match with mine in which each boy bloodies the others's nose. And there's something else you mentioned in only the most peripheral way – T not only coached your sons in tennis, he coached them in boxing too. In fact, I learned from my own boy that he served as referee of their match. So in a sense, we could say you hired T to teach your sons to bloody my son's nose. Next session let's try to pull this all together in the context of your dream, because, you see, I think we're getting close now to its underlying meaning, the meaning that terrifies you even as it excites you.'
ANALYSIS (continued): Consistent with past behavior, Mrs. F immediately demonstrated her resistance at the start of the next session by making the following statement:
*15 In fact, though mine is a fairly common name, I didn't doubt for a moment that this was far more than mere coincidence. However, I decided not to dwell on the matter just then, believing there was something deeper to be uncovered.
“I'm having such a busy twenty-four hours! Last night I had The Dream again and got all sexy on account of it. Early this morning I went riding, and that, as usual, got me juiced up. Now I'm here to discuss it… and I always find our meetings sexy in a cools sort of way. Then I'm off to meet C for lunch and a hot bout of rough sex. Then after a quick stop home for a shower, I'll meet T at our usual seedy motel for silken loving sex, the kind I've come lately to appreciate more and more. He's so tender with me, so sweet, loving, and eager to please…, etc.^16
Feeling that this could be a crucial session, I decided to postpone further analysis of her dream till later in the hour. Instead I asked her to describe the difference between the sex she was having with her two lovers, whom, she had just made clear, she was no longer meeting on separate days but was now seeing, provocatively, back to back.
'Well, Doctor,” she smirked, “to satisfy your prurient interest, C is one hard-ass lover. That, I think, is originally what attracted me. He's dark, hairy, charming, glossy, an old-fashioned ‘lounge lizard’ type. But there isn't a hell of a lot of heart there if you know what I mean. For him sex is rough-and-tumble without much tenderness. When we started our affair, I pretty much let him take over. You know, “do with me what you will.” He told me, ‘You're a classy lady and that makes me want to dirty you up.’ When I asked him what he meant, he said he wanted to make me gasp and scream. ‘No polite little orgasms, thank you, ma'am,’ he said. So I told him, “I love getting carried away, so please, if you think you can send me like that, by all means try.” Oh, he tried all right! I really made him work for it! We'd wrestle and slap and scratch – the whole nine yards. But, see, being dominated doesn't really do it for me. To be satisfied, I need to be in control. So over the course of time, things began to change, with me taking over more and more. The way things are now, we both get ‘dirtied’ up. Now he loses his cool. With me he's no longer the unflappable, slightly malevolent, hail-fellow-well-met nightclub impresario. When I ride him, he turns into just another panting boy screaming for release.”
I quote Mrs. F's statement in extensor to illustrate how her neurosis, as exemplified in what I had now come to regard as her ‘key’ or ‘master’ dream, was determining her love relationships. Her descriptions of C were so close to her earlier descriptions of her father, Blackjack, as to be transparent to even the most naive observer. Yet it seemed that Mrs. F still resisted making this connection.*17
Here now is her description of her lovemaking with my namesake and ‘love proxy’ T.:
“T is a really gorgeous guy, lean, hard, blondish, fair-skinned without much body hair. So physically he and C couldn’t be more different. Different in personality too, because T's a sweetheart. With him there's none of the slapping and scratching I do with C. We make love gently and slowly, excruciatingly slowly sometimes. Yeah, C makes me scream, but with T, I can really lose myself, forget who I am. He doesn't want to ‘dirty’ me up. He only wants to worship me. He adores me for who I am, not what I represent. I find that so refreshing.^18 But if you're wondering why I keep seeing them both, I guess it's because each satisfies a different need. C gives me what I think I crave, while T gives me what I really Want.”
Mrs. F smiled. “Pretty complicated, huh?”
*16 In response to my query, 'Do you see how you always start our sessions like this, talking abut your sex life and never failing to add me to the mix?' Mrs. F laughed. “Well, isn't sex what psychoanalysis is about? Aren't I being a good patient by building up a strong transference bond with you?”
*17 Strangely, she'd also seemingly never made the connection between her father's profession or racehorse trainer and C's ownership of a casino. The fact that both men worked in the gambling industry appeared to have entirely escaped her notice.
*18 I found this idealization of her relationship with T suspect in view of other information she imparted. For instance, she told me how she'd arranged to meet him one day at the Municipal Aquarium in front of a large tank containing sharks. Describing their kiss in front of the lit tank while the sharks swirled behind, she said: “That felt so bold. I think I did it to insert some drama into our affair.” Later, when I described this encounter to a colleague, he pointed out a strong similarity to a scene in the film Lady From Shanghai in which the actors, Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth, kiss in front of an aquarium containing a huge octopus. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to ask Mrs. F if she'd seen this film and whether it had inspired her choice of the location of her rendezvous. Still, whether she knew the film or not, the scene suggests she saw herself in a femme fatale role with T.
As the hour was now nearly over and since she'd redreamt her key dream 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.
She 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 horse 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 that 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.^19
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
*19 At this point, it would be disingenuous not to mention certain difficult countertransference 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
