because she had nourished in me a boundless belief in my ability to win whatever I wanted, an optimism and innocence about my charmed life that (now that I thought about it) could very well have left me less than fortified against the realities of setback and frustration. Yes, perhaps what made me so pathetic at dealing with Maureen in her wildest moments was that I simply could not believe that anybody like her could exist in the world that had been advertised to me as Peter’s oyster. It wasn’t the repetition of an ancient “trauma” that rendered me so helpless with my defiant wife-it was its uniqueness. I might as well have been dealing with a Martian, for all the familiarity I had with female rage and resentment.
I admitted readily to Dr. Spielvogel that of course I had been reduced in my marriage to a bewildered and defenseless little boy, but that, I contended, was because I had never been a bewildered little boy before. I did not see how we could account for my downfall in my late twenties without accounting simultaneously for all those years of success and good fortune that had preceded it. Wasn’t it possible that in my “case,” as I willingly called it, triumph and failure, conquest and defeat derived from an indestructible boyish devotion to a woman as benefactress and celebrant, protectress and guide? Could we not conjecture that what had made me so available to the Bad Older Woman was the reawakening in me of that habit of obedience that had stood me in such good stead with the Good Older Woman of my childhood? A small boy, yes, most assuredly, no question about it-but not at all, I insisted, because the protecting, attentive, and regulating mother of my fairly happy memories had been Spielvogel’s “phallic threatening mother figure” to whom I submitted out of fear and whom a part of me secretly loathed. To be sure, whoever held absolute power over a child had inevitably to inspire hatred in him at times, but weren’t we standing the relationship on its head by emphasizing her fearsome aspect, real as it may have been, over the lovingness and tenderness of the mother who dominated the recollections of my first ten years? And weren’t we drastically exaggerating my submissiveness as well, when all available records seemed to indicate that in fact I had been a striving, spirited little boy, nicknamed Peppy, who hardly behaved in the world like a whipped dog? Children, I told Spielvogel (who I assumed knew as much), had undergone far worse torment than I ever had for displeasing adults.
Spielvogel wouldn’t buy it. It was hardly unusual, he said, to have felt loved by the “threatening mother”; what was distressing was that at this late date I should continue to depict her in this “idealized” manner. That to him was a sign that I was still very much “under her spell,” unwilling so much as to utter a peep of protest for fear yet of reprisal. As he saw it, it was my vulnerability as a sensitive little child to the pain such a mother might so easily inflict that accounted for “the dominance of narcissism” as my “primary defense.” To protect myself against the “profound anxiety” engendered by my mother-by the possibilities of rejection and separation, as well as the helplessness that I experienced in her presence-I had cultivated a strong sense of superiority, with all the implications of “guilt” and “ambivalence” over being “special.”
I argued that Dr. Spielvogel had it backwards. My sense of superiority-if he wanted to call it that-was not a “defense” against the threat of my mother, but rather my altogether willing acceptance of her estimation of me. I just agreed with her, that’s all. As what little boy wouldn’t? I was not pleading with Spielvogel to believe that I had ever in my life felt like an ordinary person or wished to be one; I was only trying to explain that it did not require “profound anxiety” for my mother’s lastborn to come up with the idea that he was somebody to conjure with.
Now, when I say that I “argued” or “admitted,” and Spielvogel “took issue,” etc., I am drastically telescoping a dialectic that was hardly so neat and narrow, or so pointed, as it evolved from session to session. A summary like this tends to magnify considerably my own resistance to the archaeological reconstruction of my childhood that began to take shape over the first year or so of therapy, as well as to overdraw the subtle enough means by which the doctor communicated to me his hypotheses about the origin of my troubles. If I, in fact, had been less sophisticated about “resistance”-and he’d had less expertise-I might actually have been able to resist him more successfully. (On the basis of this paragraph, Dr. Spielvogel would undoubtedly say that my resistance, far from being overcome by my “sophistication,” has triumphed over all in the end. For why do I assign to him, rather than myself, the characterization of my Mother as “a phallic threatening figure,” if not because I am still unwilling to be responsible for thinking such an unthinkable thought’?) Also, had I been less desperate to be cured of whatever was ailing me, and ruining me, I probably could have held out somewhat longer-though being, as of old, the most willing of pupils, I would inevitably, I think, have seriously entertained his ideas just out of schoolboy habit. But as it was, because I so wanted to get a firm grip upon myself and to stop being so susceptible to Maureen, I found that once I got wind of Dr. Spielvogel’s bias, I became increasingly willing to challenge my original version of my fairly happy childhood with rather Dickensian recollections of my mother as an overwhelming and frightening person. Sure enough, memories began to turn up of cruelty, injustice, and of offenses against my innocence and integrity, and as time passed, it was as though the anger that I felt toward Maureen had risen over its banks and was beginning to rush out across the terrain of my childhood. If I would never wholly relinquish my benign version of our past, I nonetheless so absorbed Spielvogel’s that when, some ten months into analysis, I went up to Yonkers to have Passover dinner with my parents and Morris’s family, I found myself crudely abrupt and cold with my mother, a performance almost as bewildering afterward to me as to this woman who so looked forward to each infrequent visit that I made to her dinner table. Peeved, and not about to hide it, my brother took me aside at one point in the meal and said, “Hey, what’s going on here tonight?” I could not give him anything but a shrug for a reply. And try as I might, when I later kissed her goodbye at the door, I did not seem to have the wherewithal to feign even a little filial affection-as though my mother, who had been crestfallen the very first time she had laid eyes on Maureen, and afterward had put up with the fact of her solely to please me, was somehow an accomplice to Maureen’s vindictive rage.
Somewhere along in my second year of therapy, when relations with my mother were at their coolest, it occurred to me that rather than resenting Spielvogel, as I sometimes did, for provoking this perplexing change in behavior and attitude toward her, I should see it rather as a strategy, harsh perhaps but necessary, designed to deplete the fund of maternal veneration on which Maureen had been able to draw with such phenomenal results. To be sure, it was no fault of my mother’s that I had blindly transferred the allegiance she had inspired through the abundance of her love to someone who was in actuality my enemy; it could be taken, in fact, as a measure of just how gratifying a mother she had been, what a genius of a mother she had been, that a son of hers, decades later, had found himself unable to “wrong” a woman with whom his mother shared nothing except a common gender, and a woman whom actually he had come to despise. Nonetheless, if my future as a man required me to sever at long last the reverential bonds of childhood, then the brutal and bloody surgery on the emotions would have to proceed, and without blaming the physician in charge for whatever pain the operation might cause the blameless mother or for the disorientation it produced in the apron-strung idolatrous son…Thus did I try to rationalize the severity with which I was coming to judge my mother, and to justify and understand the rather patriarchal German-Jewish doctor, whose insistence on “the phallic threatening mother” I sometimes thought revealed more about some bete noire of his than of my own.
But that suspicion was not one that I cared, or dared, to pursue. I was far too much the needy patient to presume to be my doctor’s doctor. I had to trust someone if I hoped ever to recover from my defeat, and I chose him.
I had, of course, no real idea what kind of man Dr. Spielvogel was outside of his office, or even in the office with other patients. Where exactly he had been born, raised, and educated, when and under what circumstances he had emigrated to America, what his wife was like, whether he had children-I knew no more about these simple facts of his life than I did about the man who sold me my morning paper; and I was too obedient to what I understood to be the rules of the game to ask, and too preoccupied with my own troubles to be anything more than sporadically curious about this stranger in whose presence I lay down on a couch in a dimly lit room for fifty minutes, three afternoons a week, and spoke as I had never spoken even to those who had proved themselves worthy of my trust. My attitude toward the doctor was very much like that of the first-grader who accepts on faith the wisdom, authority, and probity of his teacher, and is unable to grasp the idea that his teacher also lives in the ambiguous and uncertain world beyond the blackboard.
I had myself been just such a youngster, and experienced my first glimpse of my doctor riding a Fifth Avenue bus with the same stunned disbelief and embarrassment that I had felt at age eight when, in the company of my sister, I had passed the window of a neighborhood barbershop one day and saw the man who taught “shop” in my school getting a shine and a shave. I was four months into my analysis on the drizzly morning when I looked up
