warnings:
Phyllis and I are having dinner in a ramshackle restaurant. The service is very poor. The waiter is never there when you want him. Phyllis tells him he is dirty and poorly dressed. I am surprised that the food is so good.
The message:
“He is building up a case against you. Phyllis wants you out of their lives. You are highly threatening to both of them. Be careful. Do not get caught in a crossfire. No matter how good your food, you are no match for a woman.”
And then a dream providing specific grievances:
I’m watching a heart transplant. The surgeon is lying down. Someone is accusing him of being involved only in the transplantation process and being uninterested in all the messy circumstances of how he got the heart from the donor. The surgeon admits that was true. There was an operating room nurse who said she didn’t have this privilege—she had to witness the whole mess.
The message:
“The heart transplant is, of course, psychotherapy. [Hats off to you, my dear dreamer friend! “Heart transplant”—what an inspired visual symbol for psychotherapy!] Marvin feels you’re cold and uninvolved and that you’ve taken little personal interest in his life—in how he got to be the person he is today.”
The dreamer was advising me how to proceed. Never have I had a supervisor like this. I was so fascinated by the dreamer that I began to lose sight of his motivation. Was he acting as Marvin’s agent to help me to help Marvin? Was he hoping that if Marvin changed, then he, the dreamer, would gain his release through integration with Marvin? Or was he chiefly acting to alleviate his own isolation by taking pains to preserve the relationship he had with me?
But regardless of his motivation, his advice was sagacious. He was right: I was not truly engaged with Marvin! We stayed on such a formal level that our use of first names seemed ungainly. Marvin took himself very seriously: he was practically my only patient with whom I could never joke or banter. I tried often to focus on our relationship, but aside from some barbs in the first couple of sessions (of the “you fellows think sex is at the root of everything” genre), he made no reference to me whatsoever. He treated me with such respect and deference and generally responded to my inquiries about his feelings toward me with statements to the effect that I must know what I’m doing since he continued to remain free of migraines.
By the time six months had gone by, I cared somewhat more about Marvin, yet still had no deep fondness for him. This was very strange since I adored the dreamer: I adored his courage and his scorching honesty. From time to time, I had to prod myself to remember that the dreamer
was
Marvin, that the dreamer provided an open channel to Marvin’s central nucleus—that whorl of the self which possesses absolute wisdom and self-knowledge.
The dreamer was correct that I had not plunged into the messy details of the origin of the heart to be transplanted: I had been far too inattentive to the experiences and patterns of Marvin’s early life. Consequently, I devoted the following two sessions to a detailed examination of his childhood. One of the most interesting things I learned was that, when Marvin was seven or eight, a cataclysmic secret event shattered his family and resulted in his mother banishing his father permanently from her bedroom. Though the nature of the event was never revealed to Marvin, he now believes, on the basis of a few stray comments by his mother, that his father had either been unfaithful or a compulsive gambler.
After his father’s exile, it fell upon Marvin, the youngest son, to become his mother’s constant companion: it was his job to escort her to all her social functions. For years he endured his friends’ jibes about dating his mother.
Needless to say, Marvin’s new family assignment did not increase his popularity with his father, who became a thin presence in the family, then a mere shadow, and soon evaporated forever. Two years later, his older brother received a postcard from their father saying he was alive and well and was sure the family was better off without him.