In the fall of
1980, I overcame my wariness and asked Dr. Fortson, my mentor at Massachusetts
General Hospital for a therapy referral. Dr. Fortson supervised my
work, so I assumed she knew me well and could suggest a good match.
She gave me the names of two psychologists.
I had had an evaluation a couple
years before. Therapy was recommended for all clinical psychology
students, and the consulting psychologist, Dr. Reich, kept a list of therapists
willing to see clinical psychology graduate students, poor as we were, for a low
fee. He asked me a few questions and made a family tree. When
he got to me in his sketch, he blackened the circle.
"Ah!" I said, smiling,
"The one with the disorder...like the hemophiliacs in the Royal
Family!"
He laughed. "No," he
said "Just my way of keeping everyone straight."
I liked that he laughed without
interpreting my comment, and I loosened up immediately. By the time the
interview was up, I had earned a deferment. "You're really not a high
priority, so I'll put you at the bottom of the list.
I wouldn’t expect anyone to call you any time soon." I
stepped lightly down the steps of the hospital both relieved and disappointed.
But two years later I volunteered
again, determined to serve my time.
The first therapist I called, Dr.
Farber, said he was happy to see me. He offered me a regular hour at 5:30
in the morning. These were still the "macho" days of
psychotherapy--when one was expected to sacrifice for the sake of the
"cure." Still, I politely refused. The second therapist, Dr. Edberg
offered me a more reasonable hour, and I agreed to see him.
Dr. Edberg was a handsome, athletically trim man in his 40’s, with a charming
Swedish accent. He had short blonde hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and he dressed
casually in corduroy pants and sweater vests. His home office was in the
basement of a brick townhouse in Cambridge, near Harvard Square. In the winter
time he fired up a small wood stove, and his Golden Retriever laid by his side.
I told him I was there, not because I was in any specific distress, but because
a lot was happening in my life: I was 23 years old, living with one of my
professors from graduate school (soon to be my wife); she had three kids from a
previous marriage. I was at Massachusetts General Hospital, proud of it,
but swimming with the sharks--was this where I wanted to be? What I didn't, and
couldn't tell him at the time, was that I quietly longed for someone to hear me
and appreciate me—for I had always felt rather invisible in my life, except
during those years when teachers (to whom I am eternally grateful) had taken a
special interest in me. It might
have made little sense to Dr. Edberg even if I had been able to tell him.
Invisible kids don’t usually end up on the staff of Harvard Medical
School at age 23—but such was the story.
I never asked Dr. Edberg to
articulate his philosophy of therapy. But
his job, as I soon learned, was to discover the parts of me that I did not know
about (and perhaps would not want to know), and then reveal them to me with a
twinkle in his eye. He was very clever. After everything I said, he had
something smart and perceptive to offer. He didn't seem to particularly like or
enjoy me and he contradicted much of what I said, but I figured that was o.k:
therapy wasn't about being liked it was about discovering oneself with the help
of a wise person. And if I wanted to impress him, well that was my problem (or
"transference" as they say in the Freudian vernacular)—after all,
hadn’t I wanted to impress my mother and father?
This was simply something to be "worked through."
Sometimes to make his points more poignant, he made up names for me.
Once, he called me Dr Jekyl and Mr. Hyde when I appeared in paint-spattered
jeans and a sweatshirt after doing carpentry on my house all morning: usually I
came from work in tie and jacket. But
his favorite name for me was Cotton Mather, because he said I had the bad habit
of criticizing people who had wronged or misheard me.
After that, I dared not criticize him.
One day, a couple years into the
treatment, Dr. Edberg reminded me I had had a sexual dream about him.
I was confused. I didn't remember any sexual dream I had had about him.
"You mean the one in which I was sitting in front of you on a surf
board?" I figured he could have interpreted this as a sexual
dream—although what I felt was the wish for (non-sexual) intimacy and
affection.
"No. I mean an overtly sexual
dream."
I thought for a minute. "I don't
think so--I had a dream about seeing my boss in bed with his secretary, and
somehow feeling neglected. You know, the one I had after my boss canceled our squash game and I saw him leave the hospital with the young woman.
You know it turns out they were having an affair.
The dream was right.”
"No," he said again, unimpressed by the detective work of my
unconscious. "An overtly
sexual dream about me."
"Gee, I don't think so. I would remember that."
He paged through the notebook in which he wrote down all his patients' dreams.
He went forwards and then backwards. Then the room went silent.
I thought of how to respond. "It must have been another patient,"
seemed possible. Or, in a light-hearted way, "Maybe it was a dream you had
about me." But the former seemed lame, and I dared not say the latter for
he would not have found it funny. So,
instead I reverted back to my childhood ways and said nothing.
He never mentioned the dream again, nor did I. I was afraid he would
become accusatory if I brought the matter up.
A few months later I thought it time to end therapy—I thought we had talked
about my life sufficiently, and I assumed it was healthy that I assert myself.
But Dr. Edberg thought it was a bad idea and suggested I stay because our
"work" wasn't finished—he even suggested I come twice a week.
I knew from experience that twice a week therapy was helpful for many
patients--why wouldn’t it be helpful to me? Yet, I had no desire to come a second time—even after all
the time we had spent together. Still,
how could I end therapy when Dr. Edberg was suggesting I needed to come more
often? Dr. Edberg seemed to have no
better sense of who I was and what I needed than when we started. Still,
one could attribute my dissatisfaction to "transference,” the
resurrection of familiar childhood feelings. Perhaps he knew me better
than I knew myself—wasn’t he the expert?
Wasn’t that why I had gone to him in the first place?
Soon I had another dream.
I was working my own farm in Germany,
a peaceful bucolic place, when suddenly I realized a foreign army was coming.
"Go!" I yelled to everyone on the farm, and I watched the women and
children flee through the fields and into the woods. Soldiers with rifles
arrived, and quickly I was captured. A soldier attached me to a
pitchfork in the middle of the farmyard and soldiers stood and watched as the
pitchfork rotated in circles. Somehow,
I managed to free myself when they weren’t watching.
But they saw me and chased me toward the farmhouse.
I ran desperately—a soldier was close behind—suddenly I saw a wire
fence on the edge of the yard. There, a sympathetic woman teacher stood on
the other side of the boundary. "I'm an American, " I yelled.
She helped me across. I woke up in
tears, with my heart pounding.
Dr. Edberg and I talked briefly about
the dream. It didn’t make sense
to me at the time—it felt like a Holocaust/pogrom dream, and yet I was a
German (part of my heritage is German Jew), and a foreign army was invading my
land. Was the pitchfork a cross? Why
was I being martyred? We were not able to shed much light on it.
But I understand it now.
Dreams serve a problem solving
function, and the particular problem I was working on was my relationship with
Dr. Edberg. Part of me knew I was
being tortured by him, and that I had to escape—even if intellectually I
thought there was still hope for the therapy.
And I trusted that if I escaped, my wife (the professor), like many of my
teachers in the past, would give me refuge.
The dream represented the story of my therapy (and, in some ways, my
life) in symbols that were familiar to me.
I had the dream because I was beginning to sense the true nature of my relationship with Dr Edberg. A few months after we spoke about the dream, I left Dr. Edberg’s office, without his blessing, for the last time.