After Harry left my office, I sat there tired and stunned and angry. The patients would, within seconds, become deeply offended because they would believe Elva to be mocking them. . After a crash accountancy course, he said goodbye to his students and colleagues and opened an accounting firm, which ultimately proved to be highly lucrative. Furthermore, it had been a good personal experience after a bad week, in which he had hospitalized two patients and had a run-in with the department chairman. Second, how do you really feel about me now?, Lets be certain that you dont also finish our three-way meeting wanting to kick yourself for something you didnt ask. I visited them a couple of timesuntil they got adopted. Nothing. Set a reasonable goalyou can do this as well as I. Had she considered the Sierra Club? Were these previews of coming attractions? It was apparent that both he and I had reservations. Their shoes were on the wrong feet. But I kept silent. During my meeting with my next patient, it was hard to get my mind off Saul. But Ill be honest with youit makes a lot of sense and I probably will do it. I ended the session thinking that, though she might fulfill her research commitment, there was little chance she would resume therapy. doing it. Ive been told thats true of many bald men. In a way no patient had ever done before, she showed me everything. These are tough things to talk about, really tough., He went on to say that Phyllis had paid a price for her insightsshe had become very agitated. After a few minutes he tried to continue. "Do not go gentle" -- Two smiles -- Three unopened letters -- Therapeutic monogamy -- In search of the dreamer -- Afterword [by the author]: On rereading Love's executioner at age eighty. Oh, yes, he told me he had been married and divorced and that he had gone through a lot of turmoil about the divorce. I meant the things I said to you, every one of them. He imagined saying his final goodbye to his mother, sitting across from him in her familiar bentwood rocker. The message I believed the dreamer was sending me:I try to look back but my vision fails. Penny knew that next time around she would be luckierperhaps richer. I cant talk to Harry because Ive got only two things on my mindMatthew and suicideand both topics are off limits. Her sagging head and shoulders said depression; her gigantic eye pupils and restless hands and feet said anxiety. Everything else about hermultiple suicide attempts, eating disorder, early sexual abuse by her father, episodic psychotic thinking, twenty-three years of therapyshouted borderline, the word that strikes terror in the heart of the middle-aged comfort-seeking psychiatrist. Penny, who, in her streetwise way, always had an answer for everything, again just sat silent, as though in shock. Thelma began the next session by telling me that it had been an awful week. I think of your aunt reminding you so often that you were lucky she agreed to take care of you rather than let you go into an orphanage.. I was very grateful that Phyllis demonstrated so much flexibility. It seeps into your dreams. God, I hated those calls! And, even though we wont meet again, Ill still retain that change.. No one ever exhaustively analyzes a dream; instead, most therapists approach dreams expediently by examining the dream themes that will accelerate the immediate work of therapy. I turned to look at Thelma, but she averted her glance. It is that someone is dying. Explain. And so much pain, so close to the surface, only minutes deep. I remember that Thelma and I both asked many questions, each of which he answered fully. This was her chance to ask the questions that had plagued her for eight years. So in a sense she was following your unspoken wishes by not openly expressing her uncertainties, by pretending to be stronger than she felt. Would he flee his own discovery? The fate of Pennys marriage is, unfortunately, all too common in families that have lost a child. It is a cat chasing a mouse. It was probably overkill. She thought about our discussions between sessions, had long imaginary conversations with me during the week, looked forward to our meetings, and felt angry and disappointed when business travel caused her to miss meetings. Let me think about it for a week. I decided to increase my leverage by triangulation, and I approached the same issue from another direction: And, Carlos, something else comes to my mind right now. Those were twenty-seven days of paradise, and Id give anything to have them back!. But once I married Harry, love was over. When I spoke to Dr. Farber on the phone, he did not mention his naps, of course, but he did volunteer that Betty had not been able to learn how to use therapy. I didnt tell anyone till it was too late to do anything about it, so I went ahead and had the baby. She worked sixty hours a week, had no friends, no social life, no activities in California. She resisted every effort on my part to dip beneath the surface. And YES, agreed tired of the binary male/female authors category, there should be feminist reviews of all books! Neither looked at the time; they silently colluded in pretending that there was nothing unusual about talking personally or sharing coffee or dinner. Sometimes, as in Pennys family, the surviving children suffer because so much of the parents energy is bound up with the dead child, who is both memorialized and idealized. As long as Marge thought in those terms, she would not get better because the source of help was either outside of herself or beyond comprehension. Sarah stopped here and dabbed her eyes. Given the choice of discussing the dream from the perspective of death or of sex, Marvin, with dispatch, chose the latter. Carlos had been intrigued by this construct. Memories of her father permeated these flashbacks. Why is it so necessary for you to entertain me?. (Saul felt so defenseless in the face of others demands that he had chosen to remain single these last twenty years.) Could Marvin have possibly dreamed them? In the story Loves Executioner, Thelma would not, for example, relate to me: her energy was completely consumed in her love obsession. Rather, love is a way of being, a giving to, not a falling for; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person. Use an excuse, any excuse: my time all filled, leaving the country for a few years, embarking on a full-time research career. I wish we could have sessions like that every time. No doubt they resented that arrangement while Chrissie was alive, I suggested, but what of their anger now when Penny refused to let them use their sisters room after her death? Perhaps one hundred spurts would fill a cupthats only fifty seconds. If Marie left him outside, he howled so incessantly that neighbors, even several doors away, phoned her to plead or demand that she do something. He was glad I was seeing you. He reassured Phyllis that travel was important to him, but not so important that he couldnt wait until she was ready. She had never allowed herself to believe that Chrissie would die. Swept along by hubris and by my curiosity, I had disregarded twenty years of evidence at the outset that Thelma was a poor candidate for psychotherapy, and had subjected her to a painful confrontation which, in retrospect, had little likelihood of success. Occasionally it happens during waking life, sometimes after a personal brush with death, or when a loved one has died; but more commonly death anxiety surfaces in nightmares. She was ashamed, ashamed to tell me that she didnt know the identity of the father. Thus her descent from two hundred fifty pounds set her spinning backward in time through the emotionally charged events of her life: leaving Texas for New York (210 pounds), her college graduation (190 pounds), her decision to drop the pre-med curriculum (and to give up the dream of discovering the cure for the cancer that killed her father) (180 pounds), her loneliness at her high school graduationher envy of other daughters and fathers, her inability to get a date for the senior prom (170 pounds), her junior high graduation and how much she missed her father at that graduation (155 pounds). She sighed, closed her eyes, and nodded. That hit her very hard. Onions! And what do you make of the allusions to deathundertakers, silence, blackness, the whole atmosphere of dread and foreboding?. I want! In a Proustian way, youve packed this creature full of the attributes you so desire. Only Thelma could tell me. Throughout my year of work with Marge, I had only a single real rule in my worktreat her as an equal. Other hopeful dreams followed:I am at a wedding, and a woman comes up and says she is my long- forgotten daughter. There was another vehicle with problems with the rear-vision mirror. And I had accepted everything and asked for even more. He tiptoed in and saw Phyllis kneeling by her bed, praying, chanting the same phrase over and over: The mother of God will protect me. I knew from our work three years before that this aunt, the one who had brought him up after his parents death, was a bitter, vindictive woman. It had rear windows with a kind of filter that slid up and down but it was stuck. Love's Executioner offers us the humane and extraordinary insight of renowned psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom into the lives of ten of his patients - and through them into the minds of us all Why was Saul tormented by three unopened letters from Stockholm? Marie was brittle, irritable, and despite her avowed gratitude to me, often sarcastic or provocative. As her sobbing subsided, Thelmas words grew audible. It occurred to me that I was performing a thankless task. We cant do anything about it! I tried to help her understand that, though the fact of death destroys us, the idea of death can save us. Despite such behavior, I am nonetheless proud of his putting nothing in the way of forging a true therapy encounter; I would do exactly the same today. Both Marvin and Phyllis now cared so much for the others growth and being that they could genuinely collaborate in the process of wrenching a symptom from its socket. As for Marvin? If not, bingo! Ill tell you. This possibility occurred to her a couple of years later when, while taking an out-of-town guest sightseeing, she warily entered a gay bar on Castro Street and was astounded to see fifteen Matthews sitting at the barfifteen slim, attractive, neatly mustached young men. I end this retrospective with an observation my younger self would have found surprising: namely, that the view from eighty is better than expected. Im good at it. Imagine being in therapy for eight years and not talking about the real problem! it is our own ideas of him which we recognizethese words provide a key to understanding many miscarried relationships. That was surprising since the writer seems so youthful, energetic, and often unrestrained and sophomoric. Go on, Carlos, this is importantapply that to yourself and to your life., He bit off each word slowly. I tried to describe to her how I had seen things differently, and how, in my view, Matthew had been warm to her and had gone into lengthy and painful detail about why he had broken off with her. Or this very moment? He was a British commando officer during the Second World War and specialized in teaching methods of hand-to- hand killing.. Ill be all right. Her silly commentary was equally offputting. Well, I ate the sandwiches. I am old. Saul handed me the brief handwritten note from the dead Dr. K.:Dear Professor C.. Im planning a trip to the United States, my first in twelve years. Remember when you were pushing me to go to Overeaters Anonymous? Just time enough for his letter to reach me in California., Saul stopped here. He had, she noted, mentioned none of her positive features, and Thelma convinced herself that his basic posture to her had been unfriendly.. He and Phyllis still related very well, but at times he found himself aggrieved at her newfound activities and felt ignored by her. I began to think of good reasons not to accept his letters. Marge said this as though it were an original thought, and it was apparent that she had not remembered everything Me had said. It was then that Pennys latchkey days began. It didnt fit with the rest of her presentation. Ive waited my whole life away. Then, at one museum, the aged guardian offers proof his parrot is the real one. Its just that Ive been so hurt by Matthew that Im not going to make myself vulnerable again to another therapist., Youve got good answers for everything, but what it all adds up to is Dont get close. You cant get close to Harry because you dont want to hurt him by telling him your intimate thoughts about Matthew and suicide.

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