The General's Daughter

“Yes. It has to. When the child is young, the child wants to win the father’s approval. The father sees no threat to his dominance and thinks of the son or daughter as a chip off the old block, to use an expression. But by adolescence, they both begin to see traits in the other that they don’t like. The irony is that these are their own worst traits, but people cannot be objective about themselves. Also, they begin to vie for dominance, and begin to voice criticisms of the other person. Since neither can tolerate criticism, and since both are in fact probably competent and high achievers, the sparks start to fly.”

“Are we speaking in general terms,” I asked, “or specifically about General and Captain Campbell, father and daughter?”

He hesitated a moment, probably out of a deeply ingrained habit against revealing privileged information. He said, “I may speak in generalities, but you should make your own conclusions.”

“Well,” I replied, “if Ms. Sunhill and I are asking specific questions, and you’re giving general answers, we may be misled. We’re a little dense.”

“I don’t think so, and you can’t fool me into thinking you are.”

“All right, down to cases.” I said to him, “We were told that Ann felt she was in competition with her father, realized she could not compete in that world, and rather than opting out, she began a campaign of sabotage against him.”

“Who told you that?”

“I got it from someone who got it from a psychologist.”

“Well, the psychologist is wrong. An obsessive-compulsive personality always believes they can compete and will go head-to-head with a domineering figure.”

“So, that wasn’t the actual cause of Ann Campbell’s hate of her father? They didn’t mind the head- butting.”

“Correct. The actual reason for her deep hate of her father was betrayal.”

“Betrayal?”

“Yes. Ann Campbell would not develop an irrational hate of her father because of rivalry, jealousy, or feelings of inadequacy. Despite their growing competitiveness, which was not necessarily bad, she in fact loved her father very much right up until the point he betrayed her. And that betrayal was so great, so total, and so traumatic that it nearly destroyed her. The man she loved, admired, and trusted above all others betrayed her and broke her heart.” He added, “Is that specific enough for you?”

After a few seconds of silence, Cynthia leaned forward in her seat and asked, “How did he betray her?”

Moore did not reply, but just looked at us.

Cynthia asked, “Did he rape her?”

Moore shook his head.

“Then what?”

Moore replied, “It really doesn’t matter what specifically it was. It only matters to the subject that the betrayal was total and unforgivable.”

I said, “Colonel, don’t fuck with us. What did he do to her?”

Moore seemed a little taken aback, then recovered and said, “I don’t know.”

Cynthia pointed out, “But you know it wasn’t rape and incest.”

“Yes. I know that because she volunteered that. When we discussed her case, she only referred to this event as the betrayal.”

“So,” I said sarcastically, “it may be that he forgot to buy her a birthday present.”

Colonel Moore looked annoyed, which was my purpose in being sarcastic. He said, “No, Mr. Brenner, it’s not usually something so trivial. But you can understand, I hope, that when you love and trust someone unconditionally, and that person betrays you in some fundamental and premeditated way—not a forgetful or thoughtless way, such as you suggested, but in a profoundly personal and self-serving way—then you can never forgive that person.” He added, “A classic example is a loving wife who idolizes her husband and discovers he’s having an intense affair with another woman.”

Cynthia and I thought about this a moment, and I suppose a few personal thoughts ran through our minds, and neither of us spoke.

Finally, Moore said, “Here’s a more relevant example for you: An adolescent or young adult female loves and worships her father. Then one day she overhears him speaking to one of his friends or professional associates, and the father says of his daughter, ‘Jane is a very weird girl, she’s a stay-at-home, hangs around me too much, fantasizes about boys but is never going to have a date because she’s awkward and very plain. I wish she’d get out of the house once in a while, or go find her own place to live.’ ” He looked at us. “Would that devastate a young woman who idolized her father? Would that break her heart?”

No doubt about it. It broke my heart hearing it, and I’m not even sensitive. I said, “Do you think it was something like that?”

“Perhaps.”

“But you don’t know what it was. Why wouldn’t she tell you?”

“Often, the subject can’t bear to discuss it because to tell the therapist invites judgment or evaluation, which is not what the subject usually wants. The subject knows that the betrayal might not seem so total to an objective listener. Though sometimes the betrayal is enormous by any conventional standards— such as incest. It wasn’t that, but I believe it was terrible by any standards.”

I nodded as though I were following all of this, and I suppose I was. But the question remained, and I asked it. “Can you take a guess at what it was?”

“No, and I don’t have to know what her father did to her—I had only to know that he did it, and that it was traumatic. A complete breach of trust after which nothing was ever the same between them.”

I tried to apply my own standards to this statement, but I couldn’t. In my job, you must know who, what, where, when, how, and why. Maybe Moore knew at least when, so I asked him, “When? When did this happen?”

He replied, “About ten years ago.”

“She was at West Point about ten years ago.”

“That’s correct. It happened to her in her second year at West Point.”

“I see.”

Cynthia asked, “And when did she begin to seek revenge? Not immediately.”

“No, not immediately. She went through the expected stages of shock, denial, then feelings of depression, and finally anger. It wasn’t until about six years ago that she decided she had to seek revenge rather than try to cope with it. She, in fact, became somewhat unstable, then obsessed with her theory that only revenge could make things right.”

I asked, “And who put her on that path? You or Friedrich Nietzsche?”

“I refuse to take any responsibility for her campaign against her father, Mr. Brenner. As a professional, I did my job by listening.”

Cynthia observed, “She might as well have spoken to a canary, then. Didn’t you advise her that this was destructive?”

“Yes, of course. Clinically, she was doing the wrong thing, and I told her that. But I never promoted it, as Mr. Brenner just suggested.”

I said, “If her campaign of revenge had been directed toward you, then you’d have been a little less clinically aloof.”

He stared at me and said, “Understand, please, that sometimes the subject does not want to begin the healing process in a therapeutic way, but wants to hold the grudge and settle the score in his or her own way, usually in a like manner—you betrayed me, I’ll betray you. You seduced my wife, I’ll seduce your wife. Usually, to try to exact a revenge that is similar to the original crime is not realistic or possible. Sometimes it is. Conventional psychology will say that this is not healthy, but the average layperson knows that revenge can be cathartic and therapeutic. The problem is that revenge takes its own mental toll, and the avenger becomes the persecutor.”

I said to him, “I understand what you’re saying, Colonel Moore, though I’m wondering why you persist in speaking in clinical and general terms. Is that your way of distancing yourself from this tragedy? Your way of avoiding any personal responsibility?”