Venus became Mars

I remember an extremely lovely client. She was movie star pretty, with the givingest smile and voice. Her manner, with winsome movements demure and not come-hither but open to the imagination, was so gracious and approachable, her eyes so warm and lively, that – chemistry galvanized – I practically had to restrain myself from lunging forth and giving her a big hug, if not (going a bit too far) a loverly kiss. Fortunately, the human organism has a pro-perverse nature: handicaps can spawn compensatory powers. Countering my weakness was a redoubled dedication to the client’s deepest need, her best goal. This was to kill her personality.

Her warmth was a feature of conciliation, soothing away and smoothing down all potential feelings – craggy, bright, angry, sad, real ones – to words of sweet nothing. Before I grasped the breadth of this, I wrote in a progress note: “She translates my English into English.” I knew this was paraphrasing as defense, catching my inquiring or confronting dart in her mind and kneading it into verbal dough.

How did she come by this personality? It’s an uncanny feeling to picture her as a young child responding like a caring and diplomatic counselor to her mother’s drinking, screaming profanity, to the ominous atmosphere of mother’s cheating and father’s knowing. Both parents were programs of self-centeredness, never listening, never teaching her anything at any developmental stage. As if this were some earlier century, they assumed her lot in life was to support them in their old age, maybe before that. They were angry when, in high school, she dropped a sport that might have led to a scholarship and free college. They were furious when she decided not to do law school but to become a social worker.

I remember facing my client, not yet 30, with sober intensity and a deep wish that she allow herself to feel the truth, what was buried and sleeping beneath her surface. My own words were not enough, though I had plenty of them. I produced some motley pieces of literature I remembered: Janov’s “the secret craziness of neurotics”: “a smooth façade may hide agitated colitis inside.” “We might say, in general, that when a value system (the parental brainwash) does not even allow for a SECRET craziness to erupt, then the ‘craziness’ will remain deep inside, and psychosomatic disease may ensue.” I read from Branden’s The Disowned Self, in which a “jet-set playboy” restaurateur stops in florid mid-sentence to describe the emptiness inside him. I went to the fringe with Dr. Douglas Brodie’s “cancer personality.” Brodie lists symptoms of the “cancer-susceptible personality” such as “having a deep-seated need to make others happy,” “harboring long-suppressed toxic emotions, such as anger, resentment and/or hostility,” “showing an inability to resolve deep-seated emotional problems and conflicts, usually arising in childhood.” This was supplemented with Janov’s chapter, “Malignant Despair: Repression and the Immune System.”*

And then, as the smile faded so slightly, the eyes became less bright, I suggested Empty Chair. After a nervous spate of peripheral stuff addressed to “she” rather than to “you,” my client talked to her mother. From where I sat, I couldn’t hear much of what she said in her low emotional voice. But I could see this was different. I heard a real voice. I saw tears. There was a tone of complaint or grievance, somehow wide and covering all of her life. She seemed shaken yet more substantial. The process had been left to only the very end of the session. Sometimes I don’t know if therapy is reckless or perfect poetry. Imagine waking up to reality after twenty-seven years, and only six minutes in which to do it. Imagine considering being an entirely different person. She left the office after scribbling her copay information.

It’s been awhile and I don’t remember the precise concepts in her treatment plan. But I’m hoping that “long-term goals” included something like: “Be real, bright, dark and bloody. Arrive at the bitch face. Scare your parents.”

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* Arthur Janov, The New Primal Scream, p. 239. (Copyright pages ripped out – date forgotten, but published twenty years after The Primal Scream.)