Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom
Perhaps my discourse with the dreamer was counterproductive. Perhaps I was willing to permit Marvin a slower pace because of my encounter with the dreamer. I remember beginning every hour not with excitement about seeing Marvin, but with anticipation about my next communiqué from the dreamer.
Sometimes the dreams, like the first ones, were frightening expressions of ontological anxiety; sometimes they foreshadowed things to come in therapy; sometimes they were like subtitles to therapy, providing a vivid translation of Marvin’s cautious statements to me.
After the first few sessions, I began to receive hopeful messages:The teacher in a boarding school was looking around for children who were interested in painting on a large blank canvas. Later I was telling a small, pudgy boy—obviously myself—about it, and he got so excited he began to cry.
No mistaking that message:“Marvin senses he’s being offered an opportunity by someone—undoubtedly you, his therapist—to start all over again. How exciting—to be given another chance, to paint his life all over again on a blank canvas.”
Other hopeful dreams followed:I am at a wedding, and a woman comes up and says she is my long-forgotten daughter. I’m surprised because I didn’t know I had a daughter. She’s middle-aged and dressed in rich brown colors. We had only a couple of hours to talk. I asked her about the conditions of her life, but she couldn’t talk about that. I was sorry when she left, but we agreed to correspond.
The message:“Marvin, for the first time, discovers his daughter—the feminine, softer, sensitive side of himself. He’s fascinated. The possibilities are limitless. He considers establishing ongoing communication. Perhaps he can colonize the newfound islets of himself.”
Another dream:I look out the window and hear a commotion in the shrubbery. It is a cat chasing a mouse. I feel sorry for the mouse and go outside to it. What I find are two baby kittens who have not yet opened their eyes. I run to tell Phyllis about it because she’s so fond of kittens.
The message:“Marvin understands, he really understands, that his eyes have been closed, and that he is finally preparing to open them. He is excited for Phyllis, who is also about to open her eyes. But be careful, he suspects you of playing a cat-and-mouse game.”
Soon I received more warnings:Phyllis and I are having dinner in a ramshackle restaurant. The service is very poor. The waiter is never there when you want him. Phyllis tells him he is dirty and poorly dressed. I am surprised that the food is so good.
The message:“He is building up a case against you. Phyllis wants you out of their lives. You are highly threatening to both of them. Be careful. Do not get caught in a crossfire. No matter how good your food, you are no match for a woman.”
And then a dream providing specific grievances:I’m watching a heart transplant. The surgeon is lying down. Someone is accusing him of being involved only in the transplantation process and being uninterested in all the messy circumstances of how he got the heart from the donor. The surgeon admits that was true. There was an operating room nurse who said she didn’t have this privilege—she had to witness the whole mess.
The message:“The heart transplant is, of course, psychotherapy. [Hats off to you, my dear dreamer friend! “Heart transplant”—what an inspired visual symbol for psychotherapy!] Marvin feels you’re cold and uninvolved and that you’ve taken little personal interest in his life—in how he got to be the person he is today.”
The dreamer was advising me how to proceed. Never have I had a supervisor like this. I was so fascinated by the dreamer that I began to lose sight of his motivation. Was he acting as Marvin’s agent to help me to help Marvin? Was he hoping that if Marvin changed, then he, the dreamer, would gain his release through integration with Marvin? Or was he chiefly acting to alleviate his own isolation by taking pains to preserve the relationship he had with me?
But regardless of his motivation, his advice was sagacious. He was right: I was not truly engaged with Marvin! We stayed on such a formal level that our use of first names seemed ungainly. Marvin took himself very seriously: he was practically my only patient with whom I could never joke or banter. I tried often to focus on our relationship, but aside from some barbs in the first couple of sessions (of the “you fellows think sex is at the root of everything” genre), he made no reference to me whatsoever. He treated me with such respect and deference and generally responded to my inquiries about his feelings toward me with statements to the effect that I must know what I’m doing since he continued to remain free of migraines.
By the time six months had gone by, I cared somewhat more about Marvin, yet still had no deep fondness for him. This was very strange since I adored the dreamer: I adored his courage and his scorching honesty. From time to time, I had to prod myself to remember that the dreamer was Marvin, that the dreamer provided an open channel to Marvin’s central nucleus—that whorl of the self which possesses absolute wisdom and self-knowledge.
The dreamer was correct that I had not plunged into the messy details of the origin of the heart to be transplanted: I had been far too inattentive to the experiences and patterns of Marvin’s early life. Consequently, I devoted the following two sessions to a detailed examination of his childhood. One of the most interesting things I learned was that, when Marvin was seven or eight, a cataclysmic secret event shattered his family and resulted in his mother banishing his father permanently from her bedroom. Though the nature of the event was never revealed to Marvin, he now believes, on the basis of a few stray comments by his mother, that his father had either been unfaithful or a compulsive gambler.
After his father’s exile, it fell upon Marvin, the youngest son, to become his mother’s constant companion: it was his job to escort her to all her social functions. For years he endured his friends’ jibes about dating his mother.
Needless to say, Marvin’s new family assignment did not increase his popularity with his father, who became a thin presence in the family, then a mere shadow, and soon evaporated forever. Two years later, his older brother received a postcard from their father saying he was alive and well and was sure the family was better off without him.
Obviously, the foundation was in place for major oedipal problems in Marvin’s relations with women. His relationship with his mother had been exclusive, overly intimate, prolonged in its closeness and had disastrous consequences for his relationship with men; indeed, he imagined he had, in some substantial way, contributed to his father’s disappearance. It was not surprising, then, to learn that Marvin had been wary of competition with men and inordinately shy of women. His first real date, with Phyllis, was his last first date: Phyllis and he kept steady company until their marriage. She was six years younger, equally shy and equally inexperienced with the opposite sex.
These anamnestic sessions were, to my mind, reasonably productive. I grew acquainted with the characters who peopled Marvin’s mind, and identified (and shared with him) certain important repetitive life patterns: for example, the way he had re-created part of his parents’ pattern in his own marriage—his wife, like his father’s wife, wielded control by cutting off sexual favors.
As this material unfolded, it was possible to understand Marvin’s current problems from each of three very different perspectives: the existential (with a focus on the ontological anxiety that had been evoked by passing a major life milestone); the Freudian (with an emphasis on oedipal anxiety which resulted in the sexual act being welded to primitive catastrophic anxiety); and the communicational (with an emphasis on how the marital dynamic equilibrium had been unsettled by recent life events; more about this was to emerge shortly).
Marvin, as always, worked hard to produce the necessary information, but, though his dreams had requested it, he soon lost interest in past origins of current life patterns. He commented once that these dusty events belonged to another age, almost another century. He also wistfully noted that we were discussing a drama in which every character, save himself, was dead.
The dreamer soon gave me a series of
There was another vehicle with problems with the rear-vision mirror. It had rear windows with a kind of filter that slid up and down but it was stuck.
I was giving a lecture with great success. Then I started having trouble with the slide projector. First, I couldn’t get a slide out of the projector to put in another. It was a slide of a man’s head. Then I couldn’t focus the slide. Then people’s heads kept getting in the way of the screen. I moved all over the auditorium to get an unobstructed view, but I could never see the whole slide.
The message I believed the dreamer was sending me:“I try to look back but my vision fails. There are no rear windows. There is no rear-vision mirror. A slide with a head in it obstructs the view. The past, the true story, the chronicle of real events, is unrecoverable. The head in the slide—my head, my vision, my memory—gets in the way. I see the past only filtered through the eyes of the present—not as I knew and experienced it at the time, but as I experience it now. Historical recall is a futile exercise in getting the heads out of the way.
“Not only is the past lost forever, but the future, too, is sealed. The patent-leather car, the box, my coffin, has no front windows either.”
Gradually, with relatively little prompting from me, Marvin began to wade into deeper waters. Perhaps he overheard scraps of my discourse with the dreamer. His first association to the car, the curious black box on wheels, was to say, “It is not a coffin.” Noticing my raised eyebrows, he smiled and said, “Was it one of you fellows who said you give yourself away by protesting too much?”
“The car has no front windows, Marvin. Think about that. What comes to you?”
“I don’t know. Without front windows you don’t know where you’re heading.”
“How would that apply to you, by what you’re facing ahead of you in your life now?”
“Retirement. I’m a little slow, but I’m beginning to get it. But I don’t worry about retirement. Why don’t I feel anything?”
“The feeling is there. It seeps into your dreams. Maybe it’s too painful to feel. Maybe the pain gets short-circuited and put onto other things. Look how often you’ve said, ‘Why should I get so upset about my sexual performance? It doesn’t make sense.’ One of our main jobs is to sort things out and restore the feelings to where they belong.”
Soon he reported a series of dreams with explicit material about aging and death. For example, he dreamed of walks in a large, unfinished, underground concrete building.
One dream, in particular, affected him:I saw Susan Jennings. She was working in a bookstore. She looked depressed, and I went up to her to offer my sympathy. I told her I knew others, six others, who felt the same way. She looked up at me, and her face was a hideous mucous-filled skull. I woke up extremely frightened.
Marvin worked well with this dream.
“Susan Jennings? Susan Jennings? I knew her forty-five years ago in college. I don’t think I’ve thought of her once till now.”
“Think about her now. What comes to mind?”
“I can see her face—round, pudgy, large glasses.”
“Remind you of anyone?”
“No, but I know what you’d say—that she looks like me: the round face and oversized spectacles.”
“What about the ‘six others’?”
“Oh, there’s something there, all right. Yesterday I was talking to Phyllis about all our friends who have died and also about a newspaper article about people who die immediately after retirement. I told her that I had read an alumni bulletin and noted that six persons in my college class have died. That must be the ‘six others who felt the same way’ in the dream. Fascinating!”
“There’s a lot of fear of death there, Marvin—in this dream and in all the other nightmares. Everyone’s afraid of death. I’ve never known anyone who wasn’t. But most people work on it over and over throughout the years. With you it seems to have exploded all at once. I feel strongly that it’s the thought of retirement that’s ignited it.”
Marvin mentioned that the strongest dream of all was that first dream, six months ago, of the two gaunt men, the white cane, and the baby. Those images kept drifting back into his mind—especially the image of the gaunt Victorian undertaker or temperance worker. Perhaps, he said, that was a symbol for him: he had been temperate, too temperate. He’d known for a couple of years that he had deadened himself all his life.
Marvin was beginning to astonish me. He was venturing into such depths that I could scarcely believe I was talking to the same person. When I asked him what had happened a couple of years ago, he described an episode he had never shared before, not even with Phyllis. As he was flipping through a copy of Psychology Today in a dentist’s office, he was intrigued by an article suggesting that one attempt to construct a final, meaningful conversation with each of the important vanished people in one’s life.
One day when he was alone, he tried it. He imagined telling his father how much he had missed him and how much he would have liked to have known him. His father didn’t answer. He imagined saying his final goodbye to his mother, sitting across from him in her familiar bentwood rocker. He said the words, but no feelings came with them. He gritted his teeth and tried to force feelings out. But nothing came. He concentrated on the meaning of never—that he would never, never see her again. He remembered banging his fist on his desk, forcing himself to remember the chill of his mother’s forehead when he kissed her as she lay in her casket. But nothing came. He shouted aloud, “I will never see you again!” Still, nothing. That was when he learned that he had deadened himself.
He cried in my office that day. He cried for all that he had missed, for all the years of deadness in his life. How sad it was, he said, that he had waited until now to try to come alive. For the first time I felt very close to Marvin. I clasped his shoulder as he sobbed.
At the end of this session, I was exhausted and very moved. I thought we had finally broken through the impenetrable barrier: that finally Marvin and the dreamer had fused and spoken with one voice.
Marvin felt better after our session and was highly optimistic until, a few days later, a curious event occurred. He and Phyllis were just commencing sexual intercourse when he suddenly said, “Maybe the doctor is right, maybe all my sexual anxiety is really anxiety about death!” No sooner had he finished this sentence, than—whoooosh!—he had a sudden, pleasureless premature ejaculation. Phyllis was understandably irritated by his selection of topics for sexual small talk. Marvin immediately began to berate himself for his insensitivity to her and for his sexual failure and toppled into a profound depression. Soon I received an urgent, alarmed message from the dreamer:I had been bringing new furniture into the house, but then I couldn’t close the front door. Someone had placed a device there to keep the door open. Then I saw ten or twelve people with luggage outside the door. They were evil, awful people, especially one toothless old crone whose face reminded me of Susan Jennings. She also reminded me of Madame Defarge in the movie A Tale of Two Cities—the one who knitted at the guillotine as heads were lopped off.
The message:“Marvin is very frightened. He has become aware of too much, too fast. He knows now that death is waiting for him. He has opened the door of awareness; but now he fears that too much has come out, that the door is jammed, that he will never be able to close it again.”
Frightening dreams with similar messages followed rapidly:It was night, I was perched high on the balcony of a building. I heard a small child crying below in the darkness, calling for help. I told him I would come because I was the only one who could help, but as I started down into the darkness, the stairwell grew more and more narrow and the flimsy banister came off in my hands. I was afraid to go farther.
And yet another dream:I am taking an examination. I hand in my blue book and remember that I haven’t answered the last question. I panic. I try to get the book back, but it is past the deadline. I make an appointment to meet my son after the deadline.
The message:“I realize now that I have not done what I might have done with my life. The course and the exam is over. I would have liked to have done it differently. That last question on the exam, what was it? Maybe if I had taken a different turn, to have done something else, to have become something else—not a high school teacher, not a rich accountant. But it is too late, too late to change any of my answers. The time has run out. If only I had a son, I might through him spew myself into the future past the death line.”
Later, the same night:I am climbing a mountain trail. I see some people trying to rebuild a house at night. I know that it can’t be done, and I try to tell them but they can’t hear me. Then I hear someone calling my name from behind. It is my mother trying to overtake me. She said she has a message for me. It is that someone is dying. I know that it is me who is dying. I wake up in a sweat.