For the same reason that it’s okay to find somebody else if, as Nancy McWilliams writes, “the therapist is too much like the person’s original devalued or overstimulating object“—meaning they make you feel homicidal, suicidal, or hornier than you can handle—it’s okay to pull the plug in advance and get the heck out of Dodge before you begin.
Maybe not so much if you’re prepared to fall like a rock into an erotic transference, the stuff of which X-rated films were made back when they had a plot.
I was not.
Hell, I fell for an almost-octogenarian who, once he had me hooked, proceeded to engender a response that reduced Anastasia Steele’s twitchy, asinine “inner goddess” going gaga over Christian Grey to Disney’s original hand-painted, G-rated Tinkerbell minus the never-implied fairy-dusted ovaries.
Although it did take him three months to get to me, so he probably had to consult with somebody on even more ways to seduce me, especially after he foolishly suggested I read Freud.
I know one person I’d very much love to meet but to work with? Let’s put it this way:
I came out of my second cancer surgery minus one bladder plus one bag plus one libido that rages hotter than when I was nineteen with my high school boyfriend with whom I was not in love, but he knew how to make love. Henri’s so centered now I can barely keep my mind clear when I read his irritatingly platonic emails.
My cancer was also both estrogen-negative and chemo-resistant. That means I get to keep HRT and my longish hair. Everything works better than it did for decades, too, so “sexualizing” just about everything with an XY chromosome set is pretty much out of my control.
Is that bad? Wrong? Am I guilty of un-resolving a mostly-resolved transference with Dr. Almost-Eighty? Maybe.
Or maybe I’m what Sondheim envisioned when he wrote the character of Madame Armfeldt in “A Little Night Music,” the also-octogenarian courtesan who fondly reflects on her “liaisons … what’s happened to them?”
Maybe I was meant to be a courtesan of sorts in my waning years. If only I were amenable to hookups.
But back to choosing the best man for your therapeutic dyad. Or not.
I still haven’t pried out of him exactly how he found me. I also haven’t worked that hard. (Pun intended? Not this time.) But as much as I’m dying to know how in-a-chair psychoanalytic psychotherapy works, as opposed to on-the-couch Freudian analysis and all the other chair therapies like CBT, there is no way I could stand to sit in a room with the sweetheart who hired me to write what’s fast turning into my analyst’s legacy.
I doubt I’d remain an adult passing him in the hallway at a conference. For sure, I’d have to skip any panels, and heaven help me if he gave a presentation. Maybe sitting in the back row under an Audrey Hepburn wide-brimmed hat with oversized shades and slightly doped on the Valium with which I spiked my Starbucks.
That just might work since Benzo’s put me to sleep before the humiliating disinhibition can kick in. But back to Greg.
His profile pic is bad enough. Young, blue eyes, heaven help me if he’s tall. Worse if his inseam exceeds pelvis to crown, rendering that perfect ratio of which my analyst’s legs fell a little short and for which I lust even on the likes of even more out-of-the-question Adam Lambert minus the KISS-esque platform boots.
Even if I refused to look him in the eye—Greg, I mean, not Adam, though I’d like to meet him in person, too—and only focused on his shoes, if he—Greg—wore anything better than ratty gym socks stuffed into black and white Florida Walmart flip flops, I’d still be screwed unless he spent every fifty-minute hour mute and never, ever called me on the phone.
Every male analyst I’ve ever met has a bedroom voice, and all the ones with that near-psychic ABPP credential—which Greg already has in spirit, if not in progress—are damned fine specimens of male humanity.
Worse than his face is his brain. Just like my analyst fell into Freudian lust with mine the moment I said on the phone, “I want to make sure my head and my heart are connected,” I fall in love with brains harder and faster than any beach-worthy hard body, and this kid’s cerebral physique is stacked.
For one thing, there’s his pedigree. Nobody makes professor at a Chicago institute before they’re forty, kind of like not studying Talmud before your fourth decade, and he’s been there, I don’t know how long. Then there’s the nature of his practice. You try searching for “psychoanalytic psychotherapist,” and you’ll find Chicago before New York. These people simply don’t exist like they need to. Yet.
Looks to me like Greg’s going great guns plowing that fertile field, what with the satellite group in Houston that I’m not convinced existed when he hired me.
I’m so impressed with him that in the Kathryn Levison Family Romance, I assigned him the role of my analyst’s grandson and Freud’s great-great. Once I manage to remember that, it takes the edge off. Some.
What would be interesting is to see “who he reminds me of” in classic Freudian transference form. I fear it might be my brother, which would mean I inherited my poor, unfortunate father’s incestual bent. Maybe Cousin Chuck, not too much my elder, and boy, was he hot, hot, hot in his ROTC uniform. When Chuck and Debbie showed up at my father’s post-suicide memorial, though, the ROTC fantasy scattered faster than my dad’s ashes over the Gulf of Mexico.
Or maybe, just maybe, I was meant to be the classiest courtesan sub-tropical Florida has ever seen.
I could take the lucrative path that came to me on Dr. Almost-Eighty’s couch one day. See, this bag my surgeon set up … Not only can you snap on various-volume receptacles, but they all come with a handy little spigot, like the water faucet in your shower. And there’s this odd and quirky specialty related to warm shower water, primarily gold, for which I could charge a mint and never contract COVID-19 or an STD and would never, ever have to kiss even one frog.
I wouldn’t even have to look at the guy. Just make him wear a mask, perhaps something out of Eyes Wide Shut or the secret society with which James Bond finally came face to face in Spectre.
Which gives me an idea …
“Here you go, Dr. Rizzolo. I pinched this nicely phallic, long-nosed Plague Doctor mask from the Lyric Opera prop room. Now be a good little tabula rasa Freudian and never say another word. Three times a week for the next five years.
And before I forget … what size socks and sandals do you wear? Those Cole Haan tassel loafers have got to go.”
