of this anguished and highly vulnerable patient.
I recommend such counseling to colleagues who find themselves facing a similar dilemma. The stresses of 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. 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.*20
For these reasons, I decided to embark upon a new approach.*21
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 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 that 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 hat 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 by truly fearful but which for your own good we must
*20 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 nonetheless 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 / countertransference phenomenon reaches proportions beyond the normal range.
*21 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. 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 that 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
At this point, in mid-sentence, Dad's draft case study suddenly breaks off.
10
'It'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 a 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 countertransference 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.
