A Kafkaesque Memoir E-Book

Dennis McCort

• Herausgeber: PalmArtPress
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 682

Beschreibung

A Kafkaesque Memoir is that rarity in the psychological literature: a patient's account of the complete arc of his own psychoanalysis from first session to last. It is the memoir of a literature professor who walks into a psychotherapist's office one day seeking a quick hypnotherapy fix for a driving phobia and ends up staying for a nine-year Jungian analysis that fundamentally transforms him. Looking back on his recently completed analysis, the professor recreates his near-decade-long conversation with his analyst, a dialogue that gradually unearths the roots of a deep sense of guilt he feels over an "abandoned child." This personal psychological drama unfolds in the context of certain cultural themes that have woven themselves deeply into the professor's nexus of values over a lifetime and profoundly shaped his worldview. These include: the strange parables of Franz Kafka, Zen Buddhism in America, French deconstruction, the roots of psychoanalysis in German culture and the nature and philosophical questioning of analysis itself. The enigmatic writings of Kafka, in particular, become a kind of fictive code used by the professor to probe his deepest conflicts. As the story of a long-term analysis that moves gradually through the stages of the professor's angry defensive posturing and religio-philosophical jousting to a deep mutual sympathy between patient and doctor, the book is rich in intellectual and emotional substance; but, in the professor's recalling of key life events, it offers as well a full-bodied social canvas of its time: there are, for instance, chapters that tell of a close encounter with the mafia in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, crashing a party in early 70's Harlem and navigating the underground counterculture of mid-70's Los Angeles. Personal struggle, the dance of analysis and the contemporary culture wars intersect in this absorbing tale of a man's late-life quest to heal a deeply divided self.

Leseprobe

Dennis McCort

A Kafkaesque Memoir

Confessions from the Analytic Couch

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek

Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen

Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind

im Internet über http://www.dnb.de abrufbar.

ISBN: 978-3-941524-99-6 (E-Book)

ISBN: 978-3-941524-94-1 (Print)

First Edition, 2017

All rights reserved

© 2017 Dennis McCort

© 2017 Dr. Charles Purpur, Foreword

© PalmArtPress

Publisher: Catharine J. Nicely

Pfalzburger Str. 69

10719 Berlin, Germany

www.palmartpress.com

Table of Contents

Foreword by Dr. Charles Purper

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE: CONFESSION

1) October 2000: The Concave Mountain

2) February 2001: Frankenstein in the Forest

3) May 2001: The Cobra under the Boardwalk

4) November 2001: She Stoops to Conquer

5) April 2002: Chased by the Keystone Kops

6) September 2002: “Was He an Animal, That Music Could Move Him So”

7) March 2003: Pinocchio

8) August 2003: Goosed in the Parking Lot

9) December 2003: A Crawling Baby, Unattended

PART TWO: EDUCATION

10) April 2004: Entering the Enclave of Avatar

11) October 2004: The Rules of the Game

12) May 2005: The Cell

13) November 2005: Manhattan Mandala

14) March 2006: The Guru Koanundrum

15) July 2006: Beach Blanket Buddha

16) October 2006: “I am Tony Soprano!”

17) January 2007: Judge Loophole, and a Little Help from My Friends

18) June 2007: Lust Encumbered

PART THREE: TRANSFORMATION

19) September 2007: Gregor (the Musical?)

20) February 2008: Doughnuts for the S.U. Ladies

21) May 2008: Eye Trouble

22) August 2008: Close Encounters at the Women’s Building

23) November 2008: The General Was a Slacker

24) January 2009: Bringing Up Mom and Dad

25) May 2009: Prisoner of Love

26) July 2009: A Breakfast Gathering

27) September 2009: A Diamond ’neath the Soul of my Shoe

CONCLUSION

Endnotes

Foreword

To be sure, there can be no literal endpoint in analysis, since self-realization is a process susceptible of endless deepening. Nevertheless, I can say in a provisional sense that Dennis McCort is one of only three analysands I have known in my practice who have gone “all the way.” That is to say, he is now in a position from which he can manage his own “case,” chart his own path, enjoy his own process of growth. This very book, the story of his nine-year analysis with me, is perhaps the first manifestation of such enjoyment, the first flowering of a strongly individuated consciousness. Indeed, I told him that the experience of writing this memoir, which took place over roughly the final year of his analysis, would become, in effect, a kind of meta-analysis, an enrichment and consolidation of our original journey together. In reproducing his analysis in these pages, he has, one might say, done it again on his own—reexamined the dreams, sharpened the insights, more fully assimilated the psychic unfolding he has realized himself to be. And told a gripping tale into the bargain! Though he always waves me off when I say this, I have by now come to regard him as more a colleague than a patient or analysand.

It is, I think, impossible to overstate the magnitude of the accomplishment this book represents. Unlike most narratives of psychoanalyses I have read, what we have here is no mere collage of subjective impressions or truncated description of a particular phase of the analytic process (say, the “dawn of insight” or the “grand finale”). It is, rather, a brave and, I believe, brilliantly successful attempt to recreate in a straight- forward, realistic style the entire span of the process from its faltering beginnings, through its long, dark years of pin-balling anxiety and tedium to its final emergence into the bright sunlight of self-mastery. Dennis McCort’s analytic story has unfolded over the first decade of the new millennium, and I would like to view it as a hopeful microcosm of a similarly benign destiny in store for our presently benighted culture. As Carl Jung never tired of telling us, facing one’s own demons with honesty, and therefore also courage, is an absolute sine qua non for the health of a society no less than an individual. May the story told in these pages help to lead the way.

There is another, self-evident, feature of this book that puts it into an elite class. I refer to the fact that the analytic tale is here told, not by the analyst, which is usually the case (e.g., Robert Lindner’s classic The Fifty-Minute hour or Vamik Voltan’s What Do You Get When You Cross a Dandelion with a Rose?) but by the patient himself. It is entirely his own story, told exclusively from his own point of view, without so much as a single correction, editorial emendation or “friendly suggestion” from yours truly. In my five or six readings of the manuscript, I am proud to say I gamely resisted any impulse to read as an editor, rather respecting my patient’s right to exercise the same absolute control over his material as the many analysts who have enjoyed such control in their own accounts. So here the shoe is on the other foot, the tables turned, and I am glad of it. This book belongs to analysand McCort alone, perceptions and misperceptions, charms and warts, such as they may be. I can only assure the reader that I have come across very few of the latter in either category. What one reads in these pages is as close to the psychospiritual drama that took place between us over a nine-year period as my memory is able to attest.

Dennis McCort’s book tells the story of what it means to traverse both phases of Jungian analytical psychotherapy, the Freudian monologue (the resolving of the core conflict within the personal unconscious) as well as the Jungian dialogue (the confronting, encountering and integrating of archetypal aspects of the collective unconscious). In his account the triumphs of the individuation process, coming mainly in the third part, read like narrations of a series of little “kenshos.” I know of no other book about “being in therapy” that does this and, generally speaking, no other book that approaches this one in its presentation of the depth of the therapeutic experience. Reading it has been nothing less than a mutative experience for me. I know it will be that for others as well.

Charles Purper, Ph.D.Syracuse, New YorkMay, 2010

Preface

I am an ordinary man who, to all outward appearances, has lived an ordinary life. I was born into a solid, God-fearing middle-class family, enjoyed the good will of relatives and friends as I grew up, attended excellent schools and universities, had a rewarding career as a professor at a major university and am now savoring the creative leisure of retirement, which has made it possible for me to write this book. As enviable as such a life may seem to some, there is little about it that would rate space in a newspaper. I did once hit a 330-foot home run as a Little Leaguer; that got about two inches in the next day’s Jersey Journal. I’ve written three books, which, however, have been read by no more than a handful of scholars and now sit on a lonely shelf in my study next to books just as lonely written by friends. Before age sixty, I had to be rushed to a hospital only once, for a seven-year-old leg broken by the bumper of a car I never saw coming, which means there are no grave threats to life and limb in my past of which I can boast. During the draft-board years of my youth, my student deferment kept me out of Vietnam, so I have no war stories to tell. While I generally enjoyed the approving nods of my colleagues and students as a professor (that is, unless I’m deluding myself), I never fulfilled my pipedream of reaching the “rock star” echelon of academe, the rarefied air breathed by, say, a Doris Kearns Goodwin or a Carl Sagan or even a Jacques Barzun.

Nevertheless, I do believe I’ve drunk well and deeply of life’s heady ale, so much so that I am presumptuous enough to think my tale worth telling others. It is a tale that has all the elements of a good story: conflict, suspense, farce, “quietly desperate” doldrums, struggle, triumph. The thing with me is, almost all the drama has played out on the inside, in the relatively private worlds of psyche and spirit; and so, in my effort to find a generic category for my story, I find myself resorting to the ungainly adjective, “psychospiritual,” a word that has yet to assume its rightful place in Websters, which would be between “psychosomatic” and “psychosurgery.” This, then, is a psychospiritual memoir. More specifically, it is a memoir tracing the arc of a nine-year psychoanalysis I undertook with Dr. Charles Purper, a certified analyst who also happened to be theologically trained, in Syracuse, New York, from 2000 to 2009.

My analysis with “Dr. P.,” as I’ve come to call him, was the culmination of a series of discouraging attempts to assuage recurring bouts of anxiety and depression that had plagued me throughout adulthood. Even in the summer of 2000 as I dialed his number for the first time, after picking his name at random from the Syracuse Yellow Pages, I certainly had no plan for long-term psychotherapy in mind, particularly of the psychodynamic sort; I’d already tried that several times, found it wanting (to put it kindly) and no longer had any emotional or intellectual stomach for it. I’d also tried Logotherapy, Primal Therapy, Zen, Avatar and a bunch of other self-styled panaceas, with similarly disappointing results. All I wanted from this Yellow-Page Svengali, “Dr. Charles Purper, hypnotherapy,” was a quick fix for my increasingly debilitating phobia centering on interstate highway driving. I needed to drive to Boston to give my daughter, who had recently graduated from college, a hand moving into a new apartment and didn’t want to have to “sneak” my way there using back roads. Nearing sixty by then, I’d more or less given up youthful idealized fantasies of personal transformation, resigned myself to taking my neurosis with me to the grave and sought from the mental health complex no more than support for “holding actions” against “guerilla symptoms”—a phobia here, an obsession there.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I began with the intention to persuade the reader that this life of mine, in which “nothing much has happened,” and the writing of a book about it, have been well worth the effort. For that I must take the reader back to the day on which the notion of such a book first suggested itself. A little over two years ago, having just retired from forty years of service to my university, I was having lunch with a friend and colleague in the German Department, Gerd Schneider, who had retired two years before me. Gerd had just written, in German, an absorbing memoir of his years of struggle with grinding poverty growing up in war-time and post-war Berlin1 and we were discussing the feasibility of my translating it into English. Suddenly, over dessert, he said to me, “Dennis, why don’t you write an autobiography?” Certain he was ribbing me for my placid American life that had never known war, I replied, “Oh sure, Gerd, why not; after all, I’ve led the kind of life biographers salivate over, haven’t I—you know, the epic backdrop of post-war New Jersey and the compelling struggle of my family to save up enough for that first TV set. Now there’s a story!” He laughed and waved me off, saying, “No, no, I don’t mean an autobiography like mine, an external history; I mean an internal history: write the history of your inner life.” At first I dismissed the idea, but over the next few months this casual suggestion of my friend just kept surfacing in my mind, more or less in the form of a series of questions I at first didn’t especially want to entertain: Why not? Isn’t it true that my inner life has been, by far, the dimension of greater interest? The private misery? The many failed, yet curious, even fascinating, efforts to deal with that misery, right up to and including my analysis with Dr. P. (which by that time was well into its seventh year)?

But finally I thought, seeking a way to banish the idea, even if I seriously considered it, no one really wanted to read an entire book about someone else’s inner life, unless that book were written by, say, an Augustine or a Rousseau or a Flaubert.2 It would be just too claustrophobically private, too, well, … “inner.” And that’s when it hit me: the analysis itself would be the ideal format for writing a predominantly inner autobiography since all the private features, the things within, that fill an analytic session—the memories, the feelings, the intuitions, inklings and moods—were, inevitably, grounded in external life events, relationships and social fields without which nothing could be told. The analysis gave me the formula, the framework, within which to narrate the interplay of dominant internal and recessive external that was my life. And since the analysis, as made up of my weekly conversations with Dr. P., provided, all by itself, the plot line of a dramatically unfolding relationship, that between doctor and patient, on which to hang this dialectical interplay, I could pick and choose which particular events from my external life to tell about: naturally they would be the ones of which I told him, the interesting ones steeped in conflict, longing and regret, and I needn’t fear being burdened with a tedious birth-to-old age chronology. On the contrary, I need only tell as much of my outer life as was necessary to cast light on my inner life, and that in no particular order, or rather in the random order of analytic free association. Viewed from this angle, the outer life would have the charm rather of a mosaic than a linear sequence, a jigsaw pieced together by the heart and mind of the teller as revealed to the listener.

That settled it. I would write my confessions, the confessions of my analytic “sins,” in the original Germanic sense of that word as the “sunderings” or “cleavages” in my soul. I would write them for the entertainment, edification and possibly even instruction of those like me who found themselves psychospiritually at sea. Alas, no sooner did I commit to the idea than I found myself facing the dilemma of every memoirist: how to account for the long trail of quoted conversation begun many years before the time of writing (not to mention the subtle play of gesture, attitude and body language animating that conversation). If critics rolled their eyes over Frank McCourt’s “total recall of dialogue overheard from the crib!”,3 what would be their reaction to me for implying I had an eidetic memory of my own psychoanalysis. Moreover, in my own case the problem was compounded by the very nature of analysis as “the talking cure”; conversation was just about all there was to it, whether Freudian monologue or Jungian dialogue.

I don’t know how the reader feels about Carl Jung’s principle of synchronicity,4 but let me relate here an incident that surely speaks in its favor. During the time I was fretting over this problem of the limits of memory with respect to my “memoir,” I picked up Somerset Maugham’s autobiographical novel, The Razor’s Edge, a book I’d been meaning to read since retiring and was now finally getting around to. As I opened the cover and began to read, I was astonished to find the solution to my problem right there on the first page. It is contained in the attitude Maugham takes at the outset of his own spiritual “memoir”:

I do not pretend that the conversations I have recorded can be regarded as verbatim reports. I never kept notes of what was said on this or the other occasion, but I have a good memory for what concerns me, and though I have put these conversations in my own words they faithfully represent, I believe, what was said. … I have done this for the same reasons as the historians have, to give liveliness and verisimilitude to scenes that would have been ineffective if they had been merely recounted. I want to be read and I think I am justified in doing what I can to make my book readable. The intelligent reader will easily see for himself where I have used this artifice, and he is at perfect liberty to reject it.5

He is also at perfect liberty, as far as I’m concerned, to regard my book as a first-person novel, one that happens to be highly autobiographical. In fact, as far as the events of my life occurring outside the treatment room are concerned, the book is, for reasons of discretion, at least as much novel as memoir. In the end, I am, like Maugham, less concerned with questions of genre or cognitive limits or even factual accuracy than with the importance of telling a good story, a story, one hopes, that might in some small way contribute to the reader’s quality of life.

There is, I hasten to add, one part of this story of my analysis that is emphatically not an amalgam of memory, reconstruction and invention, and that is its core, the dreams. The twenty-seven dreams set in italics that head up the chapters, along with a score of others interpolated within them, are recounted from a combination of clear memory and notes made, in most cases, in the morning upon waking. These notes, scribbled on slips of paper many of which also contain my spontaneous associations to and thoughts about the dream in question, are dated in most cases, though not all. Such dream-dating, which I began years before I ever thought of writing this book, has been of enormous help to me in my efforts to reconstruct the long chronological arc of the analysis. I truly believe I could never have written anything even ironically justifying the term “memoir” without it.

Nor was the dating of dream notes the only happy accident aiding me in my reconstruction of personal history. The reader will be amused to learn that, during the years of analysis and without giving it a thought, I developed the habit of tossing these slips of paper, upon returning home with them from a session, into a desk drawer and forgetting about them. Imagine my overflow of gratitude years later when, having decided to write the book, I opened the desk drawer and immediately realized the pile of note papers was already arranged for me in nearly perfect reverse chronological sequence, with the most recent dream on top. Thank God the fact struck me before I could scoop up the papers, including the undated ones, and spread them out randomly all over my desk! I’m sure Dr. P. would insist this was a great gift from the gods of synchronicity.

I described my dreams above as “the core” of the analysis, and this is no exaggeration. Though I have no wish to put words in Dr. P.’s mouth (yes, I know, an entire book of such words follows!), I’m confident he would agree with Freud’s description of dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious.” Over time and little by little, our persistent ruminations over the themes and images of these dreams revealed what the “money” issues were in my psychopathology and, in so doing, suggested new, more effective ways of looking at old problems. The dreams also charted the phases of the analysis as it unfolded and supplied clues to important shifts in psychic structures as these occurred, as, for example, when “Judge Loophole” in chapter 17 morphs into “General Slacker” in chapter 23. Although I didn’t have a dream to report to the “dream master” (as I was fond of calling him) every week, I usually showed up with at least one, often two, and on occasion even three. By my best estimate we analyzed well over four hundred dreams in the course of the nine years, of which the twenty-seven that lead off the chapters here are among the most important and interesting. At the very least, these twenty-seven can be said to provide an accurate map of my analytic journey.

No matter how many aids to memory the memoirist may call upon, memory itself remains a most subtle and slippery thing. The line between reflection and reconstruction can be impossible to locate; often there is simply no telling where one leaves off and the other begins. This vaguely unnerving state of affairs was brought home to me in astonishing fashion on a few occasions when Dr. P., having reviewed this or that part of the manuscript as I was writing it, would say to me something such as, “Yes, I remember our discussion of that; you wrote it up pretty close to the way it went,” and I would be embarrassed to admit, “You’re kidding! I was sure I was reconstructing that—I have absolutely no memory of it!” Slowly I became aware of this interplay of recollection and reconstruction as a dialectical principle guiding my writing. This, it turns out, is quite appropriate since the dialectical nature of truth is one of the book’s leading ideas.

The great German poet, Goethe, an idol of mine as a teacher and student of German literature, titled his own autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, or Poetry and Truth. He avoided any genre term connoting facticity, such as “autobiography,” “life history” or “memoir.” Yet the book is full of facts: names, relationships, dates, places, events of both personal and general history. I believe Goethe’s title, doubtless carefully chosen, reflects his insight that the truest truth of a life is its poetry, which may or may not adhere strictly to the facts. He might have titled it Poetry or Truth, had he wished to emphasize the deep identity rather than the superficial contrast of these two opposites. There must be a truth that is somehow not the opposite of falsehood. Maybe that truth is Dichtung. I offer this book as my Dichtung, hence also my Wahrheit.

To be sure, a writer needs his muse, but he also needs his models, writers he admires, to inspire him. When I wrote as a scholar, I always kept the noble pen of William James before my mind’s eye, whose supreme clarity and elegance of style were, all by themselves, sufficient reason for me to read him. Now, as a memoirist, I raise that eye to the lofty sphere of St. Augustine’s Confessions for its profundity of spirit, to Rousseau’s Confessions for its matchless courage of self-disclosure and to Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes for the seductive charm of its Irish tongue. Just a mote of magic dust for my own book from the dust jacket of each of these masterworks would more than content me.

Finally, there is one other writer who must not go un-mentioned here, even though, having never written a “Confessions,” he is, strictly speaking, not a model, and that is the Czech-German master, Franz Kafka. Yet even if Kafka had “confessed,” it would still be misleading for me to identify him as a model for myself. The German word for model, Vorbild, literally means “pre-” or “pre-existent image,” a sense emphasizing the essential otherness of the person or thing inspiring emulation, and the fact is, I’ve never felt any separation between Kafka and myself, not even in college days when I first read The Metamorphosis and felt at once transfixed by all that strangeness that—strangest of all—felt so familiar. The uncanny aptness of Kafka’s existential tropes, images and situations for charting the labyrinth of my interior life will, I hope, become manifest in the pages to follow. For me Kafka is whatever one calls a model after it has been absorbed into one’s being. It was the least I could do to share the title of this book with him.

Introduction

I never bargained for what was to come, that day in late September of 2000 when I first walked into Charles Purper’s consulting room. But the next nine years would tell the tale. He was a portly man, probably in his late forties, cordial and soft-spoken. He offered me a choice between chair and sofa. I sat down in the chair facing him and we began.

“What brings you here, Mr. McCort?”

“Well, I’m having trouble driving on the interstate, especially in the left lane.”

“What sort of trouble do you mean?”

“I sometimes get panicky feelings when I’m in the fast lane, a kind of claustrophobia, I think, a feeling of being stuck there whenever cars are next to me in the right lane. We’re all there going at high speeds and it freaks me out that I can’t get off even if I want to. The cars and especially the eighteen-wheelers to my right are blocking me. I feel totally hemmed in and begin to panic.”

“Why don’t you just stay in the right lane, so that you always have the option to pull over?”

“Well, actually that does work to some extent, but I resent not having the freedom to use the left lane if I want to—I guess I’ve got a phobia.”

Dr. Purper seemed to consider this, neither confirming nor rejecting my self-diagnosis. After a moment he told me that many simple phobias could be treated rather handily through hypnosis. I told him that was what I was there for and we agreed to try it.

On my next visit he had me take a comfortable sitting position on his sofa and proceeded to induce trance. He had me close my eyes and imagine myself going down a flight of stairs, step by step, each step taking me deeper into the hypnotic state. When I reached the bottom, he gently suggested all sorts of reasons why interstate driving need cause me no concern, the basic idea being that I was in control. He brought me back up the stairs and soon I was out the door and on the interstate doing 70 mph., feeling no pain. The placebo lasted a week or two and I wound up back in the doctor’s office wanting to know why.

“I said simple phobias can be effectively treated with hypnosis, that is, those brought on by recent trauma, say, the death of a loved one or some other acute stress, but usually not those symptomatic of some underlying pathology of long standing.”

“Why do I sense we’re heading towards the issue of psychoanalysis here?” I asked in the drollest professorial tone I could muster. “If in fact we are, I don’t want to hear about it. You’ll recall I only came here for the quick-fix hypnosis.”

“You certainly seem to have a strong opinion on the subject of analysis,” he said with a wry grin, smoothing his dark goatee with an index finger. “How did you come by it?”

“Through three bouts with three different therapists, all three into depth psychology, which netted me absolutely zero in terms of the improvement of my mental health.”

“Ouch! Sounds like you’ve been burned.”

“Well, at least you’re giving me the benefit of the doubt, which I appreciate—but that’s no reason for me to reconsider my verdict on psychoanalysis.”

“No, it certainly isn’t,” Dr. Purper granted, looking thoughtfully out the window. He pondered this as he cast a brief gaze upon the brilliant fall foliage. “But since we’re at it, why don’t you tell me a little about yourself—you know, the usual vital statistics?”

My initial inner response, totally knee-jerk, was “Oh no, here we go again,” but something about “vital statistics” made it seem as if he were teaming up with me in what would be for both of us a perfunctory exercise—the Grand Introduction—and willing to share the mild tedium of it with me. This disposed me favorably towards him. I decided he’d at least earned a one-paragraph plot summary of my personal history.

“Well, I was born at a very early age,” I intoned with narrative solemnity and then immediately apologized. “Sorry, I’ve waited years for a chance to drop that line into a serious conversation. I guess, to be honest, it’s just a way to express my frustration at having to go down this path yet again. And for what?!”

“Mr. McCort, I get that you’re down on psychotherapy, psychoanalysis in particular. Believe me, many people who’ve come to me over the years [‘Over the years’? He didn’t look nearly old enough to be saying that] have shared your disillusioned view, and it is an issue we’ll take up in due course … Or better yet, maybe we should start there, since the issue of therapy itself is obviously very much on your mind.”

“That’s fine with me,” I wasted no time replying, “and if you don’t mind, I’ll get right to it. My problem with psychoanalysis, and with the whole idea of depth psychology, is that I just don’t believe it—or better yet, believe in it—anymore. The whole business strikes me as much more faith than science, really. The unconscious, repression, the shaping influence of early childhood experience—the whole Freudian ball of wax—its day has come and gone. It owned the twentieth century, but, looking at the world these days and our own society in particular, can you honestly say we’re any better off for it? I’ve read that even Freud himself wasn’t particularly interested in the therapeutic effectiveness of his own ideas—only their scientific validation (though I fail to see how you can have one without the other).”

Dr. Purper gestured as if to offer clarification on this point, but it was already too late for interjections. I was on a roll, with the right target for my frustration trapped in a chair ten feet directly in front of me. I hammered on.

“We need a new approach for a new century, not that there haven’t been a thousand approaches already between Freud and today on a therapy smorgasbord ranging from orthodox psychoanalysis to Skinner’s rat box to SSRIs that make you feel no pain. You know, from the subjective to the objective. Even the idea of ‘a new approach’ is probably dinosaur thinking; I should probably say ‘an entirely new paradigm, a metamorphosis of perception, a fresh Weltanschauung, with a new psychology as merely one of its “fruits,” so to speak.’”

I suddenly became aware of the sermonizing tone of my own voice, disagreeable as it was, and simultaneously of the rapt seriousness of Dr. Purper’s gaze. Instinctively I shut up so as to give him room to get into it.

“I can see your disillusionment with Freud is based on more than just personal therapeutic experience,” he observed, relaxing slightly into a more comfortable position.

“Yes, it is,” I hastened to confirm. “I’ve probably read some fifty or sixty books by and about Freud, Jung and the other members of the early circle—Rank, Reik, Ernest Jones, etc. I’ve thought about the issues and explored them with my students in many of my German lit. courses up on the hill. In fact, the unconscious—its meaning, its status, its cultural sources and such—is probably the dominant theme of my scholarship over my entire career.”

I was now presenting my credentials to speak with authority on the subject. I wanted to establish myself as, at the very least, a worthy partner in a relationship of equals (assuming, that is, there was to be any relationship). In my fantasy, I could even envision myself as a primus inter pares. I was determined to have no more of the bottom-dog patient (euphemized as “client”) status in which my previous therapists had straitjacketed me, knowingly or not. Of course, I didn’t quite recognize it then, but all of this maneuvering on my part was an effort to take out my anger on Dr. Purper over the failures of my previous therapists. I wanted to rub his nose in those failures, and in general, in the failure of the profession he represented. I also wanted him to know that I was fully aware of this abject failure, and possibly even more aware than he of the reasons for it. That might even elevate me to “top dog” (to complete the Fritz Perls metaphor) in our nascent relationship. Needless to say, I was also totally oblivious to the contradiction that my very presence here, as a patient sorely in need of help, deafeningly announced.

Suddenly I felt the need to pee, but immediately suppressed it, calculating that I could hold it till the end of the hour. I would not give him the satisfaction of knowing the stress the interview was putting me under.

I went on. “Or maybe I should say ‘the dominant theme over the first half of my career,’ until about the mid-eighties, when I made two profound personal discoveries which, together, turned everything topsy-turvy.”

“Oh? And what were they?” asked the good doctor, with what seemed like genuine interest.

“One was postmodernism and the other was Zen, and I honestly can’t remember which happened first,” I answered as I sent my mind back to those heady days, to summon up a picture that would in some measure recreate for him what I believed to be my experience of losing the blinders. My recall was briefly interrupted by the sound of the front door of the house slamming shut on its heavy spring. Dr. Purper shared the building with a chiropractor who occupied the downstairs premises. I envied what I imagined to be the patient who had just come in for his bi-monthly spinal adjustment. Five or ten minutes under the strong yet gentle hands of Dr. Farinelli and he’d leave feeling great, every time. “Whichever it was, one fired up the other in a great synergy. The basic insight of both, which hit me like a thunderbolt, was that the ego, the individual self, the person—whatever you want to call it—was unreal. It just didn’t exist! This meant that I didn’t exist the way I thought I did—that I wasn’t who, better yet what, I thought I was.”

Dr. P. nodded thoughtfully, which meant either that he was carefully weighing what I had just told him or that he was confirming to himself I was a madman. So I felt somewhat reassured when he finally said, “I take it you understand that you’re using the term ‘ego’ in the Buddhist sense of self-image, and not in the Freudian sense of a mediating function between inner and outer worlds?”

“Yes, I certainly do—that’s the only way I ever use the word. For me it means the internal image someone has of himself as a discrete, conscious entity, but an entity, it turns out, that is nowhere to be found. It’s an image with which each of us identifies that has no model in reality the image is of. (Excuse the awkward preposition, but it makes my point). The Freudian ‘Ich’ or ego, on the other hand, is of no use to me in my thinking. As far as I’m concerned, its only function is to separate the sane from the insane, and issues of sanity are not my cup of tea.

“But to get back to my story, to my discovery of this great hoax of ego (in the Buddhist sense): it’s not as if I wasn’t acquainted with such ideas and their variations from my study of literature, philosophy, religion and such, for practically my entire mature intellectual life. But, you see, there it was always merely ideas, theories—interesting, even exciting stuff, to a student of the humanities, but basically all just maps of the territory, and, as such, of very limited value. Now I began to feel that I was, however gropingly, tentatively, beginning to set foot on the territory itself. Looking back, I can remember the awe I felt on discovering that it was of the nature of these two disciplines, Zen and postmodernism, to deliver a blow to consciousness that could jolt a person, in spite of himself, from map to territory, theory to experience.”

I saw nothing in the doctor’s demeanor to indicate that he wanted to interject anything, so I soldiered on.

“Postmodernism, or poststructuralism, or deconstruction—or any number of other equally uninformative labels—took a long time to get to me. It had been making trouble on campuses at least as far back as the early seventies, especially in university English departments where some version of it was being used as a way of reading literature, to the consternation of older traditionalist professors who, I think, feared its revolutionary implications. But, snuggled away in the docile, unimaginative foreign language department as I was, it was at that time all pretty much like a war being fought on the other side of the planet to me. That is, until I began sniffing around Zen, circa 1983—for totally unrelated personal reasons. As I began to learn about the Buddhist doctrine of anatta or no-self, the few little nuggets of postmodernist wisdom I had picked up by osmosis—such as the death of the author, or the fact that ‘there is nothing outside the text’—began to light up in me like Christmas tree ornaments.

“Anyway, to bring it all back to psychoanalysis and my loss of faith in it, this new view of the unreality of the ego, of its essential emptiness, that postmodernism and Zen had shown me—not just in theory but—and I can’t stress this enough—in practice, that is, through the meditative consciousness—left me convinced that dynamic psychotherapy amounted to no more than tinkering with a chimera, with the delusion of individual selfhood. And what could possibly be the point of that? Even if you manage to ‘improve’ the content of a delusion, it’s still a delusion, isn’t it? Far better to attack the real problem: the belief in an ego in the first place, the belief in ourselves as separate beings, a belief that, as Buddhism teaches, is the source of all human suffering.”

“Beliefs in general, I take it, belong to the ‘map’ half of the map/territory dichotomy you made a moment ago. But tell me, how long did it take you to reach this insight in your Zen practice?” Dr. Purper asked.

“It’s hard to say, there was no one dramatic moment, though the process certainly wasn’t lacking in drama to me, tremendous psychospiritual drama, with many gratifying little epiphanies along the way. Once, the day after a weekend Zen retreat, with two or three years of sitting 6 under my belt, just walking to class across the Syracuse campus, I suddenly felt—and saw—lightning flash just above the central quad, even though I knew it couldn’t have anything to do with the weather. I knew the flash had somehow come from me, and it charged my whole being with an indescribable exaltation. At the same time, I sensed this instantaneous identity with everything around me, the chapel, the grass, the nearby physics building, as if the whole world were my body, and that anything that happened in the world were the willed movement of my own body. I don’t mean my ordinary will, of course—this was an entirely different force, somehow both gentle and omnipotent, and it was totally new to me. I was in awe.

“But anyway, I had many other experiences of this kind, the vast majority far less ‘Pauline,’ over the course of the nine-plus years I practiced Zen.”

“Oh I see, you’re no longer practicing.”

“No, I’m not. It’s been several years, maybe seven or eight, since I’ve sat zazen. There are several reasons why I stopped. Suffice it to say for now, toward the end of those years of sitting, I began to get headaches. They increased in frequency and intensity until I was forced to conclude it had to do with zazen. I’d eliminated all other likely causes. So I stopped.

“Well, you know,” Dr. P. ventured, with an air of casualness that put me on my guard, “there are monks who spend their whole adult lives meditating and just hang in there and work their way through these dry and sometimes painful periods. You know, the ‘inner dessert’ phase the meditation manuals speak of, St. Ignatius, St. John of the Cross, and so on. It’s all part of the rocky ascent up the spiritual mountain.”

This stung and angered me. The man thinks I’m a spiritual wuss! “Listen,” I shot back, “nine years and change on the zafu is not exactly a warm-and-fuzzy weekend retreat. I poured myself into Zen with everything I had. Call me a dharma drop-out if you like, but don’t think I dropped out easily. Those headaches went on for years.”

Again I heard the downstairs door slam shut. Lucky man—he was in and out, back mended, while I sat here squirming in uncertainty.

“Mr. McCort, I don’t mean to imply you weren’t a dedicated Zen student. I was just pointing out that ‘the Way’, as Zen people call it, is fraught with difficulty for anyone who takes it seriously. It’s to be expected. But then, I guess with nine years of sitting, that’s not something you need to hear from me … I did actually do some sitting myself, some years ago.”

“I thought as much, from your comments,” I nodded.

“Yes, I sat with Philip Kapleau at the Rochester Zen Center, so I don’t speak of Zen entirely as an outsider.”

“That’s good to hear,” I said, “because I don’t see how I could possibly get anywhere with a therapist whose empirical outlook caused him to be dismissive of spiritual concerns, or worse, to regard them as mere ‘defenses.’”

“Have no fear on that score,” the doctor assured me. “Although I no longer practice Zen as such, I do still meditate, and my therapeutic orientation, as you’ll come to see if we stay together, leaves plenty of room for the spiritual; in fact, I would even say my practice is grounded in the spiritual. Which doesn’t mean, by the way, that I don’t believe it’s possible for someone to use religion as a psychological defense. Obviously, anything is grist for the mill of neurosis.

“But anyway, before time runs out, I would like to get back to that autobiographical synopsis you promised me earlier in the hour.”

“Ah that … Of course. Well, I was born into a lower middle-class Catholic family in Hoboken, New Jersey, on September 26, 1941, which makes me fifty-nine. My father, Edward, worked as a rate clerk in the traffic departments of various trucking companies in Jersey, most notably Roadway Express, located in the town of Kearney. I think he spent about fifteen years there. You’ve probably seen their humongous orange and blue sixteen-wheelers on the interstate,” I surmised.

“Traffic departments?” Dr. P. asked quizzically.

“Yes,” I explained. “All trucking companies have so-called ‘traffic departments’ whose function it is to calculate the cost of shipping whatever-it-is from point A to point B. This can become very complicated, with shipping regulations varying from state to state, and even in different areas within a state. So a rate clerk is a highly trained office worker. All of which is to say that my Dad was a pretty smart guy. He was very good in math and loved to read.”

“I guess you could say,” Dr. P. added, “that he was the one in control—commercial control at least—of all those humongous sixteen-wheelers crowding the interstates.”

For the second time in the session I was taken aback, this time profoundly. Dr. P. didn’t even need to refer to the phobic complaint of highway trucks I presented at the top of the first hour. Just the word “crowding” in his ostensibly casual remark was enough to get me to make the connection on my own. I was as impressed with his skill in this as I was with the insight itself. He did it in a way that left me no ground for knee-jerk protestations, or as he might put it, denial. I was deftly maneuvered into considering the viability of a symbolic connection between my Dad and those massive highway trucks.

I knew he could see I was impressed by this insight, that I was made thoughtful by it. Part of me resented his ability to see this deeply into me so quickly, if indeed that is what he was doing, for I had my doubts, but another part was flushed with honest admiration for what was, at the very least, acute observation. Not wishing to betray this to him, however, I pushed on with my story. “My mother was a housewife who never got beyond the eighth grade. She was a shy, anxious woman and generally took a passive, even defensive attitude towards life; she was dutiful and kept a good house. Her religious faith was her indispensable bulwark against ‘the slings and arrows’ [Damn it, I thought, there I go again, validating his assertion of religion as a possible defense mechanism. Of course, I’d often considered Mom from that angle, but I didn’t want him doing it, and before I’d even ‘introduced’ her. Then I suddenly realized he hadn’t said a word.] She was loved by all who knew her and generally thought of as a woman of simple yet deep faith who was moved by that faith to help anyone in need. She was self-effacing, at times to the point of saintliness.

“Then there’s my sister, Iris, four years younger. Iris and I were pretty close growing up, though I must admit I teased her way too much. I wouldn’t call her an ‘afterthought child’—certainly my parents loved her—but I always felt, you know, that I was the apple of my Mom’s eye. I think Iris sensed that—how could she not?—and it’s left her as an adult with this refractory anger she’s never been quite able to shake. Still, as far as I can see, she functions well and has a nice life, while I struggle with my phobias and sometimes barely manage to function at all. So I don’t see how being treated as ‘Number 1’ by Mom did me much good.”

“Being the doted-on firstborn can have its own liabilities,” the doctor opined. “Whether that’s the case here remains to be seen, of course.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said absently, suddenly feeling an urge towards brevity and concision. I wanted to fast-forward through the rest of the bio and wrap it up, so I could get out of there and enjoy the same freedom that Dr. Farinelli’s patient was almost certainly taking for granted. “We lived in Hoboken, which in those days was a grimy industrial city, the port across from Manhattan where the immigrants arrived. I grew up amidst factories that made everything from Tootsie Rolls to slide rules. The city had great low-end Italian restaurants and bread bakeries; it also produced Frank Sinatra—in fact, my mother, who as a girl lived three houses down from the Sinatras, baby-sat little Francesco a few times. (I’m not sure that story’s not just my mother’s little urban legend.) There were also a lot of sandlots in Hoboken for baseball, and I guess I got to know just about every guy in the city who played the game to any extent. Good Catholics that we were, I went to Catholic schools from first grade through college, spending eight years with the nuns and then another eight with the Jesuits. For graduate school, I went to Johns Hopkins to study German—I had an aptitude for foreign languages—finally breaking out of that claustrophobic religious ghetto, though I didn’t see it that way at the time. My years at Hopkins included a year ‘of study’”—as I said these words, I made digital quotation marks—“in Germany, 1964-65, at the University of Tübingen in the southwest. Two important things came out of my year abroad, neither having anything to do with academic life: I saw a lot of Europe and I finally lost my virginity. At twenty-three, can you believe? My only consolation was that I had a Jewish friend over there, an American exchange student like me, who lost it even later than I did.

“The rest is a rather banal history: I went to Syracuse in 1968, at 28, joined the German-department faculty, most of whose members personally repelled me right from the get-go. So, of course, I stayed there and endured for the next thirty plus years.”

“But why … ?” Dr. P. made to interject, but I saved him the bother. “Oh, I suppose you, as a Buddhist-friendly psychologist, might say, once you got to know me better, that it involved some deep masochistic need to suffer, to burn off karma for sins known and unknown. (An old friend of mine once put it to me the American way: ‘Denny, you just don’t know how to live.’) But there’s an equally important reason that’s far less exotic, though my friend might consider it rationalizing: I got married and had two kids, and that at a time when the academic job market was well into a career-long nose dive, and that, I guess, pretty much sealed my fate.”

Dr. Purper looked at me steadily and without expression, apparently using the moment to take it all in. Perhaps because I’d given him more than he felt inclined to summarize, he selected one facet of my story for comment: “Eight years with the Jesuits, eh? I can empathize. I did eight myself, four at the University of Scranton.”

Suddenly all my impatience to make an exit drained out of me, replaced by a feeling of warmth as the doctor shared something that was not merely personal, but parallel to my own development. I felt as if I’d just downed a double shot of Jack. It was not just the particular fact that he too had been molded by the Jebbies, but the clear implication that he had, just like me, been dragged up through the entire Catholic indoctrination program: the profound alienation from the body, the sexual guilt, the threat of eternal punishment, the Russian roulette game of dying outside the state of grace, and so on. He knew about youthful Catholic misery, not from that vantage point of vague puzzlement that non-Catholics always seemed to take, as if they were bemused by the bizarre behavior of another species, but through identity—he’d been there in the same trenches.

I felt grateful, for the moment at least, for having found a therapist who, on first meeting, already knew a fair amount about me from the inside, who had this invaluable knowledge-through-identity. All my previous therapists had been “alien-species observers” in this respect. My gratitude moved me to add a detail about my life with the Jesuits. “The Jebbies do generally live up to their reputation as good educators, good teachers, I guess; still, of all the priests and scholastics who taught me at St. Peter’s Prep, or College for that matter, only one stands out in memory as a man of intellectual depth who truly cared about the welfare of his students. Father Raymond York, S.J., taught us Greek with brilliance, and élan, and humor. He knew how to bring the ancient culture to life for young boys. Of course, he was helped in this just a little by Homer’s mythic imagination: what kid could resist a giant cyclops with one eye smack in the middle of his head, or a hero who shoots an arrow through the holes in twenty-four ax heads (is it twenty-four?)? York and Homer, the dynamic duo! He made us sing the dactylic lines of The Odyssey to the tune of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’: you know, ‘ANdra moi ENnepeh, MOUsa, …’ and so on. It fit perfectly and made it easier for us to memorize large chunks of the epic.

“Anyway, one day not long before graduation, Fr. York calls me up to his desk during class—the other kids were doing a writing assignment—and asks me what I had in mind for a career. I told him I was thinking of teaching. He put the ever-present balled-up hanky to his mouth for a moment of reflection and said to me, ‘Teach in black.’ Yep, that’s right, ‘Teach in black,’ he said, intoning the words as if they were some sort of sacred Jesuit mantra. If you’re going to teach, you ought to teach as a priest since both are really more vocations than careers. One is called to do either, and all such calls come from the same source, and so on. Anyway, that’s how I read what he said. I pretended to consider it, but inwardly I was already shrinking away, since the one thing I knew for sure regarding my future was that it would not exclude sex. (Please, I was a naïve seventeen-year-old!) Putting the same certainty negatively, I knew I could never wade across the river of sexual guilt I was already in over ‘self-abuse’ to the redemptive shore of the priesthood. I didn’t have that kind of heroic renunciatory strength. I suppose the irony is that I have, in a sense, taught in black—just not the way York intended it.

“For whatever it’s worth to you as a psychoanalyst, I might mention that, every few years, Fr. York would have what people in those days called a ‘nervous breakdown.’ He’d just start babbling incoherently, and they’d come and take him away and you wouldn’t see him for a few weeks. Then one morning he’d pop up in class again and pick up where he left off. He had no self-consciousness about his own instability; in fact, he even joked about it, about how the doctors would discuss ‘his case’ and spout their medical jargon in front of him, totally unaware that, as a Greek scholar, he grasped just about everything they were saying. Electro-en-cephalo-gram, and so forth. As for us kids, we loved him all the more for his deep imperfections; somehow they only added to his mystique. I think we understood intuitively that a man of his depth could not be conventional in the way our other teachers were.”

As I made this last remark, it occurred to me Dr. Purper might read it as a patient’s “apologia pro” mental illness, an attempt to romanticize and mythicize emotional suffering as, in some cases at least, heroic, a kind of perverse gift, rather then just miserable. Another defense mechanism, with a bit of self-aggrandizement thrown in. Whether he did or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that I was resentfully projecting all sorts of therapist-stereotypic ideas onto him in our early days together and that I hadn’t the slightest notion of how astonishingly broad and encompassing—indeed accommodating—his worldview was. If I could really have listened to him that first day with any keenness, I would have recognized as much in his generous response to the Fr. York story: “Jung had a lot to say about what you might call ‘divine madness,’ that is, genuine inspiration that so moves a person that he behaves in ways that could only be described by others as ‘crazy’. St. Francis of Assisi dancing naked in the town square or Meister Eckhart punctuating his sermons with patches of schizophrenese or ‘word salad.’ I’m not saying your Fr. York was one of these, but who knows? …”

I sensed it was time to finish, but suddenly a question for the good doctor arose in me and took hold of me with such urgency that it rendered me momentarily mute. I couldn’t even consider saving it for next week. Inhaling deeply, I asked, “So Dr. Purper, I realize I’m putting my head in the lion’s mouth by asking you this, but how come my great liberating insight into the non-existence of the ego, the individual self, hasn’t liberated me? This is supposedly the fruit, so to speak, of my long Zen practice. If I’ve truly seen through the delusion of my own existence as a separate individual, a discrete consciousness—and I’m convinced I have—why am I still the same old fearful, depressed bastard I’ve always been? How profound could these so-called spiritual discoveries have been if they’ve left me with the same emotional sack of rocks?”

Some deep intuition told me he would not take the low road here and give me some “I told you so” type of answer exalting the superiority of psychoanalysis to Buddhism, or religion in general, and therefore, ultimately, the superiority of the scientific-materialistic to the idealistic (in the German sense) worldview. My peripheral attention, the small pre-conscious part of me unencumbered by anxiety, must have sensed him as a man who, however he might answer this one important question I’d put to him in the hour, would say something consoling, whether because he was a man with heart or because, basically seeing the world as I did, he could tell me something enlightening about my own worldview I didn’t know. His answer, while not exactly enlightening, did not disappoint me either, and gave some cause for hope: “Maybe we can find out together, and find out more as well about those sixteen-wheelers. Next time you come, bring a nice dream with you.”

A nice dream, no less. I felt, not unpleasantly, like a bagel delivery boy. Bring a nice dream already, with lox and cream cheese. As I got up to leave, my thoughts turned reflexively to the question of a common restroom in the building, that is, until I realized that, oddly enough, I didn’t have to go anymore.

PART ONE: CONFESSION

(1) October 2000: The Concave Mountain

It’s nighttime. I’m standing at the edge of a high ridge, somewhere just outside the city limits of Montreal. I can look over the entire city from this spot, see all its bridges and towers and twinkling lights. Somehow I’m also able to see my wife, Dottie, facing me from a corresponding spot all the way over on the other side of town, as if the ridge encompassed the city in a more or less circular shape and she were at the opposite end of the diameter. Don’t ask how I can see her from so far away; it must be one of those tricks dreams use to telescope distance. Anyway, the problem is that she and I are literally separated by the city, which is ironic since Montreal is where we spent our honeymoon. How do I get to her, or she to me? Or can we meet in the middle? It’s obviously more than a problem of logistics. Then, as I look more closely, I see that the topography of the city resembles a gigantic chessboard, only without the squares, but with the board bent like an ordinary chessboard into two halves, the crease bisecting the city between us in concave fashion. So, to get to her, I’d have to descend my half of the “city board” and climb up her half, till I finally came to her. It seems daunting.

Finishing my recital with a mystified shake of the head, I let myself feel the cool air being blown my way by a nearby floor fan set up just beneath the window. It was an unusually warm early Fall day. I looked out the window at the treetops bordering the building’s parking lot. They were totally motionless; it was easy to imagine them listening intently to my dream tale.

“So, what are your thoughts about the dream?”

“What are my thoughts? Aren’t you supposed to be the dream master here? I’d much rather hear what you