Broken Fathers Broken Sons: A Psychoanalyst Remembers (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies)

Broken Fathers/Broken Sons Broken Fathers/Broken Sons A Psychoanalyst Remembers Gerald J. Gargiulo Amsterdam - New ...

Author: Gerald J. Gargiulo

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Broken Fathers/Broken Sons

Broken Fathers/Broken Sons A Psychoanalyst Remembers

Gerald J. Gargiulo

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies—Volume 7 © Cover photo of the author: Renate Pfleiderer The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2344-4 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents Preface Remembering Humpty

VII 3

Carmelite Passage

23

Finding a Voice

40

Mother Earth

55

Talking Memories

64

Running

76

Interlude (Of Elephants and Kings)

79

Bridges

81

Holding Dreams

93

Dancing with God

100

The Dreaming Knight

106

Grieving Lilacs

114

Finding My Father

126

Memory and Time

131

End Thoughts

136

Epilogue

139

Appendix (Poems For Late Night Reading)

141

Preface

Memory, as we know, is not our most reliable friend. Memoirs are made of memories, so there is something inevitably selective in any recall, since memory is a child of desire. All anyone can do, I believe, is to bring as much honesty to one’s recounting as one is capable of. This memoir is a story of loss and gain, of alienation and reconciliation and of how such experiences go into the making of a psychoanalyst and the type of therapy one consequently offers. I have avoided, whenever possible, using any psychological and/or psychoanalytic jargon - it’s the enemy of candor. I have tried to convey a small aspect of the human condition, something of the pain and joy we experience in merely living. In sharing my own very troubled father/son/family history, my decade as a Carmelite monk, my marriage and career as a psychotherapist /psychoanalyst, I hope to show how the diverse pieces of one’s life can ﬁt together, if all goes well, into something that is meaningful and real. This is one person’s life - but not exclusively so. We are bound together, each of us, in our living, our troubles and our joys. As we hear another’s story, we are, simultaneously, writing our own autobiography. How else can we come to know who we are? I want to thank Ms. Sarah O’Brien for her dedication, patience, and expertise in formatting this book. I am grateful to Mr. Edmund Stoecklein for his technical computer guidance. I owe a particular debt of appreciation to my colleague, Dr. Jon Mills of Toronto, for his commitment to publishing this memoir. The novelist/essayist Erika Duncan has been a constant source of encouragement and invaluable advice. Finally, my deepest appreciation goes to my wife Julia whose guidance, editorial assistance, and loving critiques are the foundations upon which this short work is built.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; And all the king’s horses, And all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

—Old English Rhyme

Remembering Humpty

Before teaching letters and numbers, teach each child to love sunlight; then they will love the world.

I

was a rather quiet, thin little boy, dark haired, brown eyed and both enchanted and mildly bewildered by the world I was coming to experience. Freud speaks about childhood amnesia and I suppose he is right – certainly as to the facts. I cannot remember my grammar school teachers, except Mrs. Busch, a woman in her mid-forties, short, gray haired and kind. She was my middle school science teacher at P.S. 68 in the northeast Bronx of the nineteen forties. Before that I have managed to salvage bits and pieces of my life, the rest is probably resting quietly in some neuron patch awaiting electrical stimulation or death. What I have not lost is my sense that this world is an enchanted place. I am still, sometimes, a little bewildered. Somewhere, between ages seven or eight, I remember hearing the rhyme of Humpty Dumpty - whether in class or the school auditorium I have no recollection. I was puzzled, I recall, by the sequence of events in Humpty’s life. It was not until many years later, however,

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when my black hair was thinner and my brown eyes a little sadder, that I decided to try to answer some questions that this childhood rhyme evoked. Like a large puzzle on a playroom ﬂoor, I am piecing together, searching to remember what must have happened, for me to have the feelings that I have. P.S. 87, my grammar school, was a brick two story building, clean, cold tiled, and located at the crest of the street on which I lived. Was it the heavy set Mrs. Wolpol, our school principal, who had us recite Humpty’s tale? Sitting on that high wall and then falling. I sensed I was being told of a punishment that could easily befall me. I handled my anxiety by ﬂeeing to the obvious: no high walls for me. This was not too difﬁcult since on Grace Avenue, where I lived, there were a number of modest houses and a few empty ﬁelds. There were no walls, no horses and the closest thing to a king I knew seemed to be Mr. Roosevelt, who had been President from before my birth. Luckily, there were some modest trees that I climbed, usually when alone, probably to be alone. By climbing them, I dimly recall, I was proving to myself that I did have physical agility; this need came from my having relinquished to my older brother, Eddie, the arena of physical sports. Perhaps the lesson I was supposed to learn from the Humpty rhyme was not to eat too much. After all, Humpty Dumpty was clearly a pre-aerobic ﬁgure. Although my family was Italian, where eating was somehow supposed to capture most of the purpose of life and work, we were nowhere being dumpy. It did not occur to me that the rhyme was to teach me anything about food. I remember internally reciting the dramatic lines either out of some self-comforting habit or perhaps I was just trying to ﬁgure the whole plot out. Don’t get so high that you could actually fall? What could it possibly mean that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty back together again? 4

Remembering Humpty

The rhyme was intent on conveying an image of enormous strength to an unyielding task. Something terrible had happened and, although the solution seemed particularly incongruent with the problem, the message was clear – Humpty Dumpty was gone. If we teach children such rhymes is it because we believe that there is some lesson of truth to be mined? Not content with experiencing the rhyme as a lesson in the inevitability of fate or the everpresence of punishment, I stored it in the back of my mind knowing that I would return, someday, to this fallen ﬁgure. After all, our childhood companions are our closest friends. What could befall me that all the forces available would be unable to mend? Was such a fate something that I should watch out for – or worse, had it already happened? When I was pondering such questions most boys wore short pants to school – we called them knickers. I particularly recall somewhere around eleven or so wearing a suit with long pants. Those wonderful pants lined half way down on the inside with silk. I remember enjoying that silk lining as much as the length of the pants, the length clearly an emblem of my coming entry into adulthood. Only years later, as a student of psychoanalysis, would I learn that comforting silk was also a reminder of a lost closeness in infancy, as well as a distant cousin, so to speak, to my childhood teddy bear. As I write Teddy had just come back to me. I dimly remember speaking with him, was I three or four(?), while sitting on the stairs to the apartment in Mrs. Kroll’s two-story brick house. That was before my father built our home, down the street, so I must have been less than ﬁve years of age. Could Humpty be a stand-in, I wonder, for Teddy, my lost, soft, childhood friend? If so, then one of the things Humpty, in his brokenness, might stand for is, before-ness – before we come together into a whole coher5

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

ent sense of who we are. My Teddy, as I know today, and maybe as I knew even then, was really me as together, as whole, as cared for and loved. My Teddy was me when I would go off to sleep wondering if, when I woke up the next day, I would be the same or maybe I would be someone else. Freud thought that one of those phantasy daydreams, which we have along the way, would be that we wake up to be our own fathers. True enough. Throughout my childhood years I recall wondering much more than that, however. There seemed no end of who I could wake up to be. Age was not a factor, nor sex. Is this the beginning of our ﬁnding a self--our playground with Teddy? Teddy was dearly loved yet absentmindedly left behind. To be more correct, I would have to say that he must have been left in that dark hallway on the stairs, since I was somehow carrying him around inside me. All those selves he and I had been – even for just a little while! If I think about it, carrying around all those make-believe selves would make anyone rather large – no wonder I remember the rhyme of Humpty Dumpty. I’m also sure that a good deal of added weight to my Humpty friend and to myself came from all the supposed-to-be’s. Be nice to your brother, listen to your father even when he’s yelling at you and you don’t know why. Be a good student, make us proud of you. That means learn, don’t get bored and don’t ask questions that just pop into your head; that’s disruptive and you’ll be called stupid. It would take Freud, again, in his simple elegance, to categorize all this weight as our superego, the cultural world of reward and punishment that tells us who our ‘I” is really supposed to be. Like a mirror in our souls with preﬁxed images and every time we look we are reminded of how we fall short of what we are supposed to look like. Those images, imprinted, shape our reality. I remember, all to well, my utter boredom in most of my gram6

Remembering Humpty

mar school classes and the questions I would want to ask, although I cannot remember, now, if I ever asked them. It was the most basic things that I found puzzling; like how did letters get their shapes? Why? Why did we have to sit in screwed down chairs and always look straight ahead? And, how did clocks tell time? They didn’t seem to tell me anything. Somewhere around the third or forth grade I became content with my classmates thinking I was stupid, because I was uninterested in following most of what we were doing in class. So I would daydream a world where this was not so. I would daydream a world where I was up in front of a classroom teaching. How strange that this make-believe world would come to pass when, years later, I would become a college professor. I marvel, still, how our inner life, our inner images of ourselves, shape the worlds we come to. When school was out, about 3 P.M., I remember walking down the hill to my house, sometimes with my heavyset blond haired friend, Bob Johnson. Sometimes Bob would ask me why I was unable to follow what was going on in class. Then I would just close up. I thought that I knew everything that was going one; I just could not speak in a way that would let me show this. When I felt humiliated, I would close my lips tight and want to be someone else. I loved the sunlight and sometimes when I walked home alone I would see special shapes on the leafed sidewalk and I would tell myself stories about the shapes. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that light was enchanting and I would have gladly given my mind to understanding or even dancing to it, if only it had a place in our studies. Instead I remember being told how Central Americans lived peacefully and grew bananas for us; that those people were dark skinned because they worked in the sun and they were always happy because the pictures in our books showed them to be. I also remember the implication that their smiling came from their knowing their roles and place in life. I was also taught that 7

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in America everyone was free to become anything they wanted, even president. Was I, perhaps, in my daydreaming and not learning, just angry with my father? Angry, as well, at my wandering classroom mind? Probably. While carrying around all those selves, all those supposed to be’s, as well as all the needed-love-from-teddies long gone, I was struggling to ﬁnd a place, inside, that was clearly my own and not borrowed. Most of the other students, as far, as I could tell, thought that Humpty was just a silly rhyme and didn’t seem bothered by his tragic fate. I continued to question, maybe as a distracting daydream, why all the king’s horses? I grasped all the king’s men but why all his horses too? I could remember picturing how horses might pull something apart – twenty on one side – twenty on the other. How do horses put someone back together again? I was struggling with a deep confusion, a break-up within me: I felt this beautiful light-ﬁlled world and yet there was a darkness within me that I could not get away from. I did not understand by age ten the seriousness of my injuries; the cost I was paying for my daydreaming. I was increasingly alienated from my peers, self-conscious and humiliated by my not learning. I can still remember being called from class one day because I had been unable to read the alphabet, during a routine eye examination. I was sent to a little ofﬁce with a soft-spoken female teacher and given some tests. I had spent years puzzled as to how one put letters down on paper in sequence to convey meaning. I would, I recall, write in my own phonetic manner to the utter confusion of my teachers. Unable to tell time with any sense of conviction, I even had trouble tying my shoelaces. Apparently someone inside me had called a general strike and I did not know how to call it off. About a mile or so away from my home was PS. 68, atop a 8

Remembering Humpty

steep hill. I went there for the last two years of grammar school, walking to and fro, and sometimes half running home for lunch before going back. I don’t remember much from that time, except rooted in my memory is Mrs. Bush, my science teacher. Mrs. Bush was short and somewhat stocky, sharp eyed and gentle in her manner. She was not like any teacher I had, Mrs. Bush frequently encouraged me and praised me when I got something right, even while she would bemoan my not being able to spell anything except in my own phonetic language. As I stood by her desk one morning, at the end of class, Mrs. Bush said she had read my essay the night before and found it interesting and, so, had read it to her mother who, she said, enjoyed it a great deal. Her mother, of course, could not read any of my phonetic writing. Mrs. Bush told this to me gently, assuring me that anyone who could think such thoughts could learn to write. I felt humiliated but also conﬁrmed, I was not stupid. I just didn’t how to spell. I wanted to learn to read, I was tired of being so ashamed of myself. I was, however, not alone. George, my seventh grade classmate, taught me that. George, palefaced and withdrawn, would not speak to anyone when we were in the play yard. I felt inside that I knew George and I would go stand by him; I wanted to help him. I told him that I was afraid also, that it was okay to be afraid. He would look at me, I knew he heard me, and then he would walk away. George was more locked inside himself than I was, his stiff, white face and blue eyes looking unknowingly at everything. Maybe what I was living was not so bad. I was at least able to talk. No matter what I did, George would not talk to me. He knew I wanted to reach him, I know that. And I wondered what his pain was like,– like something dark inside which made the world small,– as if we were living in a tiny circle of a place. Having lost any moorings for my aggression, I was not only unable to learn, but I was likewise terriﬁed of the dark. After we had 9

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

moved into our new house down the street, a small but handsomely constructed brick colonial style house, we were burglarized, over the next few years, three times. Ours was a rural, safe neighborhood in the northeast Bronx of the forties, the break-ins were odd occurrences at best. I remember, around age eight, coming home with my parents to ﬁnd our neatly ordered house in disarray. I recall my mother’s dismay and anger that the few pieces of her mother’s jewelry were gone. I became excessively anxious and fearful of nighttime. I understand now, what I was unable to know then, that my burglar terrors were also a stand in for all the break-ins into my own personal space which were occurring daily. Sixty years ago child therapists were not common and school counselors were not as available as they are today. I spent, consequently, considerable time between my family physician and the Principal’s ofﬁce since the tests I had taken indicated someone who should be performing on a much higher level. I was continually yelled at for not learning, as if this was my personal choice. My fears at home increased no matter how frequently my father would force me to stay in the house, alone, anxiously hovering over the kitchen table. His was a therapy of confrontation. I would sit frozen at the table, hoping they would return soon, wondering why he was doing this to me. Whether it was my school ofﬁcials or our personal physician who prevailed upon my parents for me to see a child psychiatrist, I will never know. One day I found myself walking up brownstone steps, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, my parents by my side. Quietly angry and, I suspect, intimidated, my father and mother spoke to the psychiatrist about this second son who was causing such distress and social embarrassments. I cannot remember my psychiatrist’s face, but I know it was kind and interested in me. I do remember his white hair, his dark book ﬁlled quiet ofﬁce, as well as his desk – I sat to his right. I recall his 10

Remembering Humpty

buying me a magic set and that we talked and talked and played some games together – on equal ground between us. I sensed that here was a place where I didn’t have to answer other people’s questions before I had ﬁgured out what was going on in me. A place where I could talk about how I loved the shadowed light on the sidewalks and the trees and wondered what light was. With each passing Sunday morning session, I had respite from the demands and dark moods of my father. A place also, at last, where I didn’t feel stupid and defective, a place where I had a friend. And ever so slowly my capacity to learn, which had eluded me so far and caused me such shame, showed itself on the horizon and magically, it seemed, my fears of the dark began to recede. But just as I was beginning to learn and feel better about myself, my father, a successful business man with a very comfortable life style, announced, one Sunday morning, that the twenty-dollar weekly fee was a lot of money. Since, he said, I seemed to be better he thought that I could stop my sessions. I recall sitting with my parents, in a room I felt was mine, and listening to my psychiatrist, his words forever lost in my memory, trying to convince my parents that I should continue treatment. I can still feel, when I allow myself, my outrage at their negative decision. Although I felt good that something was changing inside me and I was happy to have my father’s recognition of this, I felt that a lifeline was being cut and I had no strength to object. In all I had seen my white haired gentle doctor for about eight or nine months: I cannot remember our last session, it is locked away in a timeless place. Twenty-ﬁve years later I would establish my own psychoanalytic ofﬁce on the Upper East Side of New York. Was I, perhaps, looking for my old friend as I walked its streets, studied it brownstones and saw its libraries behind bay windows? My father became loud and more thunderous, it seemed, as I grew older. He so intimidated my mother, with his yelling when11

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ever meals or schedules did not go exactly as he had planned, that her anxiety and fear engulfed both Eddie and myself. His needs were the rules of the house. We ate dinner, irrespective of our hunger, anytime between six and nine-thirty in the evening whenever he returned from work. Frequently he would come home and be silent until he was fed; we knew at such times to say nothing. I knew that food was something my father valued very much. After what he considered a good meal, his moods would change and he could be interested in talking with us. Sitting at the table each night, I would cautiously watch his response to what my mother had prepared. Carefully and deliberately folding The Daily News to his left, he would read quietly and expect us not to disturb him. I would watch his movements and listen as he spoke, never knowing whether he would praise the meal or start yelling that it was not cooked right or that my mother should have known that he had a similar meal yesterday, when he lunched at some diner. I felt his yelling in my tightening stomach. Occasionally he would, after complaining about the meal, bolt out the door to have his dinner at a restaurant. Whenever this might happen my mother would anxiously fret about in the kitchen, mumbling that she didn’t know what was wrong. Eddie and I ate our food, very delicious to our taste and to many others as well. We would try to say the right thing to comfort her. Sometimes we would say nothing and I would think that I was living in a crazy house that I would never get out of. It was his anger at the most haphazard of thing, totally unpredictable to my childhood reasoning, which continued to off balance me. Unable to understand childhood vulnerability, my father expected that my brother and I were to do whatever he told us, without discussion. I was, however, different from my brother. There was, it seemed, little I could do right. I recall my father’s angry response, one Sunday morning, and his conﬁning me to my room because I was unable to 12

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correctly identify, during a casual conversation, a nearby road as either White Plains road or White Plains Avenue. His exasperated and stupid rage, at my not knowing, still stings my memory. Overwhelmed at the seemingly unending tasks he set, the orderly way he had to live life, I was able to be good only in ﬁts and starts. Increasingly I substituted observation and self-enclosure for any possibility of a relationship. Although there was no ﬁnancial or other needs that I could grasp at the time, my older brother and I were required to work long hours from age eleven on throughout our adolescence. We worked, in my father’s small design construction shop afternoons on school days and frequently on Saturdays. We built and painted various display units that he would use in his profession of window decorating. Frequently we worked alone, sometimes to eight or nine o’clock. Although we lived in a comfortable home and had vacations, we lost our adolescence to band saws, paint spray guns and late deadlines before we could have supper or do homework. Once I graduated from grammar school and went to high school, my parents did not seem particularly interested in my academic performance. It did not occur to them that students had homework or that one’s future life was signiﬁcantly dependent on one’s academic record. Sometimes, if we had a particularly large amount of work to ﬁnish, my mother would bring supper to us at the shop. My brother and I accepted our tasks although he, particularly agile in sports, was frequently hurt and angry when he was not able to go to baseball practice on Saturday mornings. Sitting around the dinner table, particularly on weekends, my father would often tell us of his difﬁcult childhood. He would recount how he had to walk his turn of the century New York City Italian neighborhood, early in the mornings, looking in garbage cans for left over pieces of coal. Similar to our situation, his family ran a successful business and lived in a very large comfortable apartment. Rarely, but with some vulnerability, he 13

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would tell us of the primitive and severe disciplining he received at his parents’ hands. He often spoke of how he had graduated from grammar school just six months shy of the New York State law requiring students to attend high school and of how the school principal pleaded with his father to let him continue his studies. He would end his recounting, telling of his father’s inability to respond to his desires for more education. As I listened to all these memories, I felt his hurt. I was, nevertheless, all the more bafﬂed since I could not understand why he was so blindly repeating, if not in severity at least in manner, what had been done to him. But more of Humpty and his great fall. I was around twelve or thirteen when my mother, although physically present, was not to be found. I remember her lying on the bed, mid-afternoon, in the extra bedroom and telling my father to call the doctor for some help. Give her something to drink, was the answer. My mother was small framed, thin and nervously active. She had deep brown eyes, beautiful eyes to my young view. In my early childhood need to ﬁnd her, I thought that hers was the eye on dollar bills. But that was long before emotional shadows came to taunt her. I do not know my name was one; and, paradoxically, Where is there forgetting? another. Overtaken, I now know, by a depression, which had its roots in her own childhood, as well as being helplessly disappointed at her distant, angry and self-preoccupied husband, she slept, ﬂooded with forgetfulness. I suspect she was experiencing a bi-polar period at a time when there was little if any anti-depression medications. My brother and I were told that mother was having an early change of life. Soon, however, we experienced that this was a severe depression. A depression she would mask by drinking. It would not take much alcohol for her to be gone. As the months turned into years, my father, frustrated with his absent wife and unable to understand her illness, or any role he had in it, would violently attack her if 14

Remembering Humpty

he thought that she had been drinking. His yelling and her crying and screams for help, when he would ﬁnd a forlorn bottle used to disguise her angry sadness, still echo within me. It was our family physician, Dr. Schulman, who sanctioned such physical interventions. So our father told us. It fell to me, as well as my brother, to care for a mother who could not care for herself. More than once would I have to help her to her room, her bruised face, whether from an inadvertent fall or from my father’s hands, a testimony to her desperately searching to ﬁnd a way out. During such times I would clean the house and make a simple meal, hoping that some rest would make her better. Maybe if I made everything clean, maybe if I ironed and cooked, then all would be okay again. She would, when able, thank me. Sometimes I was told to take her, on the subway, to see Dr Schulman; his ofﬁce was at 168th street in upper Manhattan. This usually happened when she might be particularly unfocused and/or had some wine. Her system seemed unable to handle any alcohol at all. I would support her as she walked, hoping that none of our neighbors or friends would see us. I felt ashamed as well as protective, lost and also deeply angry. About three and a half years or so into her depression my mother was treated psychiatrically with eighteen electro-shock treatments. To no avail; the only effect was a signiﬁcant impairment to her everyday memory. I know, now, that electrical interventions were just an alternate to my father’s rage. Violence, whatever its dress, was no way to help someone who had lost her name. Sometimes Eddie would have to take her for her treatments but he wouldn’t speak of it when they returned home. In desperation, I suspect, my father spoke with gentle father Egan, from our church, St. Francis of Rome. Why he had 15

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waited so long to do so still puzzles me. Soon thereafter a woman drove to our home in a white Volkswagen beetle and we were told that mom was going to a hospital for a few weeks. We were all, I know, exhausted with little hope left. Would she remember her name as our mother, I wondered? I felt old, sometimes I felt older than my family. But I didn’t know how that was possible. Maybe my eyes were just tired. For two weeks I cleaned everything, ironed and even worked in the yard; I wanted everything to be perfect when she returned. She returned two weeks or so later with new friends from Alcoholics Anonymous and somehow, to my view, she seemed better, her bright eyes clearly focused as I remembered them from years before. A terrible dark rain was ending and the sun, ever so timidly, came out again. Within a few months my mother was able to resume her normal active life, and although she would eventually drink socially, it no longer affected her adversely. As Humpty fell, a few years seemed like forever, particularly with all those horses milling about. You can imagine the sight of it all, although the rhyme doesn’t give us any of the unsettling details. A leg here, another arm there, a foot strewn over some rocks at the bottom of the wall. Finally Humpty’s head, loosely held together, with such confusion and pain in his eyes that one would want to release him and save him from the sight of his dismembered body draping the inhospitable ground. Such was the state of my psyche coming out of a childhood of dark fears, of little learning and beginning adolescence shadowed by a mother’s collapse. If my child psychiatrist proved too expensive, in ways more than money, my parents did get me individual help in reading from a gentle and well meaning woman, a former teacher. I have forgotten her name, so I will call her Mrs. Grace. I remember her brown hair, her simple features and her neat Bronx apartment in the two-family 16

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houses that ﬁlled our streets. I recall sitting at her kitchen table once or twice a week and struggling, ever so tediously, to put sound to form and make the letters on the page friends and not foes. Not hostile armies in disguise. Around age thirteen, concurrent with my mother’s illness, I restarted the task, begun in my psychiatrist’s ofﬁce and helped by Mrs. Grace, of starting to read. I read all the literature that I could manage to stumble through. I would piece together words, then sentences, dictionary constantly at my side, even while riding the elevated train to my high school. Whatever possessed me to join The Classic Book Club is long gone into oblivion. I marvelled at the beautiful covers as I received ﬁrst The Iliad and then The Odyssey. As I read Homer’s legacy, I felt a special kinship with these ancient heroes, as if by reading their words and deeds they became my secret friends. As I struggled through these books, I felt as if I had found, on my own, another world. I had, in fact, found a place of refuge. The most obvious of experiences became mine: all I had to do was open a cover of a book and I could make friends with persons long gone, yet not gone at all. I had come upon the obvious: while reading I could be in other places with other eyes and ears. I could, for a while, forget the noisy kingdom of my youth and my emotionally distracted and ill mother. Shortly after reading Homer, I began my love affair with Socrates. Many other works came after these but my mind goes to Plato’s Dialogues when I remember that time. I recall my father’s occasional questioning interest in what I was reading; his was a bright mind cut off from any further education by age ten. Was that the reason for his frequent anger and his single minded, self-preoccupied ambition? It was at such ﬂeeting times as these that I sensed that I was his son; we shared something in the way our minds wondered about things. That very awareness made the gap between us more painful. I had found that Socrates asked questions about life that 17

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seemed much more in keeping with where I was, than where I was supposed to be in school. As his questioning echoed within me, I knew that my mind was a separate place, I could read and understand someone else. On the other hand, Socrates’ questions seemed to be mine. To my adolescent mind we were not that different. I wonder, to this day what I really understood from those argumentative interchanges. Socrates spoke to me through those pages, as if he had written me a personal letter and allowed me to experience that in my own wondering about the ambiguities of life and death, I was not alone. As he spoke through Plato’s memory, I slowly understood that it is a wondrous thing for a mind to think. Reading my Classic Club books on the noisy subway train to school, often to the detriment of my assigned homework, I replaced my distracting daydreams for thought-dreams. I still do not have any proper words for this wondrous mind of ours. Is it, perhaps, a wonderful emptiness? Something like the bubbles we would blow with our soap pipes? Beautifully colored, self-contained, light ﬁlled nothingness. Our thoughts are like the breath in our lungs; they are ours when they are inside us but they really belong to the world. Years later, when I would study medieval philosophers and read of their posing the question as to whether we should understand mind as being one or many, I had a distant recollection of my musings when my own bubble was forming and coming into view. I also recall trying my hand, somewhere around age sixteen, at Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality; a bewildering subject for any adolescent, not to mention one whose childhood companion was Humpty Dumpty. This particular intellectual and personal search to understand my sexuality came to a short end, however, when a religious brother, in the Catholic high school I was attending, informed me that I was too young to read such stuff. Freud, Brother Darcy said, was on the Church’s list of condemned authors. He said this in a kind, genuinely helpful tone. 18

Remembering Humpty

Perhaps he was responding to my confusion and not to my reading matter. Anxious to please him and fearful of reading a condemned author, I put the text aside. Socrates was not strong enough in me to follow my own course. Years later, I would learn that it was Jung’s works and not Freud’s which were on such a list. Before continuing, however, I want to recount the winds of change that occurred in the castle soon after the my mother recovered. My father, who had always wanted a girl child, decided that since my mother had recovered, he would pursue this desire. With an impulse of generosity, which he had all too frequently ignored, he decided to adopt a girl child. Although I sensed some hesitation within her, my mother went along with my father’s desire, as did my brother and I when we were individually interviewed. At age forty-four, having regained her extraordinary vitality, she was given, by the New York Foundling Hospital, a four and a half-year old delicate wisp of a child. Vickie came to our home hurriedly, recently bereft of her previous adoptive parents. Her adoptive mother had died ten months into the one year probation period before the adoption could be ﬁnalized. She came with a quiet sadness that has never left her. Rarely can a child change family patterns, however. Although my father did not bellow, as he had previously, and my mother was active and productive, this child of desire was, I know, injured. She had lost, during her ﬁrst three and half years of life, too many mothers. I remember Vicki’s thin, almost transparent little body as she tried to understand her suddenly new surroundings. I felt awkward in responding and trying to help her, My mother’s primary concern was to fatten her up. In her tiny and beautifully sensitive face, I saw bewilderment. I would get to know my sister over the next two and a half years. I would get to know that biology alone does not create a family. As I would walk with her, hand in hand or occasionally read to her, I began 19

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to experience a type of connection I had not known before. I began to experience a protective caring for someone who seemed more injured than myself. As my high school years were ending, I thought, again, of pursuing a career in the theatre; I had wanted to go to the High School of Performing Arts but my parents would not allow me. I was to go to the same school that my brother attended, Rice Hight school located in the heart of Harlem. In my last year of high school I decided I would study voice. Once a week I would go to Mrs. Morata’s studio, located above a series of stores on Morris Park Avenue in the Bronx. Her fees were modest and from my salary from working in my father’s business I was able to afford her. She was a woman in her early ﬁfties, full bodied and strong willed. I loved my lessons and attended them religiously. Nature gave me strong vocal cords, and when I was singing everything else in my life fell away. I was ﬁnding a voice of my own and beginning to feel that I had something that was mine. After a year of studying, Mrs. Morata announced that she would be holding a recital for all her students in one of the small theaters at Carneigie Hall, in New York City. I was excited and delighted, as I told my parents. On the afternoon of the concert, as I was setting out my tuxedo, I noticed that my brother was also setting out a tuxedo. Puzzled, I asked my parents why. Smiling they told me that they had a wonderful surprise for me...my brother had secretly gone to Mrs. Morata for singing lessons also and he was going to perform tonight as well. I was stunned and felt that my concert was being stolen from me. I said nothing. I have no recollection of my performance. I stopped my voice lessons shortly after the concert, not to resume them for many years. Even with my books and my music I was not able to hold onto any solid place inside me. I felt scattered, particularly when I was with my friends who seemed less desperate than me. Although I had 20

Remembering Humpty

gone on dates since I was ﬁfteen and enjoyed the company of my girlfriends, I felt as if I was about to be thrown into an adult world with no strength for the task. But it was Ed who was thrown. Shortly after the Carnegie Hall concert, Ed, who was a member of the National Guard, was sent to Korea. My distracted mother wrote to him everyday, her jet-black hair graying in two years time. When he returned home after his tour of duty, the rift that had been growing between us became clear. It was as if we could no longer emotionally remember that we were brothers. I turned eighteen during my ﬁrst year of College. The summer before my ﬁrst semester I read Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain, and, as I did so, I felt as if I had encountered a modern St. Augustine. It was a journey of turning away from the world of men to ﬁnd the world of man. As I read, I knew that here was someone I could follow; someone who was searching as I was. While reading of Merton becoming a Trappist monk and priest, I saw, to my surprise, a path open before me. Timidly, becoming a priest became a possibility. Although my family was not religious, despite our having been sent to a parochial high school, I slowly came to feel that by embracing the Church’s teachings and deepening my faith, I was assured of good insides. I was promised more primal, more powerful and more loving parents than my own. For someone who was still in a fall and reeling from the experience, such promises, delivered with utter sincerity, were a healing salve. I began to ﬁll my bubbled space with all the right thoughts and all the right meanings. Slowly the sadness that had been my constant companion began drifting away. I put aside my childhood friends; Humpty was as forgotten as my old Teddy on the stairs. I was promised a protective loving father in God and a reliable mother in The Church. I was pledged not king’s armies but angels who would help me in my healing. 21

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

Humpty would rest quietly in my mind for more than forty years, before I would awaken him and put his memory to words.

22

Carmelite Passage

I

spent my ﬁrst year of college at Iona, in New Rochelle, New York, confused and divided. Academically I was mastering some courses while nearly failing others. For the ﬁrst time in my life I had some control of my own time, so I joined the drama club, had some minor roles, and remembered, for a short while, my abandoned dreams. I was eighteen but had no strength to pursue my interest in the theater. Fearful that adulthood that was clearly on the horizon would ﬁnd me wanting, I was desperate to ﬁnd someone or something to hold me. During my ﬁrst few months at Iona, I met Louie Marazita – we seemed to like each other immediately and we would be friends for many years. Generous in his spirit, we spent considerable time in the College library with Lou patiently helping me to grasp the basic concepts of the philosophy and logic courses we were taking. Lou was a brilliant student, he was tall and very lean with a chiseled face; I learned, with his help, that thought itself could be thought about. My previous innocent enchantment with Plato and Socrates was, I found out, just that. When I began to study the philosophical tradition behind these great thinkers, I not only found old friends but a whole

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intellectual world that valued and studied these thinkers as well. Lou and I patiently went through the logic exercises; slowly I put together before and after, universal and particular; and the ordered world was no longer hiding behind my daydreams and frustrated hopes. As my freshman year progressed, I frequently visited the small, simple wooden chapel on campus where I would both study and pray. I found both the size and the quiet comforting; silence was becoming a friend. As the academic year went on, Louie and I talked – Merton’s story echoing within me – of going off to a seminary; we spent many hours talking about what road lay ahead of us. On weekends, each of us visited different local parishes, spoke to priests from different Roman Catholic religious orders, and compared notes on Monday. That I could make a choice of how I wanted to live was new to me; I was intoxicated by the possibility. Sometime around May of my freshman year, having visited a Carmelite seminary in Middletown, New York, I decided, in effect, to ﬂee back to the thirteenth century by joining this religious order whose roots went back to the beginnings of Western monastic life. It was a Roman Catholic religious order whose religious ideal was the solitary, yet ﬁerce Old Testament prophet of Yahweh. A hairy man, Scriptures tell us, a stranger on the Earth who left it in a ﬁery departure, Elias, by name. Their primary pastoral commitment was teaching, missionary work and parishes. They kept the strict silent monastic tradition alive, however, in a special monastery in Austria. The Carmelite Order would be, for the next decade, my home. When I told Lou of my decision, he spoke of needing more time to make up his mind. He stayed at Iona for the next three years; eventually he decided not to enter a seminary and instead pursued graduate studies in philosophy. My father’s response to my announcement that I was going 24

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to a Carmelite seminary, to become a priest, was to warn me, in that angry voice of his, not to embarrass him and my mother by only staying there for six months. Maybe he thought my decision was a return to my daydream times, maybe he was unable to sense my insides. As I listened to him, however, I felt that he was trying, once again, to steal my future, just as he had stolen my adolescence and my dreams. St. Albert’s Junior Seminary, in Middletown New York, was set on a three-hundred acre parcel of ﬂat wooded land a little outside of town. There was a separate ﬁeldstone house for the eight or so priests who constituted the faculty; a large, four-story high school dormitory with classrooms and a smaller cottage style which housed the chapel and refectory with twelve small, about eight feet by ﬁve, monastic cells on the second ﬂoor. We college students lived here. Seminary training started at the beginning of high school, the college students were completing their ﬁrst year before leaving the junior seminary and advancing to the next stage of training, the novitiate. I had visited the seminary before with tall, talkative Father Gregory, the director of vocations, and so the school setting was familiar. I remember meeting with my fellow students and sitting on wooden benches in the refectory for my ﬁrst meal – a description of which escapes me to this day. I felt suddenly awkward again with my olive skin and dark hair – most of the other students were Irish and fair-haired. Sitting at that suppertime table, I was suddenly anxious and fearful that I could not go through with my choice. I remembered, with confusion, my father’s anger. I felt as if I had chosen to swim in a beautiful pool unsure of my capacity to stay aﬂoat. One can wrap and reset a broken arm and as you look at it have some assurance that healing is in progress. A broken mind and injured heart heal slower. Having experienced, even in a very stumbling manner, that my mind worked and that I was able to learn, some force, or 25

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will, within me set to mastering this new intellectual and monastic terrain. I also wanted to distance myself from my father’s expectations; I wanted to distance myself from him as much as I could. I found, as the days forgot themselves into weeks, that my fellow students were friendly; the food that we ate bland and uninviting; and the schedule of study, prayer and work unyielding. During those ﬁrst six months, I lost twenty pounds and reached a weight of one hundred and ﬁfty pounds that would be my constant for the next decade. As the months progressed, I realized that the reliability of the schedule, while terribly lonely at times, particularly on Sundays, was holding me. I had expected to do only one year of additional studies at St. Albert’s, since some of the seminary courses were different from those I had taken at Iona. My grades, however, were not impressive. It was Father Timothy who told me, near the end of my ﬁrst academic year, in strong yet gentle words, that I would not be allowed to advance with the rest of my class to the novitiate year of training. The novitiate year was exclusively dedicated to prayer and meditation and to learning the spiritual traditions of the Carmelite Order. Fr. Timothy was a tall, thin, red-haired man about forty years old; he seemed puzzled that I could not master what was, to his eyes at least, easily within my grasp. Confused and humiliated, I left his ofﬁce, fearful that I would never escape my childhood. Each summer, before entering the novitiate, the seminarians would return home. Once again I worked in my father’s small window display construction shop. As I phoned a goodbye to my fellow students a great sadness and fear came over me. Would I be able to master this new terrain? There was no gloating or sense of superiority in their responses to me, they assured me that I would join them in a year. They went on to their special year of spiritual retreat before tak26

Carmelite Passage

ing their religious vows. When I returned to St. Albert’s in the fall, I called on all the strength I had. I was determined not to let this latest academic humiliation join with my prior ones. Perhaps my de facto chastity, even prior to any formal vows, gave me the strength to focus all my energies into ﬁnding my mind and putting myself together. In class, I listened closely, I read and reread each of my textbooks. My life was in the balance and its success or failure would be my doing. All my prior daydreams about my capacities faced their reality playing ﬁeld of performance. While in chapel, I knew that the silence and the prayers helped me deﬁne my life. I kept praying to and searching for this silent God. I was in a world where God and Church were spoken of with certainty and their constant love for us afﬁrmed. Jesus and Mary became beacons as to how I was to live my life. I achieved A grades my second time around. It was a wondrous but tedious task. I learned the language of the early English Pearl Poet, as well as latin, logic, again, and history. All the while having such medieval spiritual writers as Thomas A’Kempis and his famous Imitation of Christ read to us during our noonday meals. The gods of Homer gave way to the rules of monastic living – my hopes were repeatedly directed toward eternal life and the grace of this silent God. My odyssey was under way and I believed or wanted to believe – I no longer know – myself to be guided, chosen and loved by the Lord. I had, after all, been called to the priesthood, a sign, so I was told, of being specially chosen. I had, in fact, found friends whom I cared for and teachers who wanted to inform and to help. After supper each night, usually around six-thirty, the seminarians would walk around the lake that was adjacent to the buildings. It was a small lake consisting of three descending ponds. We alternated our companions on those walks, but those strolls with barrel-chested, 27

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

somewhat reserved Joe; lean, witty, and mildly philosophical Dennis; as well as gentle Ed, deﬁne my memories. We were not allowed to have any special friends and so we changed walking companions frequently, since any sign of personal kinship or special friendship was regarded with suspicion. What we talked about on those eventide walks seems wiped away. During the week there were allotted times for working on the grounds and/or for cleaning bathrooms and polishing ﬂoors. On three afternoons a week, sports were allowed, and although I did not come with much experience, I nevertheless took to running, ice skating and some stumbling attempts at football. The other college students and high school seniors were patient with my efforts; although I was well coordinated, I was repeatedly irritated at my lack of skill in handling the football. My seminary class was a small group, about ﬁfteen in all; in them, I found friends – brothers – in a way. I had dim memories of such feelings with my familial brother, Ed; something had changed, as I have said, when he returned from Korea. Had our childhood connection died within him, had he seen too much death and grief ? Ever since that time, we seemed destined, despite any fraternal feelings we might have had, to live out the competitive roles our parents assigned to us. In leaving the family, I was determined to repudiate my role as the broken one. My brother’s task, I now know, would be more difﬁcult; he would have to repudiate being the one to carry their specialness. After this second academic year at St. Albert’s Seminary, I returned home for the summer. Instead of working in my father’s construction shop, I worked as a short order cook in B & G, a delicatessen restaurant on Wall Street, in New York City. I worked with other cooks and learned how to get orders for eggs out quickly and master the art of the minute made sandwich. Although I had no religious vows yet, it was expected that I not go out on dates and so my socializing was with 28

Carmelite Passage

other seminarians and prior friends from Iona. I remember laconic, blond-haired and soft spoken Ray, whose parents had a small cottage on Greenwood Lake, New York. I would drive up and visit him frequently on weekends and we would go boating or take long walks and talk about the great mystic saints of the Church. Many evenings Lou and I would go to see foreign ﬁlms in Manhattan and would spend hours discussing them. When August closed its days, I did go to idyllic Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the New York division of the Carmelite Order located its next stage of training – the Novitiate. The novitiate was, as I have mentioned, a special year of spiritual study and reﬂection, marked at its end by the taking of what was called simple vows; these vows signaled the formal beginning of religious life. The seminary building was on the side of a hill looking across a valley at Mt. Graylock, the design was contemporary with a stark, modern chapel. Each room was small and had a bed, a sink and a small desk. Seminary life, from then on, was even more circumscribed by prayer, silent meals, and study as well as speciﬁed periods for recreation. Our clothes were simple brown medieval habits, a deﬁning statement that our individual egos were subordinate to the common good. Our thoughts, consequently, strained to recapture a different time – a Roman Catholic worldview; our hopes reached for a future when we would be called “father” and our children would be the faithful we were given to minister to. The schedule during the special novitiate year was severe and yet consoling and supportive. Each morning we were up by ﬁve thirty and in chapel at six for meditation, prayer and the celebration of the Mass. We had breakfast in silence and then four hours of class. Lunch was usually modest and we were either allowed to talk or someone read to us. After lunch three days a week we had two hours of some sports activity or, on alternate days, some type of physical work assignments, 29

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

usually around the property or the upkeep of the monastery. This was followed by two hours of study, then again prayer and medication and supper. Following supper we had a forty-ﬁve minute period of camaraderie and then another period of study before lights out by ten. During our relaxed time after supper we could play cards, talk, some seminarians taught themselves the guitar. Although the novitiate year was marked by more periods of silence, this schedule was the general pattern for all my years of study. I ﬁnd it difﬁcult to convey the transformation that these years of discipline, prayer and study brought. A panoramic landscape was laid out before me, the work of several generations of Christian thinkers and spiritual leaders. Life could be orderly and predictable. Goals, academic or personal could be pursued without intrusions from one’s superiors. When I was unsure of myself in either my studies or in my interactions with my peers, my teachers were there to talk with. For all of the difﬁculties I experienced in my childhood, I had always liked talking to people – I recall visiting, even as a young boy, neighbors and just chatting with them. My talks with tall and gentle Fr. Francis, in particular, felt somewhat familiar. They were, more importantly, a human guidance so longed for and so absent in my life at home. The year was 1954; I had found my own stable land to walk on. That there were so many young men, at that time, willing to give their lives to such discipline, to a journey of spiritual quest, relinquishing sexual satisfaction and personal ambition, assured me that I was not alone and that I had found a brotherhood. I am still convinced that they were men wholesome in their desires and generous of spirit. I know now that we were all struggling for wholeness, an integration that would assure us of our own lovableness – I know, also, that we had all, in different ways, been injured by life. In our private studies, as well as the texts that were read to 30

Carmelite Passage

us during meal times, the basic realities of life and death, salvation and damnation were repeatedly vocalized to our twenty-year-old ears and disciplined bodies. God, we were told, was a loving and forgiving father. God was also a punishing father; to violate any of our vows – chastity, for example – unless quickly repented of, would merit eternal damnation. I accepted this teaching – the relinquishing of sexuality seemed a small price to pay for a personal identity, for a self that one could hold on to. My experience, during those years, was that of becoming my own person. Was that the gift this loving God gave me? If He loved me, if He had chosen me by giving me a vocation to the priesthood, if he had given me a new life, he was no thief. I could, then, know who I was. I did not have to fear the armies of my father’s anger and the horses of his needs. No longer broken, I had found a quiet place. Finding a place that was mine, my thoughts and ambitions were no longer locked away in daydreams; they could be known, even by me. I can almost touch the excitement I felt, so many years ago, when I started my intensive philosophical and, later on, theological studies. To the Plato of my early adolescence and introductory philosophy courses were added, among others, the intellectual contributions of St. Thomas Aquinas, the monk who baptized Aristotle into the Church’s pantheon. I learned about matter and form – substance philosophy, about posing a theoretical question with the utmost care as to its parameters. I was taught that the world, in the light of reason, was to be interpreted as an orderly place; all life, consequently, had a deﬁnable and knowable goal. I thought, then, that I truly believed everything I was taught. I no longer know. As I think about these Carmelite years what was as wonderful as the fellowship I experienced were the pervasive and time allotted periods of silence. Having encountered silence as a young man in 31

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

that small chapel at Iona College, I became aware that, ever so slowly, silence itself was taking up residence within me. The long periods of solitary study in our modest monastic cells, the hour or so of meditation each day, the quiet meals – all this brought forth both a sense of personal focus and, paradoxically, a capacity for self forgetfulness. I remember a few teachers who, with their attentiveness and kindness, enkindled a feeling of worth within me. Tall Father Francis, our philosophy teacher and jovial Father Ernie, our teacher of Church doctrine, were two such men. They were special healers who gave me, over the years, many hours of careful listening and calm advice. Were they, along with my new friends, the presence of this silent God I was searching for? All this was new to me: brothers who wanted to be equal, fathers who encouraged and a mother Church who I experienced as both giving and caring. I was learning how to live in a community – as if I had not grown up in a family. Our class of twelve had dwindled to eight as we completed our year of studying such Carmelite teachers and mystics as St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. This year had been a special time to ponder our decision to continue training and to commit ourselves, more formally, to this life. The novitiate year ended with me prostrate on the ground in the sun-ﬁlled chapel, white medieval cloak and cowl covering me from head to foot. I had just knelt before the father superior of the order where I had pronounced with youthful determination, enthusiasm, as well as ignorance, my vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. These moments, however, are tucked away in my emotional memory – all that seems to remain is the scene of that sunny morning. My mother, father and sister, along with some relatives, came for the ceremony. Everyone seemed genuinely proud of my being allowed, as well as of my personal decision, to continue my training. No taunting from my father about embarrassing him by my life choice. I knew that 32

Carmelite Passage

I was ﬁnally on my way; I had completed, successfully, the ﬁrst phase of my training. I was respected and liked by my fellow students as well as my teachers. The desperate search for a safe place, which had marked so much of my youth, seemed over. Auburn, New York, where we went after the novitiate year, to continue our undergraduate studies, was in sharp contrast to the rolling hills of Williamstown. Auburn is a ﬂat town. I have not seen it in over forty years, yet I remember the wide street that the Chase Mansion was on. Mr. Chase was the inventor who had combined talking sound with celluloid pictures. The Carmelite Order had bought his mansion as a school for its students. There was a large entrance hall with French doors looking out over a courtyard, which greeted each person who entered; the two parallel wings of the building encompassed a formal garden. Not quite a monastery and no longer a personal mansion, it was a cold house, indifferent to its occupants. I ﬁnished two years of philosophical study in Auburn, forever associated in my mind with the most extraordinary amount of snowfall I had ever seen or in which I had ever driven. The Chase house was also the least heated house in which I have ever lived. The small refectory, where we had our meals, had many French doors. Perhaps in prior years they had served their purpose, but now, they merely gave the illusion of an inside/outside – the wind and cold passed through them without embarrassment. We were told that we should be indifferent to such factors; if we were cold, we should offer our discomfort to God as a sign of our commitment to him, rather than to our own bodies. While at Auburn I studied Aristotelian philosophy, English literature, history, French and Latin. I resolved, once more, to touch these thoughts and own them. I would make Aquinas or Bonaventure, or whatever I was given to study, friends and not foes. I was intent on 33

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

ﬁnding and holding that intelligence I had been searching for my entire life. After two years in Auburn, our small class returned to Williamstown for an additional year of philosophical study, before going on to Washington, DC, for our theological studies. During those college and graduate years, we spent six weeks each summer at St. Bonaventure University in Orlean, New York. While there, we attended classes with other non-clerical students and studied biology and other science courses that were not available at the seminary. These summer semesters were a time of relaxed scheduling; we were more and more on our own. We shared our dormitory rooms with one other seminarian, ate in the college dining hall with other students and the solitariness of the academic year gave way to more friendly interactions among us. Orlean, in the 1950s, was a modest town; the university campus was ﬂat, austere, and very, very hot. During my last year of college in Williamstown, I remember visiting, when I had permission to leave the grounds, the famous Clark Museum with its Monet’s, Renoir’s, Van Gogh’s and many other artists of the Impressionist school. Their playfulness with light and relaxed clarity captivated me, in some unexplained way, I felt at home in the pictures I was looking at; the same way I would feel immediately at home, so many years later, when I visited Paris with my family. I am not sure why this was so. Perhaps it was the light, bringing back memories of leafed shadows from my early childhood walks. I cherished those solitary Saturday or Sunday afternoon museum times when I could visit and seemingly talk with these masters. Was I missing, without realizing it, those Sunday afternoon visits at old aunt Jenny’s house, while I was growing up? My mother’s relatives would all be together – ten or more people playing cards, or singing to a cousin’s guitar, and the feelings were good. 34

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The Impressionist’s indeterminateness of form, besides its own intrinsic appeal, was in contrast to the thoughts to which I was exposed – the church dogmas that I experienced myself as accepting and the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy that I was learning. Although I no longer share Thomas’ vision of reality – since I no longer think, for example, that truth can be comprehensively understood as a simple correspondence between what is and our inner understanding – my encounter with him, so many years ago, was a high point of my intellectual life. The world, I have found, is more complex than either Thomas’ thought encompasses or the Roman Catholic Church doctrines permit. The summer before I went to Washington for my theological studies, I came to a land that would inﬂuence and enchant me as much as any childhood dreams. After summer school we had about three weeks before our fall semester started. A wealthy individual offered one of our father superiors a large Victorian house, as a summer vacation respite, for the twenty or so philosophy and theology students. I remember driving from Orlean in a small, old, and, I am tempted to say, courageous green bus to a large white house, two blocks from the beach, on a wide street in a village of serene beauty. The town was East Hampton, New York; the year was 1957. We would be lucky enough to come back for four consecutive summers and during each stay I walked the town proper, studied the tombstones behind the main pond at the entrance to the town, told myself stories of the lives of those who lived in the great old houses and came to know and respect the insistent ocean. While there our life was still quite regulated; we had, however, four or ﬁve hours most days when we could enjoy the open ﬂat spaces, the ocean beach and, of course, the gentle and pervasive light. It would take twelve years before I would return to this place 35

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

of varied houses, winding streets and enchanting topography. It would be this land, which the ocean washes daily, many years later, to which I would return, to write of my adventures and of my mishaps. Looking back after all these years on my seminary decade, one incident stands out in my memory with a clarity that still amazes me, forty years after its occurrence. I was in my mid-twenties, early in my training at St. Albert’s, sitting at the front of the room with seven or eight other students. We were studying old English literature. The topic turned to the central event of Christianity, Jesus’ death and resurrection. I remember being asked a question basic to Christian belief. Since Jesus was God, did I believe that God Himself died on a cross? To my surprise, and rather out of character to my experiences so far with these good teachers, the heavyset Father Vincent turned to me, brown eyes focused, if not glaring, as he asked me whether or not I believed, on faith, this teaching. Suddenly I felt anxious and bewildered. If I answered no, I would be asked to leave this newfound place of healing. I did not answer no because I did not feel no – but neither did I feel yes. God? Died? He through whom all creation lives and moves and has its being? Died? What could that mean? Suddenly my world was tottering. There was a tense silence, among my classmates, for a minute or so before I said yes, I believed. It was an unfair question in an unfair place. Did I betray myself by my answer? I understand now that it was Father Vincent himself who must have had doubts that he could only assuage by the loyalty oath he needed to extract from me. As the days gathered into years, I continued to ask myself who is this silent triune God I worshipped, I prayed to, who loved me? Increasingly the words attributed to Jesus’ whatsoever you do for these, you do for me became my theological touchstone. Love, I sensed, was in the doing and the caring, as perhaps faith was also. I would, years later, read of Freud’s thoughts that we make the world real by loving it; 36

Carmelite Passage

when we are free from corrosive narcissism we can experience the world as good enough to captivate both our interests, our care and our desires. And I remembered my quest to understand faith. It would take my subsequent teaching of theology and my psychoanalytic studies before I could let myself know my own fears, that is, that the God in heaven I had been given, had, in effect, ﬂed the twentieth century. My searching, however, would continue. No ﬂeeing to heaven once your eyes have seen mass graves – any God worth ﬁnding would have to be found here on Earth. Perhaps the seeds of such feelings, the seeds to my ﬁnding a different path than the Carmelite one, were planted in that classroom long ago; that classroom in which, so alien to my experience of an accepting brotherly community, I felt violated by Father Vincent’s questioning. Before my decision to leave the seminary, however, in the middle of my third year of studying theology at the Carmelite seminary in Washington, D.C., I was sitting, again, in a chair opposite a kind, bright and rather tall psychiatrist. I would travel for an hour from the seminary to reach his graciously furnished Alexandria, Virginia, home – with its formal entrance foyer and his small ofﬁce to the left. Fr. Ernie had offered me the opportunity of seeing him, sensing my confusion as to whether or not I should continue on to ordination to the priesthood. A pervasive uneasiness had invaded me. It was nine or ten months before my appointed ordination date and I found myself feeling a growing reluctance to proceed to the goal of all my studies, a goal that included either teaching in one of the many high schools the Carmelites operated, serving as a parish priest, or being chaplain in one of the many hospitals we serviced. I feared that the discontent of my youth had come back to haunt me, my optimism and focus blurred. Were my Carmelite brothers no longer the comradeship I needed? Was sexual37

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ity harder to deny and a personal relationship more necessary at age twenty-seven than before? I experienced a nameless stirring that my spiritual counselors, for all their desire, seemed unable to calm. I was no longer able to accept, as I had previously, the unquestioned teachings we had been given. I dimly sensed that the mystery that we named God was more complex and more hidden than any teaching reﬂected. It was Dr. Robert Neu, my therapist, who would enable me to knit together my feelings, my memories and my words and give me, with his non-intrusive manner, the space to ﬁnd a decision. As I sat in his small ofﬁce, quietly telling my tale, I knew that in my second encounter with these shamans of the mind I had met, once more, a remarkably kind, gentle and insightful person. After many weekly meetings and much internal questioning, I decided to leave my new home just a few weeks short of my ordination. There are seven stages before ordination and during the month prior to my departure, I had been ordained by the bishop of Washington to four of them, that is, porter, lector, exorcist and acolyte. I left prior to the ﬁnal three, that is, sub-deacon, deacon, priest. With an old sorrow I weighed my future, my disappointment and my parents’ disappointment, but felt that I could not continue, given the ambivalence I was experiencing. It would take many years before I would know that faith is the quiet trust that passes from one human being to another, as we put our insides into words and come to know who we are as another hears us. And I have wondered if the silent God of my search is not hidden just beneath the words we utter, just beneath the love, or maybe sometimes the anger, we yearn to express. There was more faith in my talks with Dr. Robert, and in his insights, than I felt in my formal studies or spiritual meditation practices. If the breath of life does not come from inside, it is merely a taunting possibility outside. Dr. Robert said nothing of my religious beliefs, said nothing of my impending decision. 38

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He let me tell him about the journey I had been on since I was very young. I had to cry, again, for my brokenness before I could emotionally recognize how the seminary put me back together and why I had to resume the task I had left behind at Iona, of walking competently in the world. But, as I have said, it was not without some confusion and terrible sadness that I contemplated leaving my brothers of ten years to return to the home of my youth. I had mastered, as I had promised myself years before, this new terrain; I was no longer that odd fellow always falling off walls. I had taken, when I arrived in Washington three years prior, solemn vows, intending thereby to remain in the Carmelite religious order for the rest of my life. All of this would be undone by leaving. My oncea-week therapy sessions with Dr. Robert were crucial, as was the personal guidance during those last months which gentle Father Ernie offered. When I decided that I could not accept ordination, Father Ernie sensed the quiet darkness that had settled on me, he respected my needs and let me leave. He was a man who asked very little in return for the care and concern he gave. He was interested in helping me ﬁnd a road to walk on, even if that meant leaving the common path we Carmelites traveled.

39

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P

erhaps the Humpty rhyme is a story, an abbreviated myth to tell us that we cannot go home again. Maybe Humpty is the child in the womb; and when he fell off the wall, he fell out of union with that life-giving abode. Initially, he might very well try to get back there, at least to that sense of protection, but no force on Earth, no matter how many horses or how many men were assigned the task, could achieve this. Separation is a long, arduous task, something like playing Giant Step – two steps forward, may I (?) then, all too frequently, one step back. Was I taking one step forward or one step back when that early morning ﬂight in June ﬂew me from my monk’s cell in Washington back to La Guardia airport in New York and my childhood home? Was the broken dreamer of my childhood, or the self I had become, the one who was making this decision? Was I condemned to repeatedly slip whenever I was close to achieving the heights? Like an egg standing on its head, precariously, was I destined to tumble repeatedly throughout life? So many questions went through my mind on that short ﬂight

Finding a Voice

from Washington to New York. Were my father and mother the same or, now that I was a grown and educated man, would they be different? What would I do with my life? How would I support myself ? Would I be able to ﬁnd a woman with whom to share my life? Notwithstanding my therapy with Dr. Neu, I questioned whether I had made the right decision. I knew I would miss witty, intelligent, red-haired Chester, a master of classical Latin as well as ancient Aramaic. I said a friendly but somewhat formal good-bye to philosophical Dennis and wrote of my decision to my friend Ed, who was studying in Rome. The most that any of the seminarian monks could do would be to shake hands; there was no hugging or indications of special affection. The plane descended to La Guardia Airport, gliding ominously over the waters before landing. Momentarily, I braced in my seat fearing a crash. Punishment? We landed safely and I made my way to New York City and the subway system that deposited me in the northeast Bronx of my childhood. My mother greeted me as I descended the stairs at the last stop of the Jerome Avenue line. When I asked as to my father’s whereabouts, she told me that he had chosen this weekend to have some elective surgery and so we would drive directly to the hospital rather than home. As I entered the room with my black suit and roman collar, out of place yet clearly home again, my father greeted me with a distracted hello, asked about my ﬂight and immediately directed my mother to attend to some task. I could not let myself know my disappointed confusion at his response to me. Had the land of my youth been frozen in time? I had been taught, for the past ten years, to put my own reactions aside and so I asked how his operation had gone, inquired about the linen stores and listened as he complained about the hospital food. 41

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I re-entered the land of my childhood quietly, as if through the back door, carrying my few clothes, my thinned body, my varied history and my unfulﬁlled dreams. The year was 1962. So many options, so many roads to travel. So few options, in fact, for we can only travel the roads that our history lets us recognize. There was a wonderland world waiting but I was unable to respond. Ray Hallowell, a good friend and fellow student, had left the seminary a few years before and asked me to join him for a summer European walking tour. But I had no job and no money and saw so way of joining him. Shortly after that another opportunity to take up the pieces of my life in Seattle, Washington, through a teaching position, came my way – although how they knew of me, I will never know. I was not able to follow such leads. The seminary had given me a solid humanistic education, had helped me ﬁnd and create a self, but I was still fragile – although I did not know it. I was still hopeful that after all I had been through, after all that I had accomplished, my parents, particularly my father, would be able to see me and know who I was. My ﬁrst summer went quickly and somewhat bewilderingly so. My only schedule was self-imposed; ten years of patterned behavior is not easily overcome. I was quiet in the mornings and needful of time to read and study each day. I took over my sister Vickie’s former small bedroom, bought a telephone and a small desk and started the task of living outside of the seminary. I had left as a distracted adolescent, burdened with confusion and anger; I returned a freer man and innocently hopeful. Such innocence of expectation and of self-knowledge was, however, not necessarily my friend. I would have to learn that it is much easier to function as a competent and even optimistic adult if we temper innocence with sensible, adult mistrust. During my seminary years, we wore black suits when off the grounds; when I returned home, I was unsure what to buy. My semi42

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nary wardrobe consisted of one black suit, some underwear, a few white shirts, two black ties and two pairs of black shoes. My father, always a meticulous dresser, offered no help with a wardrobe except to hurriedly buy me one suit. A weight I had not felt for years was returning. I remembered Dr. Robert Neu words when he assured me, sitting in his small, elegantly furnished ofﬁce, that my parents would certainly be helpful, particularly since my ten years of education had cost them nothing. But life gives to us in unexpected ways. A casual friend suggested that I call the chair of the philosophy department at Manhattan College for a possible teaching position. Not able to offer me a position, the cheery Mr. Cunningham referred me to the theology department. Strange. I had thought that theology was in my past and not my future. It was a time, however, of lay theologians, and Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York, was in the foreground in having as many as six laymen as theology professors. I had one interview with the chairman of the department and, by age twenty-eight, I was teaching seven two-credit courses and earning one hundred dollars a week. I thought I was doing well for myself. Chubby Brother Henry, the chair of the department, was a short, jolly man, quick tongued and witty. He would, however, prove to be a man of many agendas, selective in his likes and partial in his responses. The ages of man are many, more than eight, and the lives we live are too numerous to count. No wonder the persistent belief that we have lived before, that we were in other places and other times. We have and we were. Whether or not the numerous lives of our present experiences are, in fact, modeled on a larger pattern, I do not know. Maybe there is an eternal dialectic that patterns human history. I did not think much of these possibilities. I was getting used to being a teacher rather than a student, a colleague rather than a monk and a 43

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grown man rather than the confused, angry adolescent. From my modest salary, I started to buy clothes, books and a car that I needed in order to get to work. I was expected to pay for my room and board – which I did. My mother was generous in giving me some weekly supplies but I knew, as soon as I could let myself know, that I would not stay at home for long. I spent the summer preparing for my courses and completing my master’s thesis. A month before I started teaching, I received one of the ﬁrst master’s degree’s which the Washington Theological Consortium granted. Perhaps because there was no formal graduation, my parents offered, one night at supper, congratulations. That they were in fact proud of this accomplishment only became clearer years later. Their expression of pride came too late and when it was expressed it had more to do with their pride rather than any accomplishment of mine. As the academic year progressed, I had less and less overt interaction with them; I spent my days preparing for the classes I taught. It did, however, take me some time to come to terms with how trapped my father was in a fortress of his own making, how unwilling he was to experience any personal vulnerability. I had returned home with new eyes but the sights had not changed. Theology is quite literally the study of God. A difﬁcult task since the reality under discussion seems to have such varied meanings while evoking the strongest of emotional responses. Freud is right when he speaks of our dialogue with God as a continuation of our desired response from and with our fathers. There is, however, more to our rambling discussions and impassioned talk of God than can be contained under the Freudian rubric. It has to do, I believe, with discovering what is most real in life and yet what is most difﬁcult to know or should I say, experience. When we try our hand at knowing 44

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what God means, which Meister Eckhart, the great medieval mystic and theologian, says is not possible anyway, we come back, inevitably, to Freud again. We ﬁnd we are speaking of God as he falls within the shadow of either our fathers or perhaps more primarily our mothers. Even when we speak of God as that creativity which enlivens the world from each petal of light dancing upon the waters, to the pain and suffering we ﬁnd incomprehensible, to the moments of beauty which enable us to forget our separateness, we are, nevertheless, speaking of ourselves and to ourselves. I pondered such thoughts as I taught these young men the varied ways humans have tried to understand what goes beyond them and yet what seems so close. For my master’s thesis, I wrote a small booklet entitled Divine Grace. To my delight, the students were particularly receptive to it, while many of the clerical faculty were irritated. They suggested that the text was, in its tone, more Protestant than Roman Catholic. Surprisingly I was not bothered by their criticism. In writing the text I was, although unaware, paying a debt to my immediate past, to the grace that my Carmelite years had given me – the opportunity, tucked behind the discipline, the deprivation and the learning, for a new beginning. There is a great silence, I have found, built into us. It is as if there is a great distance between our center and self-awareness. As my teaching and experiences broadened, I began reading and thinking about Zen Buddhism. I felt strangely at home with the emptiness that Buddhism espouses, much more so than I had been with clearly deﬁned dogmas and unchanging formulas. Slowly I began to wonder if the integrity of my search for God could be continued only as long as I gave up the search, only as long as I understood that nothing, nothing that I could understand, could be found. What was I to do with such conclusions? At times the most elusive things to grasp are, paradoxically, the 45

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most obvious. This certainly proved to be the case as I continued my teaching, struggled to understand just what I was teaching and progressively coming to realize how distorted my social-political-theological seminary education had been. I had been trained to presume the rightness of those in authority; liberation theology was one movement in the late 1960s that tried to address the gross social inequities in third world countries. As I read and talked to colleagues, I began to realize that the poor, particularly in South America, were not smiling at our innocence. They were not smiling at all. Priests as social reformers had not been a role we had been offered; we were, in fact, warned that we should be on the look out for communists who could inﬁltrate the priesthood to pursue their own godless goals. As I began to understand the rigidity of what I had been taught, I heard the echo of kings, horses and armies where there should have been compassion and help. I read with new eyes Jesus’ words to notice the lilies of the ﬁeld – not merely a reference to Divine Providence but a warning not to lose focus by misdirecting our gaze upward and away. Leaving the monastery, I discovered, would take more than a plane trip home. During the years in which I taught religious studies, there were two or three major issues which divided the theology faculty: birth control, the right to divorce and the question of social justice. Angry still with a father who repeatedly misunderstood his children’s needs, I was, perhaps, predisposed to see the same mechanisms in a Church unresponsive to her children’s needs, needs which required addressing and not reprimands. My classes on marriage, on Christian ethics, or on psychology and religious symbolism were two-way dialogues and I would test my new thinking with my students. How is it possible, I would argue and eventually write in reference to birth control, for a Church to repudiate individuals’ tasks and obligations to plan for 46

Finding a Voice

their future or for any future life they would bring to the world? How is anything unnatural that fosters our intelligent care of the world? Likewise, how could the two people in a marriage be the cause and bond of their marriage vows, a doctrine the Roman Church had always clearly taught, yet, should they decide to separate, the Church now had a power that it did not have at the inception of this union? Did such a teaching on divorce have to do with keeping Christendom orderly and predictable rather than conveying some divine dictate? When I started my psychoanalytic studies, I became increasingly aware that in legislating an individual’s sexual conduct, religious authority was in fact controlling a person’s self-worth as well as personal autonomy. These conclusions were, perhaps, obvious to those outside the Roman fold; they took up residence in me with profound conviction as well as with saddened anger. To say that the formal Roman Catholic Church was unequivocally the voice of God was becoming increasingly bizarre. Three years after I started teaching and had gone back to Fordham University for my doctorate in theology, a friend who was an administrator at Iona College, in New Rochelle, New York who knew that I had started my psychoanalytic studies, asked me to give ten lectures combining theological and psychological insights. The series was to inaugurate the College’s Theological Institute. And I remember the confused and searching seventeen year old who had walked its corridors and studied in its quiet wooden chapel. Was I also remembering the strong Mrs. Wolpol, my grammar school principal, or the encouraging Mrs. Bush, my science teacher, as I stood in front of two hundred or so people, mostly clerics and nuns and started my lectures? As I look back now on those talks, what I remember most is that distracted, injured, dark-eyed little boy in grammar school whom so few teachers made any effort to reach. It was with that memory and to that memory that I spoke. It was that humili47

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ated, lost student who was comforted when the audience rose, at the end of each of the lectures, with applause. I knew then that I had kept my promise to my injured self. Could he rest now? Could I? My mother and father came, one Saturday morning, to hear me lecture. They seemed silently proud, yet quiet in the presence of an applauding audience. My father was clearly impressed; he seemed more respectful, yet, somewhat more distant. But I have gotten ahead of my self. By this time I was married and was no longer living at home. I had met Julia at a charity dance, Catholics for Latin America, six months after my return from the seminary. Ray and I had been in contact after he returned from his walking trip to Europe and he wanted me to go to the dance to meet his girlfriend’s friend. When I attended, still quite awkward in my dating approach after a ten-year absence, I met an intelligent, caring and beautiful woman. Julia, by name; we would marry within a year and a half. Was Julia an echo of the mother of my earliest infancy? It was during that infancy that I must have been responded to in some personal way, when my mother was less distracted by my father’s demands. I had been told frequently, while growing up, how tiny I had been, less than ﬁve pounds at birth. I was also told of how, at nine months of age, I had a pernicious infection and the breath of life nearly taken away by an infected and ever-swelling throat. The point of such stories, as well as those that reminded me of how many times I had pneumonia, was, I think, to remind me of my mother’s care. I knew, when she would talk about such events, that she, at least, had wanted me and had wanted me to live. Perhaps she was also trying to remember a different time, a more available time for her children. My 48

Finding a Voice

eventual choice of a wife would be, consequently, not totally a conscious decision. I understand now that I was able to relate to such a caring person and to sustain a long-term marriage not only because of Julia’s specialness but also because of something good in my earliest relationship with my mother. I am surprised that as I relate my ﬁnding a mate and starting a family I have been drawn back to my earliest childhood. I still have a glimpse of that pneumonia ﬁghting little boy sitting up in bed with his coloring books in hand. The house was always, during those periods, quiet. My mother would make breakfast, lunch and, of course, supper. In between these meals, she frequently shopped or worked for my father on various tasks. I remember drawing, coloring and listening to the radio. The house was always clean and when I was sick she cared for me attentively. Maybe it was those long periods in bed, a time before penicillin, which helped give birth to that day-dreaming little boy. I had to experience the world through my imagination and so makebelieve became a friend. I have also asked myself, at times, if my various childhood illnesses were some form of competition with my father for my mother’s attention, as if I was saying: take care of me, don’t always be consumed by him. I know such things are possible and if that was a factor then I paid dearly with my repeated bouts of pneumonia. My sicknesses could also have been a forlorn attempt to have my father stop telling me what to do or how to do it. Perhaps I simply wanted him to spend time with me, and notice that I was injured. Of course, I could have just been ill. I remember, during my sicknesses, tall, thin, austere Dr. Eagle. He would sit on the side of the bed for a while and assure me that I would be better very soon. I felt comforted when he would come to check on me. I wonder, do they still make those shiny black bags? 49

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Perhaps those adventure radio programs and soap operas I would listen to stimulated by imaginative wanderings? Before books became my passion, was I seduced by the sound of those varied voices? I remember that little boy of eight, with the pain in his throat, enthralled by the different sounds coming from his small, brown radio. Was it because all those characters he listened to seemed to talk directly to him? I had been comforted, early in my life, by friends in faraway places and even in different times. Perhaps that throat afﬂiction, so many years ago, was why I have had a singing voice coach at different times in my life. Was I not only mastering a forgotten trauma but joining my now rather strong vocal cords to the chorus of voices which had enthralled me? That chorus of voices which danced to me on air waves not only when I recuperated in bed but also on Saturdays, later in life, when I would listen to Milton Cross and the Metropolitan operas? Nor am I unaware that I am in a profession where it is the voice that carries our healing care. I am still puzzled by what all of this has to do with the events that took place so many years later. As I look back, with a ﬁfty-year perspective, I am unexpectedly saddened as my mind returns to the time when my Humpty injured self was particularly alone and vulnerable. Was I drawing my future homes in those numerous coloring books? Was I drawing my future family in the little ﬁgures I colored? As I remember those early years, I wonder if my body betraying me to repeated illness only deepened my experience of emptiness. I must be remembering that dark eyed little boy with a deep sense of connectedness. How strange how our different selves come, and go. As my relationship with Julia deepened, I was testing the waters, unknowingly, to ﬁnd out if I could feel secure and cared for, without the vulnerability of physical illness. 50

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I would have to master my fragility and ﬁnd a new ground to stand on if I was to bring that about.

51

Top Left to Right: Grace Avenue House: My ﬁrst communion with Father; 1940’s, Mother; Eddie and myself.

Top Left to Right: Carmelite years, Williamstown Mass. c1955; Wedding 1963; Vicki; Connie and Paul.

Top Left to Right: Theodor Reik and myself, 1969; Mother, age 88; Julia in ancestral home, Positano, Italy, 1982; Oxford, Christ Church College, 2003.

Mother Earth

J

ulia and I married in the spring of 1964, turning April, despite T. S. Eliot’s musings, into a joyous month. A college professor of English she had her own silent sorrow having lost both of her parents while in her early twenties. She put herself through Brooklyn College at night as well as Columbia University graduate school and was, when we dated, an assistant professor at Pace University in New York City. I was, however, awkward in my responses; a ten-year hiatus in dating is not easily overcome. We saw each other on an off for a number of months before I realized the obvious: we knew each other on a deep level. When I mentioned to my parents one night at dinner that Julia and I were planning to marry, my father urged me to take more time and not to do anything hastily. They had met Julia a number of times and they sensed, I am sure, not only her charm and intelligence but also her strength. I thanked him for his concern, and we went on with our plans. When April came we had our wedding reception, on a Sunday afternoon, in a small quaint Upper East Side restaurant, In Boboli by

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

name. Our ﬁnances were very modest but we knew that our relatives, with their tradition of giving monetary gifts, would help us with the expenses. It was a beautiful day despite the fact that my parents were unhappy that the wedding was not held in a more traditional ballroom setting. The wedding was a playful, happy gathering, with everyone reluctant to leave; the shadows were gone, it was a moment of light. In my decision to terminate my ten-year commitment to become a priest, I had requested and received a Papal dispensation from my Carmelite solemn vows. I had within my reach, all the singular specialness that Catholic world could offer and just a moment before others called me Father – I left. As a married man, I could be a father in fact and the specialness would be whatever caring I was able to give. I am convinced that all those years of musing and questioning and trying to understand the world prepared me to ﬁnd someone who was loving and bright, grounded and not lost. I do not know how one makes such decisions. Are they rooted in childhood experiences or just fortuitous happenings? Do they spring from a place deep inside; a place that wants to know and be known, a place that only touch heals? I knew, without knowing, that in choosing Julia I had made a choice for life. Yet, even such a love experience was not able to exorcise my remaining childhood ghosts. I was still haunted by forgotten dreams and painful memories. The fear, which I was barely able to recognize, that I would amount to nothing but a broken shell of a man still found an echo within me. By the following January we were parents. Six weeks after Paul’s birth I asked Lou, my Iona college buddy, to be his godfather. It would be just a few years after that serious mental illness would over-take Lou and claim him and we lost a common ground to stand on. With Paul’s arrival, however, I became increasingly uneasy with the prospect 56

Mother Earth

of remaining in teaching, particularly since my salary was excessively modest and each month found us anxious and frustrated when it came to paying bills. This was, however, not the only motivating factor in my growing concern about continuing teaching. While talking with my students, both in class and out, and learning of their personal problems as well as their theological inquiries, I recalled, more than once, my talks with my white-haired psychiatrist from my youth as well as with Dr. Robert Neu in Washington. Not infrequently, I saw myself, in day-time reverie, listening instead of talking, understanding and not just being understood. Not so different from priestly aspirations, yet very different nevertheless. Clearly, my beloved teddy from my youth was still alive within me. After all, don’t we tell all our troubles to our teddies and are we not consoled by their quiet acceptance? I came to understand that this daydream of listening and helping reﬂected not only any present need but also memories of my childhood schoolyard companion, George. What was I to do with such memories and such daydreams? I was thirty and still a tentative possibility to myself. Still puzzled and angry. Why had my father let loose with the armies of his anger and the horses of his needs? Why had my mother been so giving and yet so far away? Even more puzzling was my experience when I started to teach, as if some pattern was written into my life that I had no choice but to live it. That is, after a few months of teaching, it became irritatingly clear that Brother Henry, my department chairman, seemed to be playing preferential games. Thin, soft spoken Donald had been hired a few weeks before me, yet he was starting at a higher salary and had completed only a two year master’s program in theology at Notre Dame University. I came with a more comprehensive theological background. Don, who I personally liked a great deal, was also given clear preference in terms of class scheduling. 57

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Had I stumbled upon another king and an older prince? Or was I misperceiving? It was mid-September and a mildly cold day when Dr. Jerry Epstein and his wife Pearl, a graduate school friend of Julia’s, visited us in our apartment in New Rochelle, New York. Dr. Jerry and his wife were warm, bright, and delighted to see our eight-month-old son, Paul, who had been born amidst an horriﬁc ice storm the previous January. As Dr. Jerry and I talked our conversation turned to my uneasiness with the prospect of teaching for the next twenty years or so. I also spoke of my experiences when I was a child and more recently in Washington with the therapists I had seen. I am sure that I spoke of my long-held desire to do psychotherapeutic work and of my bewilderment, since I had no desire to be a medical doctor, as to how that could happen. Dr. Jerry was both a medical doctor and a student at the prestigious New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Unlike most of his medical psychoanalytic colleagues, his mind was open to many possibilities. He was self-assured and spoke of Freud’s anger at his American followers who insisted on a medical degree before one could pursue psychoanalytic studies. He mentioned different groups who had repudiated such an ideology and were intent on following Freud’s understanding of his discipline. He spoke of Theodor Reik, one of Freud’s most gifted students, and of the school he had founded to train any competent person who had a master’s degree and wished to become a psychoanalyst. I could hardly believe his words. Not only did I have a beautiful wife and son but I sensed that another door had just swung open and there lay before me a world more inviting and promising than the one I had left. The most arduous part of training, he said, was not the course work but the requirement that one undergo an intensive therapeutic experience, namely a personal psychoanalysis that entailed four or ﬁve 58

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sessions per week. Rather than a burden, this sounded like what I had, for many years, yearned for. Such an experience, I was convinced, would help me to put to rest my haunting past. Theodore Reik, in Listening with the Third Ear, writes that psychoanalysts are not made but born. He was not advocating some divine election but rather indicating, through a graphic metaphor, that persons who wish to help heal others should have made a personal, although probably unconscious decision, as to what to do with their own pain. I knew as I heard Dr. Jerry speak, sitting opposite me at our kitchen table, that I would pursue this new route he was speaking about. The seminary had healed me and given me myself but there was more to be found. I sensed that psychoanalysis was the way to do that. Julia, who was still teaching a full schedule, encouraged me in this decision, despite our very modest incomes and the complications in caring for our son that my choice would entail. Within a few days from that kitchen table discussion, I visited the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis ofﬁce, in lower Manhattan, spoke with the energetic and encouraging registrar, Annabelle Nelken, and submitted an application for training. Though the seminary had trained me to work in a highly focused and self-depriving way. But, as I look back on those years, it was as if a ﬁre was loosened in my soul, a ﬁre that was to propel me through my analytic studies with an energy, which startles me thirty ﬁve years later. Perhaps I felt as if I had to justify my leaving the seminary, so late in the day, as if becoming a psychoanalyst would be the ordination I had repudiated. As I look back over these years, however, I know that although the choice to pursue psychoanalytic training with its personal analysis was crucial for my growth, it was the birth of my two children that told me who I was. Freud has written that the most important event in a 59

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man’s life is the death of his own father. That may be so, but the birth of one’s own children is a close second. With the birth of my son, it was as if some timeless sacred moment was enacted. As if Merlin himself had conjured up not some illusion but a new world, a new garden, with its own walls around it and had turned its care over to Julia and me. We would be given a second garden when, four years after Paul’s birth, we would have a daughter, Connie, named in the shadow of Julia’s lost mother. Can I write, even after all these years, when both Paul and Connie are adults of what they mean to us? Dark eyed and black haired, with delicately chiseled faces, they came with playful and probing souls. Were they conjured up from Julia’s and my best desires? What I do know is that Mother Earth remembered my loneliness and Julia’s losses and, in a moment of quiet generosity, gave us such gifts. Children, Freud has helped us appreciate, need not be seen as angelically innocent for us to cherish their presence, nor need they be politely grateful, probably a dangerous possibility anyway, for us to respect and care for them. How easy to forget that it is not so much the meek that are set to inherit the Earth but simply our children. Not just a sign of our eventual death, children are the promise of some personal connection with a great chain of being in which we live our lives – that chain of being which only now, as we begin our second millennium, we seem to slowly recognize. Could human consciousness be waking up from a deep sleep, a sleep in which we dreamt that we were separate from each other? Can we forget such illusions of the night? Can we care for the children of the Earth knowing that they are ours whether they mirror our particular genes or not? But let me return to my psychoanalytic experiences. The year Dr. Jerry visited was 1965. President Kennedy was dead two years, but there was still hope left in America. I was thirty-one when I went for 60

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my admissions interviews for psychoanalytic training. Both interviewers accepted me. Now I would have to ﬁnd a psychoanalyst to meet the requirements for my training. After meeting with four or ﬁve different analysts I walked into the Upper West Side ofﬁce of Dr. Tom Levin, the man who would be my analyst for the next ﬁve years. Dr. Tom worked with children, a positive recommendation for me; he was quick thinking and possessed perceptive, yet gentle eyes. His fee was very moderate and his schedule ﬂexible. He was also, I eventually came to know, a person ﬁercely committed to social justice and racial equality, so much so that he helped organize the Head Start program in Mississippi. He was not a man given to obsessive ruminations on abstract theoretical or clinical questions. A personal analysis is like a private poem, a personal metaphor told to another so that through our talking we come to know who we are, why we are and who we might be. I have only learned this after many years, however. Dr. Tom’s couch supported, each weekday, all the remaining pieces of my Humpty self that had not yet come together. I have no notes from this time and so I am left with my memories and my own interpretations, both conscious and unconscious, of what happened. All this is skewed, I know, through the prism of thirty-ﬁve years since these events took place. Suddenly I feel saddened by this recounting. Do I wish to be back there, so innocent and so hopeful, as I started my analysis? Or, is it the memory of my ﬁrst dream, in analysis, which has saddened me? I was somewhere in a familiar room and I was looking at a small-screened television set, like the ﬁrst one our family had when I was twelve or so. The television scene pictured my father, smiling at me, waving and walking away. I could not touch my father through the impersonal and cold glass television screen barrier. Was the TV screen a symbol of my father’s depersonalizing 61

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defenses? Was he leaving me in the hands of my newfound father/ analyst? Alternatively, in having him wave good-bye, which he had so frequently done, was I wishing that he would ﬁnally go away? Maybe I was just desperate to reach him and was asking for help. Since my mind had reworked these images in order to remember them, what was it that I was telling my analyst with this scenario? Was I giving a message that I expected most father authority ﬁgures would be more interested in waving good-bye than in saying hello? True to analytic practice in the mid-sixties, the ﬁrst dream was not interpreted, but merely listened to attentively. Maybe my sadness is not only at a departing father but also at my own departing youth and all the energy of those youthful years. I was married, had two children, was a college professor and had started on a new career. I was fearful as to whether I could carry these tasks with competence, without losing my balance. I did not wish to imitate my father’s example of fatherhood. I realized that I would have to hold myself together for the rest of my life, not by any external forces but with a consistent inner conviction. Would such a task be possible while memories of my father’s constant criticisms and my mother‘s painful mid-life passage still echoed in my soul? I can barely remember my analyst’s responses during our early work together, all of which suggests that he did his job rather well. As the window, which I viewed from the couch, gave way to winter snows, spring rains, summer rays, and autumn leaves, I learned, ever so slowly, that without self-forgetfulness, self-remembrance is dangerous. I had to recount all of Humpty’s childhood, his ﬂight to the seminary and his present whereabouts in order, paradoxically, to forget him. As I could talk for Humpty and understand him, I found a safe place where I could mourn his passing. Perhaps the most meaningful awareness I had during my ﬁve 62

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years on the couch was what I had always somehow already known: we are alike in our needs and our dreams, only the adjectives change. I count nothing human as alien to me, wrote the Roman playwright, Terence, and in that reﬂection he captured, two thousand years before Freud, one of the building blocks of psychoanalysis. We all stand on level ground and so my story is, in a way, everyone’s.

63

Talking Memories

A

pril rain, April sun – sometimes warm, sometimes not – the mind’s mirror as I made Dr. Tom’s couch my sanctuary. My analysis continued. My father, I was able to recall, was not always angry. Strange, hiding behind my memories of his yelling, his tasks and his meanspirited responses lurked other memories, memories that came forth haltingly. Happier times when we would go on family picnics to Sylvan Lake, New York, many hours of which would be spent, while driving, singing, often initiated by my father. His was a strong although untrained voice, and as he carried the tunes he would speak of his youth when he and his friends would sing together on the corner of their New York City block. It was as if the car and not our house was the safe place, as if the father who could sing was the polar twin of that angry man at home. I remembered, with some longing, the brother with whom I also sang, before our tongues turned to misunderstanding. As I spoke of these things in my analysis, I knew I had been thrown into a maze of love and hate. I had to come to terms with both roads.

Talking Memories

Nor were my recollections of school totally shameful. I remembered Mrs. Bush and wept at her kindness as I remembered her praise when she told me that she had selected my essay to read to her mother and, only afterwards, showed her the text with its incomprehensible spelling. I told Dr. Tom of that confused eleven year old boy who performed a pantomime in the school auditorium to the melody of I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles and of the audience’s continued applause. I knew what events life had brought me, but I had little understanding as to how the pieces fell together. I had found a place, on Dr. Tom’s black leather Victorian analytic couch, where it was safe to wonder about such things, safe to lessen the rigidity of thoughts and actions imposed during my Carmelite years – those years where I had controlled myself just as my father had controlled me. Slowly, my analytic words became building blocks; they were bridges to the different parts of my life, helping me understand not only what I had done but also where I could go. The ﬁrst time I went to Dr. Tom I could not lie on his Victorian couch; it would take four or ﬁve visits before I would be able to. Although he offered the option of calling him by his ﬁrst name, I would not be able to do that either for at least three years. Yearning for acceptance and equality with a male authority, I was, simultaneously, suspicious and somewhat ungenerous in my actual responses. And of my ﬁrst dream of the departing father behind the glass TV screen, would I not reexperience that relationship, as I have mentioned, with the ambiguous Brother Luke, the chairman of the department? Remembering those events, I am struck by our human capacity not only to distort reality but also to select situations that recreate our childhood experiences and phantasies. The theology department reenactment of a favored older brother and of myself as puzzled and irritated was one such example. Dr. Tom helped me understand that 65

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all too frequently we perpetuate our emotional injuries; in our need to master childhood traumas, we unwittingly repeat them. In the present case, my older brother colleague, as well as the department chairman, shared a similar ethnic and cultural background and a similar emotional character structure. Although my perceptions were correct, my reactions and interpretations were not. I would be angry if my schedule seemed more burdensome than my colleague’s Donald’s; and I was irritated when he was repeatedly asked to discuss an issue at our department meetings, all of which locked me to the past and robbed me of the present. As my analysis proceeded, I glimpsed my own distortions and, along with a feeling of embarrassment at my own complicity in my unhappiness, I felt freer to know that I had a hand in the script writing. How liberating to know that one’s defenses are just that: one’s own. They no more accurately reﬂect the objective world than looking through someone else’s lenses. As my irritation lessened, so did my need to be injured; and as I was less injured, I had more energy for my analytic studies. Too many of the chores of our adult life are set in our childhood. In working out my hopes and fears, my aggression and my loves, I was reworking my childhood in this new playground called psychoanalysis. The particular moves were unimportant – the task monumental. In order to go any further, however, I must go backward, since the injury of my adult workplace was not the only example of my subtle reliving and recreation of my childhood experiences. When I was thirteen, my father bought a Dumont twelve inch television set. Every Tuesday evening not only would many of the neighbors come to visit, but many relatives as well – all to see Mr. Television (Milton Berle) and his Texaco servicemen. Those were wonder66

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ful moments: twelve to sixteen friends sitting on anything available, laughing on the outside yet marveling, as well, at this magical piece of furniture. To all appearances, my family was successful and functioning. My parents were generous with food and with their home. In remembering such times, I had to recognize that I was not as injured as I fantasized, not quite bereft of a family as I had imagined. As I recounted my past and present life with Julia, Paul and, with the passing of the seasons, our daughter Connie, I became less and less the fallen Humpty and more the husband and father I in fact was. I came to know myself slowly, in ﬁts and starts. I would have to hear my words, in all their various meanings, many times over before I could begin to ground myself. I listen, still. Shortly into my analysis, I spoke about Dr. Jules Nydes, an analyst I had previously interviewed before choosing Dr. Tom. I remembered his impressive ofﬁce overlooking Central Park South. His manner was distant but his questions perceptive. What would be the most difﬁcult thing for you to talk about, he asked, testing my self-awareness, I suspected. I would be embarrassed to talk about my sexual phantasies, I answered, but it would be more difﬁcult to talk about my anger. True. Wrenching moments came back while lying on Dr. Tom’s couch, as I allowed myself to verbalize my rage and hurt at my father – feelings which surprised me since I thought they were long gone. Dr. Tom repeatedly heard my memories of coming home during my early teen-age years to be greeted, all too frequently, by chaos, in what was previously a neat and orderly household. I spoke of how I would clean things up, iron the clothes and make supper for the family. I spoke of how Ed and I were closer then, before his National Guard unit was sent to Korea. I mentioned how when he returned he chose not to go to college and instead decided to work with my mother in 67

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the small linen drapery business that my father had established for her. Given our academic histories, I spoke of how puzzled I had been by his decisions particularly since he had been urged, before leaving the army, to apply to West Point. Having been through what he had, perhaps he needed the protection of a home, just as I had needed the protection of the seminary. Was it my own deep rage at my father for his betrayal of the covenant between father and son that allowed for the possibility of ﬁnding my own voice by ﬂeeing to the seminary? I also remembered, as my analysis progressed, some wonderful friends and neighbors who were available during those unconnected years of my mother’s illness – memories, which had been eclipsed. I remember, as I have mentioned, Mrs. Ritta. She was a small woman with a ﬁnely chiseled face and short black hair. Sometimes I would come home to ﬁnd her in our cleaned house with supper cooking. Stopped by, she would say, for just a few minutes. Love, I saw before my eyes, was in the doing and not in the words. I cherish her memory, still. A lot of analytic time was spent in understanding my Carmelite journey. I was not only extraordinarily grateful for what had been given to me, but I became aware, reluctantly, of what had been taken from me. Such thoughts arose as I began to speak of the Church’s teachings on sexuality. As I gave form to my feelings, my phantasies and my frustrations, I became convinced that the taboo on sexual awareness and expression was not necessarily a sign of a special calling to the priesthood but a powerful control mechanism. In curtailing and circumscribing with guilt this expression of pleasure and love a person is all too frequently alienated from his or her own human identity, alienated from a sense of themselves as basically good. St. Augustine’s depression, as evidenced by his teachings on the everpresence of original sin, had cast a spell over western Christianity, and over me. Slowly it 68

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lifted and I sensed the life-anxiety which makes such teaching possible. The city of God, I concluded, would have to be found in the here and now or it would be just as lost as Atlantis. My analyst did not comment on my theological musings. He was interested in fostering my autonomy; he seemed to know intuitively that only the one who experiences them could resolve such religious conﬂicts. Slowly I began to weave together what psychoanalytic theory was teaching and what I knew from my theological background. I became convinced that is was difﬁculty with aggression that was at the root of the Roman Catholic Church’s coercive teaching on sexuality. When we do not experience ourselves as good, our aggression goes awry; our adulthood is diminished whenever morality is coerced. Freud knew that if we are going to enable people to be more ethical, more personally responsible, we should help them build a personal sense of competence, rather than exploit their fears of transgression. In prohibiting sexual thoughts, they become more enticing, while personal autonomy becomes overshadowed. As analysis progressed, my theology classes began to reﬂect my psychoanalytic perspective. I spoke of the need for an ethics, based on emotional awareness, as well as a capacity to make responsible decisions. Having permission to put into words whatever my phantasies were, psychoanalysis was helping me make choices for which I could take personal ownership. We are free, I came to understand, as we are able to experience shared love and sexual relationships as equals. These were simple yet profound thoughts. I had to unlearn a good deal of what I had read and taught in moral theology in order to know them. I had to learn that we do not necessarily possess free will but, as the English analyst Edward Glover has said, we can constantly strive to achieve freed will. Slowly I sensed what my ten years had cost me. 69

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April brings mixed days of rain and sun, mirroring the coming and going of feelings and awareness in analysis. Almost imperceptibly, I was able to acknowledge that my sorrow, pain and anger were my own personal reactions to my past. I had to decide what to do with the different pieces of my history. Humpty, I sensed, would stay broken until I was able to do that. Destiny is, in some profoundly simple yet elusive way, personal. As I began to know such things, I realized that I did not have to wait for authority’s approval or for life to give me what I thought I needed; I began to take control of my emotional reactions. I did not have to spend my days trying to ﬁgure out what others wanted. As I found the words for the feelings I had stored within, I had more energy for my teaching and my analytic studies. My father’s voice began to grow quiet and distant. It required eight courses a year, for four years, the completion of my own personal analysis and the necessary individual supervision by the ﬁfth year, for me to complete my psychoanalytic studies – just prior to my thirty-sixth birthday. I formally ended my analytic studies by presenting a case I had treated before a committee of ﬁve senior analysts. I had seen the patient for at least two years, four times a week, in low cost psychoanalysis. The committee found my case interesting and my treatment satisfactory. I wonder to this day, however, about this case, since the patient terminated treatment within a relatively short period after my graduation. Had I, unconsciously, convinced him to remain until my studies were completed? Or, in my anxiety to pass, was I inattentive to some psychological dynamics of his that I should have addressed? We ended cordially but my questions remain. In the ﬁnal months of my training, I left the clinic I had been working at and, as I have mentioned, remembered in some forgotten corner of my mind my gray-haired childhood friend. I walked the Up70

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per East Side pavements and found an ofﬁce in order to establish my private practice. I found an ofﬁce suit at 10 East 76th Street. I shared it with a colleague, Dr. Joseph Reppen. We have been friends since that time. My parents gave me a graduation party with my family and some of my college colleagues; my father offered to pay the ﬁrst six months of my ofﬁce rent. I knew he wanted to make some helpful gesture. He was also locked in a battle with his own needs and fears, and so his stern warning to me was that his help with the rent would stop at six months, no matter what. There is more, however, to analytic training than the pathos of one’s individual analysis; the intellectual challenge was a constant and exciting stimulant. Having spent ten years studying philosophy and Catholic theology, I was more than comfortable with questions that arose out of the uniqueness of human subjectivity. Religion, a twentieth century philosopher has remarked, is what one does with one’s aloneness. The content of psychoanalysis is, in many ways, the same. Freud does not appeal to any transcendent power over man; the unconscious is like a foreign territory to be explored or, minimally, to be acknowledged. In coming to terms with what is hidden in us, although we resist such knowledge, we gain, paradoxically, a better experience of our autonomy. All too frequently submission to unknown authorities entails relinquishing self knowledge and individual responsibility. Slowly I sensed that Freud too was also a moralist; a moralist, however, without a religious portfolio. The only portfolio he seemed to carry was his conviction of man’s conﬂictual nature and his unending, and frequently unacknowledged, desires. And Humpty wondered, during his analytic studies, whether he had stumbled upon Socrates’ descendants still asking disturbing questions. Questions, which had been scattered throughout my life, 71

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were now coming together in some coherent fashion. As I struggled to formulate what I was learning, I began to understand that any internal thought or image is simply an informational point of reference, like a river, fed from many tributaries. Some we trace from obvious mountain streams, while others come forth from the ground, from hidden and seemingly silent springs. Freud speaks of unconscious motivation and I understood such a possibility immediately. I had grown up in a household of many scripts; I had struggled to understand what was really going on. To all appearances we lived in a lovely home, my father was successful, my mother competent and my brother intelligent and handsome. That there was turbulence behind the surface prepared me, in some strange way, to understand Freud’s categories of manifest and latent meanings that he used to decipher both dreams and neurotic symptoms. As my analytic studies continued, however, I began to experience that both psychoanalytic theories, as well as analysts, were as diversiﬁed as the religious denominations. I became uncomfortable with those fellow students and teachers who had to be the one who knew, who used analysis as an ideology for categorizing people, rather than simply another route for understanding and helping. Notwithstanding that awareness I progressively came to realize that I had stumbled upon a new asceticism – one not focused on the denial of our human needs, as the monastery had taught me, but on the discipline of emotional awareness. Only as an adult, I came to appreciate, could I live a life with Julia, could I be a father to Paul and Connie and not resent the giving but enjoy my children for who they were. My analytic sessions would vary in their intensity as well as their helpfulness. All of this, slowly, I came to expect. Sometimes it seemed as if the forty-ﬁve minutes were spent thinking and saying nothing at all. Nevertheless, as I was able to say what I considered 72

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bizarre, embarrassing, or disturbing, I experienced a sense of relief rather than retribution. I had to learn this lesson repeatedly. The rigor of a ﬁve-times-a-week analysis, for ten or eleven months a year, gave me another message: freedom of thought was possible and productive within boundaries. A psychoanalytic ethic entails a continuous struggle for self knowledge. And I remembered, as I have mentioned, the Socrates of my adolescence and the hidden, longed for God of my seminary years and I knew that I was on the same road – although, paradoxically, not the same road at all. I could walk this road because of the liberal education the seminary had afforded me and because my early mother, before her great absence, had given me just enough safety to risk self knowledge without self repudiation. Had I unconsciously expected that my psychoanalysis would be a liberating process of justifying and explaining my perceptions of injury? Not only was such a phantasy not fulﬁlled but also injury, I came to understand, is simply the condition of being human. In the center of that empty bubble we call mind, we can, all too easily, create a private world. Sometimes it does not join with the world of others and without such feedback, we have no way of knowing where we stand. If we imagine one of the soap bubbles from our childhood pipes and look from the inside out, inside the bubble is a world in itself. Inside there is no up or down, no right or left, only a transparent, colorful water membrane – a point of reference – demarcating, for a moment, the ever-present air. It is only from the outside that we can name a bubble. From the inside of our bubble-mind we constantly rearrange our memories, scheduling the events of our life in such a way that they result in joy or sorrow, anger or wisdom. I think wisdom has to do with knowing that it is we who do the arranging. On the inside of that space, that quiet center of my own self, I came to experience that only by letting 73

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go and working out my rage, as well as my love, could I know the role that I had played in creating and fostering what had happened to me. How, that is, in being injured, I had, unknowingly, allowed more pain to come. I was, I now know, injured as well as injuring. Injuring – by the very force of my recollections. Another major step toward my personal healing occurred when, without forgetting my father’s brutality, I was able recognize my mother’s provocative submissiveness, as well as her childhood depression, which she had brought to her marriage. Dr. Tom had mentioned this aspect of my history many times but it was not until the end of my formal analysis that I was able to hear what he was saying. I understood that although my mother was also broken, we were not the same. I had been the child, she, the mother. I had always experienced that she felt powerless before my father. I know now that she was not completely powerless. Her living out her phantasy of helplessness brought havoc to her life and to her family’s. My Carmelite years of discipline and monastic living prepared me for the many solitary hours that I would spend in my ofﬁce, listening and responding to patients. A monk’s life, even in the twentieth century, entailed learning to be comfortable with and comforted by silence and out of that silence to experience one’s sense of oneself more deeply. When my formal analysis was over, I experienced that working, verbally and non-verbally, with patients inevitably brought something new to light, in both of us. As my analytic days grew and the years added more depth to my knowledge, it was the commonality of our human experiences that took deeper root in my mind. I experienced, what Freud had rediscovered, that we are all had by our histories and our conﬂicts, by our need to feel real, to speak and be listened to. Otherwise, we are lost 74

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in a desert. Dr. Tom intervened and interpreted in many helpful ways and some unhelpful ways. Yet all these interventions are woven together somehow into a garment without seam. I have forgotten much of what he said; this, I know, would not bother Dr. Tom. The better the analysis, the less need to recall the analyst in much detail. As I am able to tell these things, in this more open space of life, the power of my family secrets seems lessened. There is a difference, of course, between self indulgent reverie and a remembering which enables us to know both others and ourselves. Which path we walk upon is not always clear; our random desires and our selective memories have us, despite our best motives.

75

Running

A

powerful wind arose. And as winds do, it rearranged the topography of leaves, the incidents that make up our daily passing. I remember the years from 1965 to 1970, as the possibly the most active in my life. While attending the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis psychoanalytic institute at night, I taught a full schedule of college elective courses; concurrently I was driving down the West Side Highway ﬁve times a week for my analysis, at 79th Street and Central Park West, while also taking courses toward my doctorate in theology at Fordham University; drinking up learning, I see now, as if I had a great fever and no amount of liquid could quench the thirst. How lucky for me that Julia understood this fever and helped me accomplish these tasks by not complaining about my absences or my need for study time when I was home. All the while she was also teaching a full time college schedule. We would leave our blue Nash Rambler running while one of us ran into the apartment and the other left as we alternated in our care for Paul. Our lives were busy, our ﬁnances

Running

modest, our hopes optimistic. It was also the nighttime lullabies that I would sing to my dark eyed son that kept me grounded to Mother Earth, while I climbed the Freudian mountain to view this new vision of mind and man. Nevertheless, in retrospect, I see that I asked too much of myself and perhaps of Julia also; an echo of my father asking too much of me. I had to prove to the memories of my broken past, and to my ever doubting father, that I was not only competent but also masterful. I had to prove, to myself, that Humpty was no longer in need of special care, that the king’s doubts should be a crown of shame on his head. I know now that I used too much energy to pursue my goals. I lost precious time with my family; a deprivation I need not have imposed on either them or myself. It is difﬁcult to understand such things in one’s thirties even with an analysis underway. In my childhood home and later in the seminary, leisure time was not valued as a human enterprise. In the last period of my psychoanalytic training, while still teaching, I found an ofﬁce, as I have mentioned, on East Seventy-Sixth Street in New York City. It had neither oak-paneled bookcases nor many entrance steps, yet the memories of my lost therapist from childhood were comforting. Tired from all that my psychoanalytic training had cost, physically and ﬁnancially, I decided not to complete my doctoral studies at Fordham University. Prior to making this decision, however, I had asked my father for some ﬁnancial help in order to take a leave from my college teaching and write a thesis. My father, who had trouble whenever he was directly asked for anything, declined. The year was 1970 and I graduated the psychoanalytic institute in June. By September, I had left my teaching position and committed myself to a full-time private practice. Although I had received positive reviews from students, most of whom were seniors, Manhattan Col77

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lege decided that the only way it would give me tenure was for me not to have any independent practice but commit myself only to teaching. I reminded them that the business and the engineering faculty were not give such an ultimatum and that my modest practice added to, rather than took away, from my teaching, as my evaluations reﬂected. Unwilling to prove myself, once again, and anxious to get on with my new profession I did not expend much energy in trying to defend my position. NPAP, as my psychoanalytic institute was known, was able to make referrals to its graduates and many of my colleagues and teachers were helpful by referring patients to me. It was the early seventies and many people were still interested in understanding their insides, notwithstanding the fact that such a pursuit did not promise immediate monetary gain or a slimmer body. I sat, as I still do thirty-eight years later, in my analytic cell listening to other Humpty’s tell the stories of their broken lives, trying to respond not with armies or horses but with whatever psychoanalytic wisdom I can muster. All this as both analyst and patient confront the elusive task of understanding mind and mores, as they reach for what is real. Real, however, is not something given to us; real is what we create in the ﬁnding of ourselves and the world we live in.

78

Interlude Of Elephants and Kings

I

don’t know when I ﬁrst fell in love with elephants, when I became aware of this binding relationship. Was it that little black metal elephant in the home of my youth on the bookshelf of our tastefully furnished living room? Maybe I fell in love with elephants much later, sometime after my own children were raised. Was it then that I remembered these giants, their mannered ways and their ﬁerce loyalty? Elephants remind me of the elusiveness of life, although why this is so I do not understand. Are their large, ﬂoppy ears reminders of the importance of listening? Is that the kinship I feel with these friends? When they carry the bones of their kin to resting places are they, in their quiet persistence, the caretakers I needed? If the king had called out such creatures as these, with their gentle eyes, instead of armies and horses, Humpty might have come together again – out of sheer delight. To do this, of

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course, the king would have had to use great power and no bluster. The elephants, I am sure, would have gently nudged, with their playful feet and trunks, Humpty’s pieces closer together, milling about as they do, seemingly unaware of the tasks at hand. I have always thought it better to take care of what is broken – quietly, self-forgetfully when possible. Not quite as potentially erratic as our chimpanzee cousins, elephants care for their young with great consistency. Is that why we call them the creatures with long memories? To care for one’s young means to remember the best that one was given in one’s own earliest childhood. My mother, I knew, remembered, although she was too easily distracted by my father’s insistent needs. Julia remembered her good beginnings and held the memory tight. She gave our children, not only a smiling face, but a playground of consistent care and available love. Perhaps elephants remind me of Mother Earth itself, large, rotund, carrying both kings and ordinary folk with no discrimination, and with ever so slight a sense of the comic. Would that we could respond in a similar way to the world. That we have killed so many of these creatures, not only for their ivory but also for the land they feed upon, is a tragic consequence of acquisitive consciousness.

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hen Humpty fell and broke into all those pieces, was he in fact replicating what we all feel like as human beings, separate yet somehow intimately related to each other, as if others are simply unconnected or forgotten parts of ourselves? Medieval philosophers, so I recall reading, pondered the question of the one and the many. I think along with our medieval forefathers, I can ask: Is there one mind that has different showings, so to speak, in all the different people in the world? Or, is each individual a separate world unto him or herself ? Are we all, perhaps, like the synchronized movement of a hundred birds in ﬂight, responding to music that is hidden to our ears? Both Freud and Jung struggled with similar issues. Freud’s twentieth century answer speaks of universal conﬂicts and fears as well as individual defenses. For Jung, there are universal archetypes and the process of personal individuation. It is only after many years of trying to understand such things that I respond to the nursery rhyme of Humpty as a yearning for reuniﬁcation and therefore a struggle with

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our separateness. Only when we personally experience such yearnings, I am convinced, do they make any sense at all. Was reading Plato, early in my life, with his thought that the sexes were once one and yearned to be reunited, the grounding for reading Humpty’s story in this light? As I reﬁned, in my memory, the patients I have worked with, I am continuously aware of Humpty and his divided parts. I see this when I sit patiently at the foot of a wall, sometimes for many years, while another tells his or her story. Knowing my own disjointedness, another’s is not alien to me. In fact, I have had to learn not to be the all good parent and rush in and try to heal wounds, responding more to my needs than to a patient’s. And I have come to learn that to whatever degree I make healing possible for the people with whom I work, I heal myself as well. In bringing to light what they have repressed or just forgotten, I constantly remember forgotten parts of myself. Donald Winnicott speaks beautifully of our need to crossidentify with each other, to put oneself in another’s shoes. When we are able to do this, not only do we momentarily appreciate difference, but our human propensity for making value judgments on others lessens as well. In order to step in another’s shoes, however, we have to not overvalue our own. We ﬁnd pieces of ourselves in each other. If this is true, and I believe it is, perhaps Humpty was not too forlorn in his fall. Perhaps as he grew older and noticed his various parts now sprinkled over the Earth, he looked with delight and amusement as he came to recognize and to own more and more of himself in the world around him. And this includes all the creatures that we walk this green and blue planet with. Maybe Humpty never quite came back fully together again, since whenever I see consciousness looking at me through supposedly dumb animal eyes, I immediately feel called upon to make some response. 82

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Somewhere, not too deep inside, I am happy we are all related to each other. I feel Lewis Thomas’ truth as he writes eloquently of our common ancestors, those original cells, immortalized forever in the fossils of the sea. Thinking about my ﬁrst few years in practice, my mind goes to a young man I treated two or three years after graduating from the analytic institute. His name was Gary. He was a quiet man who seemed particularly out of place in the busyness of mid-Manhattan. Do I connect him with that awkward dark eyed little boy, age ten, who, before graduating from sixth grade grammar school, participated in a school show pantomiming a dunce to the music of I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles? As I remember responding to the audience’s laughter and prolonged applause, I recall being both pleased and puzzled by my situation. I was able to play the dunce and anticipate the unexpected in this self choreographed pantomime; yet I was a dunce in class. Was it a self-justifying compensation that made me believe that I was isolated by the very intelligence I was presumed not to have? Was it myself again that became the backdrop for my memories of Gary? The image of that puzzled, isolated, young boy echoed in my mind as I attempted to help this lonely, lanky, pale young man. He seemed, as I remember him, both innocent and bewildered; he was hardly able to articulate why he was in my ofﬁce at all. I felt not only concern for, but also somewhat protective of this unknown stranger. I was puzzled by my feelings. He was a carpenter, he said, as well as a political activist; he participated, so he informed me, in Marxist study groups. He spoke of his father, who had left the family many years ago, as well as of his mother in such distant terms that I was barely able to sense their presence. He grew up in a country farm environment, of Swedish ancestry, and had, just a year or so prior, moved to New York City. After work, except when he went to his discussion groups, he 83

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returned to his apartment and either read or played the piano. He had little, if any, social life with either men or women. Gary was a likable young man, as I have found many injured people are who do not run away from their pain. After speaking of his personal history, he was quite content to sit opposite me, on a twice-aweek basis, and say nothing to my attentive ears. He would, occasionally, give brief answers to my generic inquiries. I had been taught, in the nineteen sixties, to listen carefully and consistently to patients; I had been taught that their free speech, so to speak, would lead us into forgotten terrain. I had not been taught how to respond to continuous ﬂat silence. I began to feel inept and mildly irritated. To my gentle reminders that he try to say whatever might occur to him, with as little self judgment as possible, Gary would smile uncomfortably while conveying bewilderment as to how he was supposed to speak of his insides. After a few months of our concerned standoff, it became clear that I was not handling this case well. Gary wondered if therapy was for him, while I, in my beginner’s enthusiasm, felt frustrated by my struggle to help this injured person. The evocation of need was painful. Had not my white haired psychiatrist from childhood made me feel safe and understood? Had not Dr. Neu in Washington been of enormous help when I reached for the words to articulate my discontent? In view of such memories, I was unwilling to lay the absence of progress at the feet of my patient. I do not remember when it occurred to me to ask the most obvious of questions; in retrospect, I am embarrassed by its simplicity. I asked Gary, one session, what it was like when there was so much silence between us. In a quiet, calm voice, he said that he was used to it. There was, he continued, hardly any speaking in his household when he was growing up. At his dinner table, for example, only the most perfunctory of interchanges would occur, for example, can I have more 84

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potatoes? After dinner, he would go to his room, play piano or read. Frequently he would hear his parents arguing. When he said this, it became clear that our work together was not making headway since it was, in some way, repeating and replicating Gary’s childhood experiences. Was that why Gary did not experience my relatively silent presence as a possibility for self-discovery? Gary did not know, in practice, anything about personal communicating. The space between us was cluttered with a dead silence. Gary reminded me not only of myself as forlorn but also of George, my classmate from eight grade, as imprisoned by fear. At this time, Gary had no girlfriend and showed no indications of any sexual conﬂicts; he seemed to be asexual and non-aggressive in his responses to others. Again, thanks to Donald Winnicott’s writings, I was gaining a familiarity with the concept of a playspace between patient and analyst. This therapeutic playground, he noted, has nothing to do with games and everything to do with how and why human beings relate to each other. Gary could not communicate in any playful interactive way because self preoccupied and remarkably non-communicative parents had injured him. His injuries were as real as if he had been physically abused. I knew what it was like to be locked away, somewhere inside, protecting my frightened Humpty self. If Gary had no bridge to the world, then I would give him words, as building blocks; I decided, therefore, to speak and no longer to quietly wait for his associations. I spoke about anything that touched on Gary’s world, carpentry, politics, piano playing, and everyday news events. Gary listened and did not turn away as George had. Ever so slowly he began to answer, not with the dead language he had used until then, but, almost imperceptibly, with a growing presence of tone 85

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and vibrancy in his voice and a desire to connect. I changed my approach, however, with some misgivings. I had left full time teaching with regret; had I, despite myself, fallen back into it? Was I substituting a personal need to be the good father for an analytic discipline that would be a better guarantee of the patient’s autonomy than a more active technique? I had read a few articles by Sandor Ferenczi, the brilliant Hungarian analyst, and a close friend of Freud’s, who, nevertheless, advocated a more personal interactive technique when working with very troubled people. He was not given to a theoretical belief in a psychoanalyst’s neutrality. He focused on a patient’s psychological and developmental needs and believed that an analyst should address, via his or her relationship with a patient, such individual factors. It has only been after many years of practice that I can fully appreciate Ferenczi’s ideas. I was, with some puzzlement, both anxious and self-assured as I departed from what I had been taught. Gary continued for another year, sitting opposite me twice a week, before he decided to come more frequently and use the couch. Even when he was experiencing analysis, in a more traditional way, I kept the focus on how his communication affected the therapy playground in which we found ourselves. As we worked together, Gary came to understand how the disproportionate relationship inherent in the child/parent situation had abused him, primarily by omission and had left him stranded in his own reveries. This awareness came when he was, so to speak, at an adolescent stage of analysis. I understood this dramatically when one day he announced that, thanks to his Marxist study group, he had come to understand that psychoanalysis was oppressive and designed to support a paternalistic, capitalistic economic system. If he continued to pay my fee, he said, he was, in fact, supporting a system that celebrated a capitalistic reward for the performance 86

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of a necessary human task. When I asked him to speak further about his thoughts and feelings, he stated, in an injured and angry voice that since he earned considerably less an hour than I did, I was exploiting him with the arbitrary fee I had set. I spoke, over the next few sessions, of his forgotten and repressed rage at his father, as well as his distrust of his distant mother. I related his rage at exploitation to the lack of personal care evident in his early home and to his feeling that there was no way he could affect the parental circle. That is, I made what is known as pre-Oedipal as well as Oedipal conﬂict interpretations. To no avail, Gary stated that he was going to quit therapy. At this point, I asked, perhaps out of frustration, if he himself saw any solution to the inequality he had come to articulate and to hate. He paused and, after some quietly tense moments, he answered that the only way he could establish equality was if he paid me what he himself earned, that is, four and a half dollars per hour. I knew, immediately, that he would leave if I did not agree. I was not willing to leave our work in such an unﬁnished way and so without too much reﬂection, I agreed. Our arrangement would last for one-and-a-half years. The therapy continued and during this period his social contacts expanded with male friends, he starting dating and his business increased. At the end of this period, Gary began joking with me that since he business was doing well and he would eventually charge the same outrageous fees that I did, he could pay my regular fee. He added that he had come to recognize that I had mastered more than he had for now and so he didn’t feel that I was exploiting him. I was able to let Gary create his world via his relationship with me, rather than just interpreting his need to do such a thing. I was able to give him not only building block words but power over my income. 87

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In so doing, I brought home to him not only our human equality but also my understanding of the relationship between people and money. Without prolonged political discourse, I conveyed my concerns about money, power and reality testing – which, I am convinced, have been skewed in our particularly acquisitive society. Gary stayed another two years or so and left feeling more alive, less frightened and in better command of himself. A year before he left, however, he said, during a session, almost self-forgetfully, that his mother had called and told him that the father he had not seen for years had collapsed and died in a small southern ﬁshing village, apparently the victim of a sudden heart attack. Although I refocused on his feelings for the lost, now dead father, I was unsuccessful in relieving the full range of anger, and particularly the grief, I suspected was there. I had been the good environment Gary needed. Perhaps too much so. I still had a great deal to learn about the analytic playground. Notwithstanding all of our work together, Gary left treatment, I believe, somewhat prematurely. He was, however, anxious to be out on his own and did not think we could go much further. I agreed, since whatever reservations I had were overshadowed by his capacity and desire to take fuller ownership of his life. He left, as I have said, a happier, warm young man. There were smiles where only bewilderment had been, color where before I had seen only pallor. He was living with a girlfriend at the time; the relationship was serious and satisfying. He called a number of months later to tell me he was getting married. He may very well have decided, eventually, to work with someone else who could take him from where he was to another place. I have not heard from him since. As I look back over the years, I am aware of others to whom I brought less healing than Gary and to whom I have caused some pain. 88

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I know that we are all both injured and injuring; paradoxically there is no defense for its occurrence. There were cases I treated, which, had I Merlin’s magical powers for just a moment, I would reverse time and treat them anew. I am sure I am not alone, among analysts, in wishing such. I am only too aware of my own clay feet; the words of T. S. Eliot, The shame/of motives late revealed and the awareness/of things ill done and done to other’s harm/which once you took for exercise of virtue, continuously humble my memories. Although Freud spoke of his band of secular pastoral counselors the only forgiveness of sin that psychoanalysis hopes to offer each patient is an awareness of their complicated motives, frequently their forgotten pain, as well as an understanding of consequences of their thoughts and actions. Ideally, in a well wrought analysis, self-knowledge replaces, among other dynamics, narcissistic specialness or masochistic subversion and this is as true for analysts as it is for patients. Analysts are, ideally, responsible to themselves for resolving their personal conﬂicts. When distortions do enter the therapeutic relationship, we speak of an analyst’s countertransference: our clouding of the issues, our misreading of a patient’s text. When this happens another avenue opens up for both analyst and patient, if an analyst is able to stand back and watch himself, so to speak. There is no end to analytic work, simply new paths to travel. An odyssey, as I have said, with no ﬁnal destination, no home to return to and no blind Homer to relate our tale. It is left to us to tell of our explorations and to learn, if we can, from where we have been. Father Patrick came one day, referred by a colleague. He would be in New York for two years or so and wanted to have an analysis. He seemed quite content in his priestly vocation; happy with the work he was doing, yet somewhat curious about what had led him to choose the priesthood. I found myself anxious to work with him. Despite my 89

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years in the seminary and my teaching of religious studies, I had seen very few clergy for treatment. Fr. Patrick was sensible, intelligent and had come from a relatively devout Irish family. His manner was down to earth; he did not have the playful philosophical mind of my seminary friend Dennis or the forceful intellectualism of my fellow Carmelite, Chester. Was I looking forward to working with Fr. Patrick so that I could, in absentia, have conversations with my old friends? Perhaps I was interested in being the one who knows, an authority over one who was living the life I had left. The analysis started and I proceeded as if his highly controlled defenses, and the potential conﬂicts of his lifestyle, could be successfully addressed in the two-year period he had allotted himself; – not a particularly long period of time to map both mind and heart and heal the forgotten wounds of childhood. The important discovery with Father Patrick would not be the necessary time to do an adequate analysis, however, but my own complicity in his tediously slow moving therapy. Fr. Patrick spoke of his caring but emotionally distant mother; he mentioned his brother, father, and grandfather, all of whom where police ofﬁcers. No wonder I experienced, in his speaking, an unquestioned a commitment to authority! Somehow, however, the various issues that he spoke about never led anywhere. He would come to his sessions punctually, lie on the couch and proceed to talk of some parish work or some course he was taking with little or no emotional resonance. When I was not puzzled as to what this all meant, I would be ﬁghting off drowsiness. As the analysis proceeded, Fr. Patrick seemed undisturbed at the seeming lack of progress. Was I wrong? Was the therapy possibly helpful in ways I was unaware of ? Was it okay simply to be a listener? Intermittently, I assured myself that this was so. 90

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During the second half of our ﬁnal year, however, I became convinced that there was some block between us. Our therapeutic playground had a stilted quality; Father Patrick treated me with a formality that was not consonant with our relationship. Despite the information I had acquired early on of his family dynamics, nothing was added and nothing seemed to move this treatment along. In the arena of sexuality, he employed masturbation and seemed content with this solution. During most of our work, it was as if Fr. Patrick was conducting the analysis despite me, off in some corner of his mind. A corner I was clearly banned from. I not only felt like an outsider but I began to wonder if I was responsible for this strange state of affairs. Did my periodic moments of drowsiness have a lesson for me? The therapy was tedious and my various interventions did little to change that. I have often wondered how is it that we think of things to say when working with patients. Theodor Reik writes of the analyst’s need to be surprised by his own utterances as much as the patient may be. It is only with this in mind that I can understand what happened one session when I, quite innocently I thought, asked Fr. Patrick to tell me again about his family. He did so. Momentarily bewildered, I sat forward in my wooden rocking chair. Was this the ﬁrst time I was hearing this? Fr. Patrick spoke of his older brother who was always putting him down. He wondered aloud as to whether he might have become a priest so that this brother would have to call him father. He spoke of his hurt that his father clearly favored his oldest son, who became a police ofﬁcer just like him. He recalled the frequent ﬁghts he had with this sibling in his attempt to ﬁnd his own place in this family of cops. He had worked out a rather formal relationship with this brother, enough to block out his anger at the family dynamics. It was as if I had been looking in a mirror and was unable to see the image. 91

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In a moment, I knew that Father Patrick was reliving with me, transferring onto me in more technical terms, his emotional relationship to this older sibling. It had been my task, unattended to so far, to recognize this pattern so that he could understand and resolve this repetition. I was, for Fr. Patrick, his older brother. Unconsciously I could not or, up until then, would not let myself see that. After all, I was the injured one, not the injuring one. How could anyone possibly experience me as I had experienced my older brother? In the space of a thought, I perceived how my inability to recognize his unconscious emotional script had interfered with Fr. Patrick’s need both to speak about and resolve such growing up experiences. I was not proud of my discovery. As I spoke, over the next few sessions, of how he was casting me in his brother’s shoes, of his formality with me as a reaction to his anger, and as a substitute for a relationship, he began, almost before my eyes, to relax on the couch. His voice seemed to have more resonance and he began to ﬂood the room with a series of unhappy incidents from his childhood relating to his brother. He left a few months later a lighter man, knowing he had more analytic work to do. I had more to think about in this experience of my countertransference. Had I been complicit in keeping myself the injured one? Clearly so. I am not questioning the events of my childhood, just my interpretation and response to them. It has taken many years to understand that to be injured is, in some ways, the same as injuring. How? One is left justifying and reacting to another rather than simply speaking with them. One of the simplest lessons of psychoanalysis, as well as one of its most profound insights, is that only in speaking with others can we join with them. Only when language functions as a bridge can we understand others and ourselves. And live together on level ground. 92

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hy have I written of this journey? Am I, in writing it, completing my analysis, or, after all these years, merely making the journey my own? The questions circle in my mind. Although I know that a broken Humpty can refer to every person, I know equally well that he is my man, my childhood self that I have only come to fully know as I tell this story. Yet, the questions persist: am I only sharing a private phantasy, recounting a personal dream, or conveying something more? As careful as I have tried to be in these recollections, and as trusting of my unconscious memory, I am aware that I am writing a ﬁction. Indeed, memory is so close to ﬁction as to be hardly distinguishable. Our desires shape not only our choices but also the recollection of our experiences. Even when we are most convinced of the accuracy of our insights, we easily forget that the interpretation of events is, for us humans, a particularly subjective experience. So subjective that we are unaware of the arbitrariness of meaning that we bring to the most intimate or mundane events of our life. Actually, we need to tell our stories to one another in order to hear them for the ﬁrst time. Freud

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learned that from Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky. Perhaps I am reminding myself that what I have written of my father and my mother and of my various experiences may very well serve needs of which I am still unaware. Have I quietly dropped some of my memories in order to highlight others? Repression is, after all, not so much wholesale denial as losing the context for what we remember. I know that what I have recounted of my patients indicates more my perceptions than their objective deeds. Just as I know that when I listen to them, I can only hear in a dialect, ﬁguratively speaking, that I understand. Language creatures that we are, do we have other options? Words give us the capacity to create corollary worlds, so to speak, atop our apparently self-evident sensory experiences. Paradoxically, we balance such personal subjectivity with the community of discourse – the need that we all have to keep talking to each other. It is in such interaction that we decipher the shape not only of our own lives but of others as well. It is in this playground of human communication that we learn to be civil and civilized. Now I have to remember, again, as my gentle-eyed elephant friends do, the places inside me where other Humptys have taken up residence. Can I let myself reﬁnd my colleague and my friend, Joan, now that she is dead more than two decades? Joan was a tall, broad shouldered woman, ﬁercely intellectual, caring in manner and bold in living. She died of cancer, as she had predicted of many years prior when she was a patient of mine during her analytic training. She died quickly, as she also had intuited, and with more strength than I seem able to let myself recall. She called me three weeks before her death and asked if I would sit with her, help her family and help her patients. I watched, in sorrowful disbelief, as the ﬁre of her life left. In retrospect, I believe that she called me more for my sake 94

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than I for hers. Whatever advice I offered was so obvious as to be meaningless. Her husband was highly educated and writer. He was, understandably, bewildered by the speed with which the cancer was stealing her life. During this short period I rearranged my schedule and managed to get to her home, about an hour away, three or four times weekly. During our talks, she spoke of all the good things life had brought her, of my helpfulness when she had been my patient years before, and of her hopes for her sixteen year old son. She showed no anger at leaving. She called each of her patients, told them of her cancer, and gave them a name of someone they could continue to work with. We both knew the deep and honest work she had done in her analysis. She knew, as well, that I would search my memory for what I might have missed in our work together. Joan died fully conscious. I helped carry her to her ﬁnal rest and when her life became fragments of separated memories – I wept. Analysts need to remember that we not only prepare patients for living but for their dying as well. To conduct an analysis as if patients do not die is similar to pretending that they will not ever face conﬂicts over aggression or sexual issues. The maturity and peace of Joan’s death brought home to me again the awareness that death need not be quietly forgotten, as if it were an unfortunate parameter; rather, it is a ﬁnal seal to a life dedicated to self knowledge and truth, despite whatever developmental difﬁculties lie in the path. I was privileged to see Joan’s coming to the end of that path in such a noble way. Having spoken of her death, I want to recall her living. She was, when we ﬁrst met, both angry and wounded. She had been referred to me by her analyst who was locating to another state. She needed to ﬁnish her training and although she said she understood her former analyst’s need to move she was quietly furious at having 95

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been left. It soon became clear that Joan experienced a profound distrust that anyone could understand her. She was intellectually inquisitive and, on more than one occasion, personally provoking. She had read more than most students and was continually trying to turn our sessions into a private seminar. I admired her perceptions as I tried not to fall into making therapy just an intellectual exchange. I enjoyed the challange as much as I experienced her provocativeness. Once, when I was momentarily called away to attend to an unexpected emergency upstairs in my Pound Ridge home, I returned to ﬁnd, to my bewilderment, that Joan was gone. When I went out to the driveway I saw that she had left. Puzzled and somewhat annoyed I waited to discuss her actions until our next meeting. She walked in quickly, lay on the couch and remained silent. When I asked about her disappearance she deﬁantly replied, just treatment for leaving me. I was surprised by the ﬁerceness of her response and knew it was meant to make me feel guilty for my actions. It took us some sessions before Joan recognized that I did not lose her or forget her because I had to leave the room. That, in fact, her feared loss, her sense of not being seen, and her consequent outrage, was an unrecognized repetition of what she experienced growing up. What she feared was happening to her, in fact, had happened to her. As she was able to mourn her childhood experiences, she understood that her emotional expectations were clouding her awareness about her previous analyst’s need to move and my temporary leaving our session. As we talked about these issues Joan grew more relaxed. She was able to say that she knew that her previous analyst was a dedicated and conscientious person and that her leaving was in reponse to her personal need. As she came to experience that, as people, we hold each other inside, and not just outside, she could accept and allow that my leaving was a momentary necessity, not an abandonement. 96

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When therapy is effective it gives our energy new directions. Joan brought, as I have mentioned, a similar ﬁerceness, to her dying. Patient, colleague, friend seem to delimit recognizable boundaries. My encounter with Joan, however, taught me that more than our common cells or even our ancestral fossils bind us together. We are bound by our need to hold each other’s dreams, even as we carry the bones of our kin to their graves. Holding each other’s dreams, I have come to understand, is frequently more important than interpreting them. Winnicott helped me know that we should hold a dreamer’s dream before attempting to interpret it. In his quiet, self forgetful way, he undid the need for an analyst to be an authority, the one who knows. Better, he believed, for a patient to come upon a partial explanation by himself or herself, than for an analyst to convey his correct interpretation. He also understood that analysis is a mutual experience. There is no such thing as a baby without a mother, Winnicott would write; likewise, no such thing as a patient without an analyst. They are inextricable. In fact, they create each other. They create a playground, a theater of the mind, where any neurotic or psychotic scripts of the past can be played out and hopefully mastered. In this drama, there are no silent observers, only active participants. In this symbolic ascent to humanness, to a fullness of creative living, there is only a Virgil helping a wandering Dante. I needed to read Winnicott many times, I needed to teach him in seminars, before I could allow myself to fully hear what he said, before I could say with conviction what I had always somehow felt. Analyst and patient stand on equal ground. Only a fallen Humpty, who can use his pain, his memories, and his mind, and who, like elephants, can mill about and clear the ground can help another Humpty come together. Elephants and people, both care, both grieve. I understood 97

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from Winnicott that we must hold, with our care, the different parts of patients until they themselves can bring them together. We must hold, surprisingly, even our hate, as we carry a patient’s hate and give them boundaries to their fantasies of unboundedness. Only when we have negotiated what a person is should we then, if necessary, analyze what a person desires. During my own analysis, I began reading the works of Eric Erikson. He was the ﬁrst Freudian analyst I had read who, in Childhood and Society, reﬂected on the ﬁrst ﬁve years of life in other than exclusively instinctual categories. In outlining the various developmental life stages and their different tasks, he prepared me for my future encounter with Winnicott. Winnicott focused on the earliest stages of life – how a person is pieced together, so to speak, the task, so to speak, of becoming an “I.” If the garment of a patient’s self-experience is frayed, one should quietly set oneself, as I have spoken about before, to weaving it together. What traditional analysis calls transference only occurs after a patient feels that their “endings,” so to speak, are more or less clear – no strings dangling in the wind. If someone cannot experience a symbolic reenactment of their life place transpiring in therapy then they have lost, or never had, the play of words. In such cases, the analyst will have to help them ﬁnd a new tongue with which to speak. Otherwise this other injured Humpty may never hear his or her own insides put into words. I discovered what this had meant for Gary; I am still discovering what this means for each person with whom I work. As I write these lines, I recognize that Joan did need me to sit by her deathbed; she may even have needed to see my tears as I said good-bye. I was also in need. I was grieving the death not only of a friend and colleague but also of a former patient. I had never faced the loss, through death, of someone with whom I had worked. Not98

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withstanding all that had been accomplished in our work together, it was as if Joan’s ﬁnal working through of her sense of self-worth, her experience of the care that others had for her, had to wait until her ﬁnal days. As I listen to my patients and their often frantic, grief-ﬁlled encounters with their past, are they not struggling with the haphazardness of life, the arbitrariness of experience, the conundrum of death? Are they not trying to ﬁnd a solitary place that they can leave and return to with peaceful regularity, with some sense of personal possession? I knew this in the ﬁrst few years of my practice, but it has taken me many years to integrate it into my work. As I grew more comfortable with my own inner space, my patients, of course, followed. As I grew more comfortable with my own inner space, diagnosis was less a category telling me about a patient and more a beacon helping me ﬁnd a common ground on which to stand. There is a silent core which Winnicott also writes about, a quiet place inside us which enables each individual to be personal not only with him- or herself but with others as well. How paradoxical. To be personally present with someone else means being able to be alone with myself. There is something profoundly elusive about life, elusive about us, elusive about death. It is only with gentle eyes, I believe, that we see souls and with large ears that we hear our aloneness. Elephants die as randomly as we do. It is all one Earth we walk on.

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he Hebrew Scriptures predict that young men will dream dreams and old men will have visions. I am older now but I still, despite such prediction, dream dreams. As for visions, it is as if I ﬂee them. Puzzling for me. They have always been a consolation. I have often wondered, sitting silently, sometimes distractedly, behind the couch, if the only real vision is the emptiness of death. The same as our life is membraned by our personal history, by the dates of our occurrence, delineating when we were and when we were not. How we ﬁll the space between these dates with dreams! Dreams that I would be a great psychoanalyst also, like the famous ones I had read when I taught college and began my analytic studies. Grandiose, my analyst would say, just be who you are. In knowing that, I am sure, I could know the dates of my coming and my going without outrage or too much grief. Knowing who we are, will we be able to leave life touching those we love? It was a few years into my teaching, as a professor of religious studies, that the words from the church pulpits fell mufﬂed to my ears. I

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no longer experienced a spiritual invitation beneath the words and rituals of the Roman Catholic Mass. All was quiet and dark. My children were young, my world was changing not merely because of the many theological discussions I had with my colleagues, but also because my own analysis was leading me to ﬁnd and deﬁne myself, without the beneﬁt of a religious script. In addition to my psychoanalytic reading I have, throughout the years, continued my reading various scriptural scholars. Many of their conclusions and studies offered a much more complex picture of Christ’s teaching and of Christianity than I had been exposed to. How did I walk away from so much that I had been? From seventeen to thirty-two I lived, pondered, and spoke with the living God. Then quietly, it seems, I left that house and moved to another. Of course, you will raise your children religious, my faculty colleagues at Manhattan College would assure me. When it comes down to it, you will send them to Church. I knew in some basic, almost primitive way, that I could not do that, simply because I had lived those religious years with whatever good will and conscientiousness I was capable of. As Julia and I understood our obligations as parents, we knew that we would have to pass on to our children what we understood to be true; making no claims that we were right – at all. Both Paul and Connie have grown to be adults capable of sensitive responses to the needs of others; they are not anti-religious – it does not seem to be an issue that concerns them. Before the West collapsed religious awareness into moral dictates, particularly sexual moral dictates, the West was concerned with conveying the presence of the “holy.” Although I no longer engaged in standard religious practices, I would, I felt, continue to pursue what I thought was true. Dr. Lewis Thomas, in trying to understand what the “holy” might mean, writes of an encompassing organizing awareness, 101

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hovering over all life. I think, somehow, he is right. My patients rarely speak of God or of religion. The more reﬂective ones seem just as aware of Buddhism or Hinduism as they are of Christianity or Judaism. Perhaps religious questions have no place in the theater of psychoanalysis. Analysts are, I believe, working at the dawn of creation, at the beginning of the self. It is only on the eighth day, long after an analysis is over, that one can turn and view what has come to be. Religious questions are, after all, eighth day observations. Spiritual awareness, on the other hand, has no calendar; it is coequal with growing in one’s humanity. Although my analyst was from what was known as the Freudian ego psychology school, he recommended individuals having a Jungian analysis, after the age of ﬁfty. I remember youthfully dismissing such a possibility. After all, I had been a Carmelite seminarian for ten years; I had read and studied St. John of the Cross and St. Theresa of Avila. What could a Jungian analysis do for me? It is only after the toll of many years of analytic work that I appreciate that one can, having encountered the past and its vicissitudes in the present, touch what is more universal in human experience. Perhaps Jung was saying that to stay rooted in the present, one must speak about the timeless. How innocent. And paradoxical. Donald Winnicott had such qualities but spoke the language in which I was taught to think. The topography of his psychoanalytic landscape was familiar. Yet Winnicott was British and I am American. His father was a mayor of a small English town; my grandparents ﬂed the desperation of turn-of-the-century Southern Italy, poor, hopeful, nostalgic, and proud. I bring, consequently, a Mediterranean perspective to my reading of both Winnicott and myself. I grew up proud of my Italian 102

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heritage, while American in my understandings and allegiance. When I have walked the side streets of Sienna or the boulevards of Rome, I have felt, in some mysterious way, wedded to the earth on which I walked. And I have wondered if there are household gods, mirrors of our human complexity, in the dark side streets of this Eternal City, waiting to be remembered. In 1970 we moved from Riverdale, in New York City, to a small hamlet in Northern Westchester, Pound Ridge by name. In many ways it was an idyllic setting with serpentine roads, gentle hills and small lakes. I would drive, ﬁfty miles each way, to my ofﬁce. We had many busy and happy years there. Eventually, however, the isolation, and my long commute propelled me to move, after twelve years, to Greenwich, Connecticut. Shortly after our move, I decided to relocate my practice from New York City. In Greenwich we found a place of great beauty, it offered many of the attractions of a larger city. Julia got us involved in the anti-nuclear movement of the 80’s, and we met many committed, dedicated and truly spiritual people. People committed to peace and justice, individuals dedicated to practicing their religious convictions. Greenwich, however, with its corporate consciousness, its Yankee emotional frugality and its sense of entitlement, would prove to be a most ambiguous experience. We stayed for only a short time in a large house and then moved to a smaller, stone French country style home and continued residence in this town, which, when I was young, both my parents had spoken of with awe. Did I want my parents to speak of me in the same way? Did I want to hear them acknowledge that Humpty was no longer broken? I know that it was their echo, inside me, that I was also responding to by my move. What a struggle it has been for me to break into the present. 103

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Free of the shadows from the past. Is that what my life has been, a dance with shadows? First the light and then, in the blink of an eye, the shade. Plato was right. We are cave creatures; perhaps that is why we get along with dogs so well. It is the same Humpty story with those with whom I work. Pieces apart – pieces together. Shadowed past. Shadowed present. Just one story. Different dialects. Just one person made from this green and blue planet. Man and woman. Woman and man. Male and male. Female and female. I remember my medieval philosophers, their musings, and their pondering – whether there is one mind or many. The goal of therapy, I am convinced, is to ﬁnd the present. Is that why we attribute to our western God the most elusive of names: Yahweh – I am who am – I am He who is now. No past, no hoped for future. Fully present. We can barely name what we hardly understand. The breakthrough of monotheism is not the one God concept, so much as the one “now” experience – at least in my reﬂections. A “now” that may be the best witness that we are alive. Winnicott, as I have mentioned, speaks of a transitional play area – that place where we create cultures and art, history, philosophy and religions. A timeless place, somewhere between each person’s inner space and what is outside. Is it the emptiness of the bubble mind? An emptiness that we ﬁll with the magical works of our hands, children of our thinking and our imagination? Art is both dated and timeless; dance is culture bound but always appealing; even the ancient Gilgamesh story of creation speaks in primal images that are still engaging. Is that why, when I look at art or hear music or see a ﬁlm, I am there and here and nowhere in particular, all at once? How frequently I feel a strange kinship with many of the objects before my eyes, as if it is only the slightest of accidents that 104

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divides the viewer from the viewed. What am I trying to come to with such thoughts? God is now, art is now, what we create is always in a special timeless place. What does this mean for Humpty or for my patients? I can hardly understand what I am struggling with. When we are able to teach our patients and ourselves the play of life, the play of words, are we merely trying to be intellectually interesting, or are we searching for a ground spot, a new place from which to live? As I have come to know who I am, I have felt myself part of a life-link with all who love the light and who come and go with as much regularity as the tides. As personally difﬁcult as it is for us to know that the sand forgets our names with each wave, it is more than consoling, I believe, to have taken part in this burst of life. To have smiled, cried, and touched each other, even for a moment is to feel transcendence, freeing us from our personal house of mirrors. Is that what I have been trying to say – that we are only ﬂeeting notes in an ocean of sound and we can never hear the whole symphony? Neurosis keeps us from smiling; borderline or psychotic conﬂicts keep us from touching. So we can add to Freud’s dictum of the goal of analysis being the capacity to love and to work, additionally: to smile and to touch.

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here is more that I have to question. Could I have been wrong about the heroes of my journey? I had remembered Homer’s characters and related my journey to theirs. It was, however, only after a brief exchange with my mother that different moments of my life came back to me; memories of a child unwilling, and not merely unable, to accept the status quo. I need to jump ahead in my story in order to reﬁned parts of my past. My mother, after my father had passed away, visited us in our rented upside-down house in Amagansett, New York. At eighty-four, sprightly in her manner, she spoke mostly of the good times, not of her terrible illness. As we sat on the back deck, with a slight wind coming at us from atop the trees, she remembered with humor, how I would complain, my ﬁrst few grammar school years at PS 87, that the teachers were stupid, that they had to say everything three times when once was enough. Besides, I informed her, I knew everything they were trying to teach me anyway, and what I didn’t know, she could tell me.

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As I listened to her, smiling at my childhood specialness, I wondered if Humpty had changed or only his words. I sit more easily with my limitations now but only when I let myself know them. In my mother’s twinkling recollections I knew, once again, that none of us is quite as injured, or as innocent, as we like to think. When a writer friend of mine gave me a short essay she had written on Don Quixote I was not only internally receptive but also puzzled. Had I forgotten this adolescent companion of mine? I had read Cervantes, with love, around age sixteen, before I had read Thomas Merton. Why had I forgotten him? Were his phantasies of escape too painful for me? Had I secretly identiﬁed with Don Quixote, but had to forget him, so that I could present to myself and to others a nobler image of Odyssean proportions? All the while holding my grieving friend, truth creator par excellence, so close that I lost sight of him? Perhaps I was unsure whether I was the fat Sancho Panza or the dreaming knight, with the upside-down barber’s bowl on his head. Something like that must have happened. I feel, as I remember him now, that I have betrayed an old friend, and I am saddened by the thought. Why are you coming to a Carmelite seminary? Tall Fr. Finnbar, the novice master, asked me. I am going to pursue the religious life perfectly, or something like that, is what I answered. Memories of my mounted friend? All the while I thought that I was going on a quest that would fulﬁll all the dreams of my youth. I would be the most humble, the most perfect monk I could be. And of my lady? Was it not Mother Church and Mary who merged, in some confused way, in my hopes and imagination? I know that I have told of this adventure before: of how I confronted the windmills of monastic reality in my ten-year encounter and then took leave of the ﬁeld, just as the priest107

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hood was within touching distance. Disenchanted. Enchanted. Disenchanted. Strange what makes up a human life. I have lived many lives since then and many deaths. I understood, even at sixteen, the weariness Don Quixote felt. You have it wrong, I heard him saying to his fellow humans: you do not ﬁnd reality, you create it. I would have to wait many years before I would hear a psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, again, say the same thing. Is that why I was so immediately attracted to him? Was he an unrecognized reminder of an old friend? If we do not create our reality, he wrote, we are oppressed by it. We are both burdened and enlivened by our need to ﬁnd and create meaning. Paradoxical. I now understand even more why I had to ﬂee to a dogmatic religion feeling unable, as I did, to fulﬁll this basic human task. In the seminary, I used all my strength to learn and to conform, to think other people’s thoughts. It has only been after years of listening to sad and broken tales that I remembered: without our own thoughts, we have no self. We are simply mirrors to the past, not roads to the future. It has taken me time not to be distracted by my patients’ obvious symptoms so that I could sense the presence or absence of an inner aliveness. I do not like the term authentic existence that the existentialists use. It has the sound of a call to arms rather than a discovery of human potential. Yet, when I seem to ﬁnd what is real, it changes. Windmills. I wonder if I knew, in my youth, that Cervantes and Plato were echoes. I think so. Cervantes, clearly, the more playful even if the more tragic. 108

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Is Freud one of Plato’s grandchildren, a footnote, as Whitehead suggests, to this great man’s thought? Did Cervantes, before Freud, capture the nature of psychic reality so graphically that he has enthralled the imagination of the West with his Knight ever since? Enthralled because somewhere inside us we know that we have all been given a packaged world; our imagination, just as the language we speak, is all too frequently a mirror. Quixote would have none of it. What I do know of psychic reality suggests that at our deepest, most buried level, we cannot know, and apparently have no need to know, what is true. So the windmills that Don Quixote fought were located in the ﬁeld of his unconscious. I remembered, in the course of my own analysis, with a sense of utter conviction, an image of my father as a functioning doctor. Alongside memories that I can verify by speaking with others, this memory prevailed with the same inner conviction of actual reality. It was only in remembering it and putting it into words that I recognized its presence as a forgotten phantasy and not an outer fact. How many phantasies of which we have no current awareness support our actions and our thoughts? I say this without any sense of judgment. Creativity and madness come, clearly, from the same well. We create the world. We ﬁnd the world. We ﬁnd the world that we created – if all goes well. I also recall speaking, after many years on the couch, of another image. A memory of seeing both my mother and father dressed in the garb of a priest functioning at Mass, as if they were, in fact, both priests. Before any conscious decision was made to leave my home and go to a seminary, this powerful, forgotten, merging of God and parents, forgiveness and parenting, had taken up residency within me. All these phantasies were present without my conscious knowledge, against my awareness of reality. That we are governed by such phantasies was Freud’s great discovery. His discovery was, however, what 109

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many discoveries are, a rediscovery. Was Don Quixote mad or only maddening to our agreed upon notions of what the world is supposed to be? Maddening because he challenged our conscious notions of how we are to understand ourselves in the dance of time? Did I ﬂee to the seminary in order to leave the kingdom behind or did I ﬂee into my forgotten mind to ﬁnd the priest-parents of my needs? Was it both? And of the phantasy of my doctor father? Am I not walking in his steps? Is that what I mean by creating the good father? Truth is one, Hindu thought has it, with many incarnations. Where are the incarnations? Inside of our forgotten world or in the agreed upon set of facts we experience as reality? Can we even begin to answer such questions, except to say that in asking them we shake the foundations of our personal certitude? An exercise we would do well to practice frequently. We get rigid in our thoughts as quickly as a dying body freezes in its ﬁnal moments. I allowed myself to remember the linear adventures of Homer’s heroes rather than the psychological wanderings of Don Quixote. Maybe I feared that the Knight had usurped my tasks and a more skillful pen overshadowed my story. I do not know. I do know, however, it is stupid to envy. So what did reading Cervantes and the other authors provide? Besides the gift of themselves, I know that they deepened my capacity for empathy – a sense of personal identiﬁcation with all the different characters; with a consequent sense of standing everywhere at once. I could be Don Quixote or Sancho Panza; I could even see myself as the inanimate but wary windmills protecting myself from the oncoming, and personally unprovoked, onslaughts. I saw myself as the maid who prepared the eggs that might cure the Don of his fever. I was also, in my readings, Peter, in The Shoes of the Fisherman; the questioning So110

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crates; and Boethius’ lonely philosophical monk. I try to employ such a merging tendency whenever I feel any righteousness for the injured Humpty coming on. I could, I am aware, be the distracted queen of my childhood – reluctantly. I might even be the confused, angry, selfprotective king – as much as I tell myself otherwise. Although I hate exploitation, I know I could exploit; although I abhor murder, I’m afraid I could do it. While I do not think that morality is simply what you make it, I do think we can only come to viable moral conclusions when we can identify with all the positions at issue. Literature teaches that and my patient’s stories do the same. After many years of struggle, psychoanalysis has helped me not to rest in my personal injuries. I am as wary of altruism as I am suspicious of overly conscious self-protection. Both patient and analyst must grow together or there is no growth at all. I have had to learn that taking money for therapy is an economic necessity and a professional liability. I have pictured myself as a shaman in an Indian tribe, supported by the group and unencumbered by a need for income. I piece time out as if it were a product and not merely a backdrop to the unfolding of our self-remembering. At times I am sorry that I have learned to do this in forty-ﬁve-minute pieces. I practice despite my awareness that some of my patients afford my professional fees because they have garnered more from an economic system than they have contributed. Many healing professionals, in our economic system, owe their livelihood to such inequality, an inequality that affects our minds as forcefully as any forgotten phantasy. Sad how easily ﬁnancial power substitutes for personal meaning; just as knowledge itself cannot only help with personal meaning but also serve power ends. Psychoanalysts have to be particularly wary of this; our understanding of unconscious inﬂuences can be a dangerous tool – unless we learn to be self-forgetful. What a strange mix we 111

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humans are. I can understand Freud’s need to simplify the situation with his two main drives – one toward life and one toward death, Eros and Thanatos. Our life place does not quite fall within such conﬁnes, however. Victor Frankel, in Man’s Search for Meaning, writes that the search for meaning, even in a holocaust, can keep us humanly alive. We search for meaning whether we like it or not. Even the proclamation that there is no meaning unavoidably stands in this searching tradition. Are we merely trying to straighten the crooked timber of humanity with our theories of signiﬁcance? In pursuing psychoanalytic knowledge was I in search of personal meaning, a quest for lost values? Or was I searching for power, sitting high and surveying the landscape below. What analyst does not come wounded to the ﬁeld and, if wounded, in need of an arena where they are in charge and perhaps vulnerable no longer? We are rivers motivated by many tributaries and our different psychoanalytic theories are, I am convinced, more a response to such meandering in our personalities than to objective choices. No hiding the bent timber. Only those patients who have been most angry at the therapeutic process, or at me, have helped me understand how psychoanalytic knowledge not only enables one to intervene but also circumscribes those very interventions. As much as I have needed to understand the mind, I have always wanted to help others. I am aware that one could read such a desire as a denial of my own aggression or as a compensation for a feared lack of competence. I have never understood Freud’s dispassion or skepticism, when it came to psychoanalytic therapeutic practice, that is, his apparent indifference as to whether or not he helped someone. I know, however, that we are all knights confronting windmills and we are, more than once, knocked off our balance by the 112

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encounter. The winds of life. If Dr. Robert Neu, my Washington analyst, had not been so considerate, perceptive, and non-directive, would I have been able to leave the monastery without guilt or self-hatred? If Julia were not a woman of extraordinary ﬂexibility and resource, would I be in this place today? I would not. Had I not needed to reach out to George, in the playground of my youth, would I have struggled all these years to ﬁnd myself ? Could I have found myself if Mrs. Bush had not praised my efforts? An echo of and also a yearning for what I had hoped for from the king, hidden behind the demanding voice with which he spoke to the Humpty of my childhood. So many if ’s shaping the landscape.

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y analytic ofﬁce. Is it like the ofﬁce I created, so many years ago, in the basement of my home, the castle of my youth? I remember placing shelves above an old desk, putting books there, and ﬁlling out little ﬁle cards with the names of my friends and neighbors, their addresses, and my thoughts about them. Were they a ﬁrst attempt at understanding those around me? Or maybe they just the beginning of a personal journal. Perhaps an attempt to gain some control, however illusory, over my environment. I wanted desperately to create a place where I had some sense of competence and personal importance; a place where I could forget my memories of Humpty as the dunce. A place, I also suspect, which my father, orderly man that he was, would praise. Peter Medawar, the English biologist, writes that we all possess many “I’s,” many selves. I agree. We are all there, in this bubbled space of mind, keeping company with each other, forgetting each other, ﬁghting each other and also grieving for each other. Did I write those comments about my friends and neighbors in

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order to ﬁgure out our different selves? How and why and what makes us different from each other and different, at odd moments, even from ourselves? The unexamined life, Socrates said, as he walked those ancient Athenian streets, is not worth living. What we hear, as a singular reference, might very well be understood in the plural. Socrates was, after all, a man of the city. In knowing others, we come to know who we are; in knowing others, we are able to forget who we are. Academically, we could say that the study of history is ultimately an annotated autobiography. After all these years, I continue to ask what is it that I do with my patients. I have learned that if they can experience standing in another’s shoes they will be able to stand in their own. In recounting and experiencing their own histories they will not only be at home with themselves, but will invite others in as well. Bubbles, after all, only ﬂoat supported by the surrounding air, with a balance of pressure between inner and outer. Take the environment away, and there are no bubbles at all. Our human world is the world of others – just as our living world ties us to the Earth and to all the creatures with whom we share this fragile blue and green planet. My gray haired psychiatrist from my youth, whose brownstone stairs I walked, would play magic games with me and ask what I would do with my new found magical powers. Likewise, do I talk with my patients. I use no magic props, however, only words. Power, magical or otherwise, is always refound power, either what we lost in our youth or had taken from us. So we go on a search, my patients and I, for what is lost. We walk the corridors of forgotten images as well as the ordinary streets of life. Did I forget Don Quixote because he was mortal, while Humpty, as a childhood tale, was not? Afraid, perhaps, that in remembering my Knight, I would have to remember my own endings? Julia and I 115

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spend as much time as possible in Amagansett, near the sound of endless waves, and we ﬁnd consolation in the meeting edge of land and water and in the phantasy-space that divides them. Sometimes I feel, when I walk the barren and repetitive sand, that I will be able to say good-bye to my childhood friend, the light. That my passing, like the receding waves, can not have and need not have more importance than the ﬂow of life that I carried for a while. Does the ocean give us permission to forget ourselves? Is that why we sit at its feet and listen to its music? As I write these lines, I am aware that these were my thoughts when I was twenty-two and ﬁrst came to East Hampton as a monkseminarian. I wonder if they are really my thoughts or whether I am just had by them. One mind or many, the question keeps returning. No answer. Not being unique in such musings gives us access to each other. Not being unique in such musings gives us companionship in our aloneness, also. When I think of those years, I know that I deeply miss my fellow monks with whom I would run on the sand. Some of my friends share our common air no longer. Just like the waves. Here and gone. Illusion or reality? Or both? Human culture, I believe, lives at the edge of the living and the dead. Like the waters. On the seashores of endless worlds, the Indian poet Tagore wrote, children meet. The past and the future meet in children. And of my children, now grown, now living memories, separate yet wedded to me so profoundly that I have no self but that does not include them, how am I present in them? How will I be present to 116

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them? Past generations, Freud wrote, are present in our Id’s. Discredited biological theory, but not psychologically. I know that I am tied to both the king and queen; they reside in me. On and on until, in our forgetfulness, we disregard the generations we mirror. I remember “Fluffy,” the dog of my youth, as well as our beloved Springer Spaniel “Puff,” whom we put to sleep only a few years ago. I can remember Puff ’s playfulness as well as I can recall the buried phantasy image of my father the “doctor.” As I sit behind my patients and listen, in my sunlit ofﬁce, I am in a place where everything is real, although not necessarily realistic. Sacred ground. In this strange habitat of an analytic ofﬁce, both patient and analyst create the world anew, repeopling one’s history and oneself with new meanings. We make the world real by loving it, Freud mused. Terence, the Roman playwright, tells us that he counts nothing human as alien. When we can love our own humanity, we can love the world as well. Healing the emotional and psychological splits in ourselves builds bridges to the earth life around us. Is that what the thirteenth-century philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart meant when he wrote that internality is externality? That is, to know oneself was to know the world. No difference(s). Just viewpoint(s). How often we forget what we once knew and have to remember, by relearning, repeatedly. I remembered, only a few years ago, that I loved the play of words and images. After an absence of nearly thirty years, I began to write poetry again. As soon as I began, I knew that I had read and reread my professional journals for far too long and that the professional articles I had written were much too cerebral. I vividly recall sitting at my desk in the living room of our Greenwich home. The hour was 117

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midnight. I was listening to “Nanette” on WNYC introduce her classical music program and I found, almost by accident, my ﬁrst poem – after so many years of silence. I knew very little about poetry; my words were primarily a selfdialogue. I was being called upon again to create my world. I was weary of understanding it. Once I started, I knew I would write more than a few poems. I decided therefore, somewhat ambitiously, to call whatever spilled out Poems for Late Night Reading. Their inspiration had come at that time when we are most alone with ourselves. A few poems follow.

SEASONS Spring is more than mild-ﬂowered, sun-warmed wind, more than crocuses surprising us with Sunday resurrections, purpling a hill with promises. There is an underleaf forgotten stalking the surprises; a hiding place; a lifetime walk

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back to childhood reverie on sand-piled seashores, hands in make-believe wondering who was more alone, sea or self. Forgotten, as Winter is no season place, but ground to all that follows quickening Spring to life self-made. In April no deciduous rebirth but now by childhood memory deﬁned, self-made, unmade, remade.

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These three last words echoed through my mind. What did they mean? What could they mean? Was I setting about the task of remembering Humpty, even before I knew what I was doing?

SOLITARY Are we not all found by time? When lilacs fall, do we not grieve?

Most everyone who heard this poem was very responsive – perhaps a reminder that we do not fall alone.

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TOSCANA IN JULY I have circled Sienna stones in measured pace and wondered at the works of man, conﬁning such a race walked these gentle hills and umbered streets cobbling my hopes with images forgot. And like autumnal leaves repeated fall I race for memory’s recall. Did I know when I started on my psychoanalytic journey that it would lead me back to the Plato of my early adolescence? That I would ask the same questions, muse the same thoughts. My poetry was becoming a preamble, but I did not know to what.

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CHARTRES Chartres, I am convinced, is so silent so still because it holds, as a grieving mother does the prayers of all those centuries. Silent Lady of the plain, when I saw you I knew ﬁrst view was but a memory, and I had come to tell you I have lost a friend and have forgotten how to pray. I wonder now, long after I wrote these lines, whether we are somehow Chartres; it embodies our dreams and sadness, our beauty and our hopes. Is it the holy ground of the self; as we emerge from the darkness, to touch the world? Or, was I just remembering the death of my friend and colleague, Joan? I seem to visit death, that great presence/absence in our lives, frequently; sometimes, with concrete signposts, as in the poem about Chartres, sometimes, like the poem that follows, more philosophically.

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UNTITLED It’s not the leaving that its about about leaving there is no about. It’s about the silence, like a monotonously sleeping sea quiet to the eyes, can we leave that way? That way, non-existence has no argument with us we trouble it not disturbing with our memories what cannot be disturbed. No wonder we come again, again to learn it is not about the leaving but leaving not troubled. Not troubling the quiet emptiness which yearns to remember us, with no trouble at all. I had written about twenty poems when I was asked by a colleague to read them at a small gathering he was having in his New York West Side apartment. He was trying to inaugurate gatherings where psychoanalysts might have a forum for their more artistic interests. He was, of course, European. North American analysts usually limit themselves to professional study groups; we seem particularly reluctant to get involved either with the theater or with politics. One late Sunday afternoon, I read, along with an actress friend of the family, the few poems I had written. Her reading gave my poems a lyrical dignity that was both an inspiration and a deception. There were two published poets in that gathering and their appreciative response, as well as that of the others present, encouraged me to continue writing. 123

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How we need each other. If the world does not love us back, can we feel real? A few months after that meeting, I discovered Canio’s Bookstore in Sag Harbor, New York. At ﬁrst, I read only two poems, at what is known as an open reading, but I soon had the opportunity to read more extensively. Canio’s Books is housed in an old, white, Victorian style store with a small apartment above it. It is a most delightful mixture of the old and the new, welcoming and featuring known as well as unknown authors. Books piled high in inviting nooks and crannies. Canio himself is a man of transparent gentleness and generosity. His voice is soft, his frame thin and his brown eyes playful behind his glasses. It was at such readings that I met other authors, usually interesting people. Not possessed by psychoanalytic rationality, they were more vulnerable in their manner and so more approachable. Of all those that I met, Erika Duncan has become a close family friend. She is an accomplished novelist, a sensitive woman, with a ﬁercely probing mind. It was her essay on Don Quixote that gave me the opportunity to reﬁnd my adolescent hero. It was late in the autumn, just before the oak’s unleaﬁng, when I visited my father and mother in their Pelham, New York, home, bringing some of my poems. Julia, in almost a last ditch effort on my behalf, had mentioned to my mother my poetry and reminded her that my father should make an effort to listen to what his son had written. I was aware that I might get my father’s usually disconnected response. This time, however, my father listened with admiration and understanding. I sensed that I had reached that curious mind of his and I felt, for that short period, that he heard me, that he knew my name and knew that he need not compete with me but could, instead, experience some pride in his son. Ever so brieﬂy, over this bridge of words, we heard each other. 124

Grieving Lilacs

I know that such an exchange does not undo a life of searching in Carmelite cells or psychiatric ofﬁces for a father who could not see me or hear my voice. It does give to my own listening a promise that the past, although always with us, does not have to cast an eternal shadow.

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Finding My Father

A

s Don Quixote lies dying of his fever and of his dreams, we mourn with those who stand around him. Most readers know, by the end of the epic, that we are the foolish ones if all we saw were windmills. Cervantes, superb writer that he was, let his Knight die, not like some Hollywood serial repeating his adventures until all of Quixote’s dignity was drained. Writing also lets us touch our own deaths. As we put our letters on a page, we know somewhere in our minds that our words will outdistance us. They will be the shadow we leave, having given ground to another. There is consolation when we pass our words on to our children, biologic or otherwise, who walk after us. Is that what we do with our patients also? Are psychoanalysts more fearful of death than others; might they, paradoxically, talk less in order to be remembered more? We modern midwives of memory are too remembered; we are not easily forgotten. Yet we should be. We are most helpful, I believe, when we can just caringly mill about, push the pieces of a broken Humpty a little, knowing that if we can get them in close proximity, the natural love, which powers life, will unite them and we, lumbering, can move on.

Finding My Father

If patients do not remember and give voice to the Humpty’s of their childhood, to the broken pieces of their lives with candid vulnerability, they will be unable to put memories to rest and let their childhood sleep. Each of us must come to a place where the events of our lives are experienced as the tumble of circumstances that spell our name. When we are in such a place, we can put the Humpty of our injuries, now cared for and mended, back into a restful corner of our souls, minding the door that leads back to our childhood injuries. The door will occasionally swing open, usually when we experience a great loss. Nothing disables us as adults so completely as the reactivation of our childhood injuries. Nothing marks us as adults so completely as our ability to know what is happening and not to lose ourselves, in grief or anger, again. It isn’t just the future which is unknown; it is the present that is hidden from our eyes, tucked behind our memories, our desires, and our hopes. We struggle with God in our need to ﬁnd the present, to understand the now which is, after all, all that we have. But what, now, do we need to ﬁnd? Don Quixote, that hero of our aspirations, died proclaiming his conquests and victories, his valor and his legacy. I have no question but that he was right. Yet were he my patient today, I would, I suppose, have to formulate a diagnosis. But I would do so only to ﬁnd common ground. I would listen in order to distinguish what is from what could be. Cervantes showed us the power of what could be and we are forever in his debt. How frequently have I confused these two realities myself ? Listening to dreams as if they were symptoms, to history as if it were fact. When my father was dying, after surviving his cancer for ﬁve years (he had been given three months to live), I visited him daily at Mt. Vernon Hospital. As we walked the antiseptically clean, marble ﬂoored corridors, he spoke sadly but not self-indulgently of his own 127

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deprived childhood. On one particular walk, I had visited him late in the day, he suddenly grasped my arm and held me still. I felt injury and awareness beneath his usually cold exterior. With his voice shaking and with tears suddenly ﬂooding his eyes, he asked for my forgiveness. He told me, as if he had to get rid of the awareness, that I was right in my life long complaint, that he had, indeed, always favored my older brother, Eddie, over me. My mother, who was walking with us, tears in her eyes, turned away. As he held my arm and spoke, my insides shook with grief. I was weeping for that injured little boy and confused young man. All the while I found myself hugging my father and telling him, amidst my bewildered tears, that it was okay - I did forgive him. In those passing moments, which had no duration, I knew that I had found my father and that he had found his son. Was it such a moment as this that would enable me to start to remember, with affection, a less pained childhood? Was it such a moment as this that enabled me to recall, a long time ago, when my eyes were still young, the family singing we would do, as my father drove? This was before the dark cloud of my father’s rage and my mother’s illness settled on the land. Or, I ask again, did the dark cloud settle only over my head. Was I too sensitive a child, as I have found myself to be too sensitive an adult? Was my father, perhaps, just a difﬁcult man, not a tyrant, the rigidity of his emotional responses something he was more victim of than choosing. Was I ﬁghting and raging, in fact, against my rigid and mean spirited paternal grandmother? Had she taken up permanent residence in her son and robbed him of his own birthright – to be himself ? Of course, he should have known better; I know he gave free vent to his armies and his men. I understand that all too well. I do wonder, however, who it was who gave the orders. If my father had had the experience of lying on an analytic couch, as I 128

Finding My Father

did, he might have discovered that he had a more gentle voice, that he had more caring feelings. Can we ever know who is the more sinning or the more sinned against? We live as if we do know and can know. But we cannot. Simultaneous with my anger was my refusal through the years to turn away from him, even when many in my therapy group, which I had joined after my formal analysis, urged me to do so. Maybe I had always hoped that he and I would reach such a moment of honesty before he left. No longer ﬁghting his isolation on the wall, or fearing an imminent breakup, Humpty could hold the king and so be held by him. Humpty could forgive him the armies of his anger and the horses of his need and all the bad dreams he lived out with his family. Only as I have lived and have been with my patients do I know that we all have bad dreams and live them out. Notwithstanding my experience in the hospital hall, I remained anxious, until my father’s ﬁnal breath, for him to know me, to know that I was his son also. While in a coma I would tell him that it was Gerald who was with him. I knew that his death would be painful – not just with the memories of absence but now with the experience of reconciliation. It was an April Sunday morning when my mother called and nervously said that maybe we should come to the hospital immediately, my father’s blood pressure was dropping quickly. Julia and I arrived as his last struggles began; Vickie, who lived a great distance away, was coming. I quickly called my brother who was at a business meeting and told him what was happening. During those last few minutes of his life, with my mother and Julia standing by his bedside, I put my head close to his, my hand on his chest and told him, with a quiet voice, that it was okay to go, it was okay to sleep now, I loved him and he could rest. 129

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He died in my arms; his breath, which had been laboring, relaxed and left quietly. Burying my head besides his, I wept. My brother arrived a few minutes after he died. After ﬁve minutes or so he gestured and mentioned that we should leave, it was over. Perhaps he was trying to be of some help to my mother. I don’t know. I do know that I should have stayed longer and I should have said so. A few days later I delivered his eulogy at his funeral service in Pelham, New York. I spoke of the last months of his life, when the king had neither horses nor armies and of how I was able to remember what had been good between us. I could speak honestly in the eulogy. I recounted the apologies and forgiveness of his last days to me and to others. I did not omit the difﬁcult times we had all lived through. I spoke of the parties and picnics we had had, of the ballroom dancing he had learned and loved, and of his joy when he adopted Vickie. After the church service, before we entered the somber black limousine, Paul and Connie hugged me and told me that I was a good son for what I had said. We get to know who we are slowly, occasionally, in ﬂeeting visions. In that moment outside Our Lady of the Assumption Church, I knew again that I was the king’s son, just I was Paul and Connie’s father. My own dreams were surrounded by both my pain and my hopes; the bubble ﬁlled with past and future and I was here and I was gone. The beckoning on the outskirts of my mind, the memories that seemed to want a hearing receded, and the aloneness that we rarely know what to make of, was here. And Julia and I touched, ever so slightly, across the great chasm that is our separate but mirrored selves. No wonder Michelangelo depicted creation this way – ﬁnger close and worlds apart. But I had danced with God before. 130

Memory and Time

T

he king is dead many years yet I am still surprised by my tears. Now that I have put Humpty’s story to words and ﬁnally know what to say to my father, to tell him of my pain, my anger, and my love, he is gone. How brief was our ﬁnding each other, now, so long ago, in that chlorine washed hospital corridor. Should my father’s memory simply be a sober fact? Emotional and physical pain interweaves each human life, as it does mine. What I have learned is that a broken Humpty can be a bridge to others, a fallen Humpty a sign of our common fragility and an aware Humpty a hope that one need not pass on what was done to us more out of ignorance than design. Julia and I lived in our East Hampton home for many years after my father’s passing. We had many friends; Julia was a gracious hostess in the frequent dinners and parties she gave. When I was not doing my professional work, I spent considerable time planting, caring for the land, remembering, as I did so, the outdoors work of my seminary years. Gardening was one area that I could see results relatively quickly; working

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

with patients one sometimes has to wait much longer. I still had a small practice in Greenwich, Ct. and would travel there weekly for a two day practice. We visited my mother often, Julia even more than myself, taking her to lunch or dinner or an occasional Broadway show. All of this became possible since my father’s obsessive scheduling and time limited visits were a thing of the past. As I began to write this memoir – not knowing if it was just notes to myself or something more, I recognized that my earliest search for what was real in life was just as pressing as it had been in my childhood. I was convinced that the healing that psychoanalysis had provided, the honesty it had demanded and the bridge it offered to reach our fellow human beings was, in itself, an expression of spirituality. I had read and reread Meister Eckhart, the medieval Christian philosopher and mystic, his provocative words, God rid me of God echoed within me: We should be less concerned with theology, he wrote, and more concerned with justice and compassion for our fellow human beings. Eckhart believed that when we speak of God we are, ultimately, speaking of ourselves and to ourselves. That is, the reality that we are talking about is beyond our human understanding, our concepts and our words. Be less concerned about worshipping Jesus, imitate his commitment to justice and compassion, was Eckhart’s message. Such an approach does no violence to psychoanalytic experience. Psychoanalysis is built upon a deep respect for each individual and is dedicated to each person ﬁnding what is real within themselves and real in the world in which they live. In order to achieve such goals the therapeutic process should reﬂect compassion, availability and equality on the therapist’s side. After a few months of writing I put aside my memoir. Dr. James Grotsein, from Los Angeles, had asked me to do an article on spirituality and psychoanalysis for an issue of The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies he was editing. He apologized for the time constraint 132

Memory and Time

and asked if I could have it done in one month. My article, “Aloneness in Psychoanalysis and Spirituality,” focused my thinking on these two areas. After publication I sent a copy to my former mentor at Fordham University, Dr. Ewert Cousins, a man gentle in speech, sharp in intellect and profoundly spiritual. Ewert is not a man who grabs attention or begrudges other’s insights. We had been friends during my studies in the early nineteen sixties. Since that time he had read, over the years, many of my articles. When he read this particular article he urged me, once again, to ﬁnish my doctoral thesis by combining this work with some of my other articles. Ewert was afﬁliated with a graduate school in Indiana that would be willing, he assured me, to accept all of my doctoral studies at Fordham University as well as my psychoanalytic studies. They had extension divisions in various parts of the world, one of which was at Christ‘s Church College, in Oxford, England. With his guidance and encouragement, so many years after my anger at my father for not providing ﬁnancial help when I needed it, I submitted a thesis to the school’s faculty in England, in preparation for its defense. Julia and I had been to London a few years prior at the invitation of Dr. Martin Stanton, to give some lectures on the work of Donald Winnicott. We had never been to Oxford, which in the summer of 2003 we found enchanting. Oxford University, among its many major accomplishments, was and still is a theological epicenter. Its faculty and courses encompass all the major traditions of spirituality and denominational theologies. While walking some of its cobbled streets and bookstores both Julia and I expressed how we would have so enjoyed doing our undergraduate studies in such an environment. As we walked the city, I found myself gently touching the walls of these ancient colleges and churches. It was on a very hot summer day in a modestly furnished small room in King’s College that I defended my thesis before three examiners. Their questions were perceptive without being hostile; they asked about 133

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some of my theoretical essays and then focused on my life experiences. Two of the examiners were theologians, the other examiner was a psychologist. As the examination proceeded I was amazed as how much psychoanalytic knowledge one professor of church history evidenced by his perceptive questions. When my defense was completed, I walked the quadrangle outside the examining room, waiting for their judgment. I recalled my walking a similar quad in my seminary days, so many years ago. That I would defend my thesis, the end result of so many years of struggling to know what spirituality meant, what psyche meant, even what the word God meant at a small room at Oxford University seemed another of life’s surprising gifts. I was called back into the examining room about ﬁfteen or twenty minutes later and congratulations were offered. I had secured a doctorate from Foundation House. Out of this effort my ﬁrst book, Psyche, Self and Soul, was published. Too late, however, for my mother to see it. Seven years and seven days after my father’s death, my mother’s body lay still. As I spoke at her funeral Mass, in the same church where I had given my father’s eulogy, I did not know that I would spend the next two years in search of her. I had hugged her the day before she died and told her I would see her during the week; we had just returned from a baby shower for our daughter Connie. When I next saw her it was after the police had found her dead in her bathroom; the family gardener, who would look in on her whenever he came to cut the lawn, had called them when he found her on the ﬂoor. My brother, who was on his way to visit her when he got the news, had his wife call my ofﬁce answering machine and say that there had been a terrible accident and that mom was dead. I retrieved the message when I returned from lunch and after absorbing what I had heard, I explained to the patient in my waiting room that I would not be able to see her. I called Julia and we rushed to Pelham Manor, New York. My mother was, I found out later, the victim of 134

Memory and Time

an aneurysm. Before entering her bedroom, I asked the police to please place her in her bed. Kneeling besides her and weeping, I touched her cold hands. I thought, as I spoke at her eulogy, that I had accepted her death. But I was mistaken. I found an emptiness within myself that was a mirror image of what she must have experienced many times in her life. I walked a steep path of sadness and loss, while carrying on my personal and professional life seemingly unaffected. I had to go in search of her and ever so slowly, as I remembered the good mother of my early childhood, was I emotionally able to know that my mother had died and I would see her no more. There would be no white Volkswagen to bring her home from her sickness, as it had so many years ago. Her illness, I now recognize, had its roots in her childhood, even though it showed itself in her adulthood with my demanding father. I had to remind myself of her masochism, in her relationship with my father, for me to reach both my anger at her compliance and my understanding that she had little choice. Whatever freed will she may have had came slowly in her life. Her vitality still shadows my memories, more than once have I wanted to phone her and to hear her aging but energetic voice. I saved her phone answering machine, with her greeting message recorded, for many years.

135

End Thoughts

L

ife is clearly a circle – in our end, T. S. Eliot wrote, is our beginning. Would I have been able to transverse the analytic passage without such a father and the ﬂight to the seminary that his reign enjoined? As my father was dying, he cried. He cried, I think, because he had been robbed of his dreams; his life was ﬁlled with facts; he had ﬁlled his space with his unending needs and had no room for what could have been. Before he closed his eyes, he knew this. I want to believe that he knew that I knew it also. I am grateful for this. Back in the Tarzan movies of my youth, Tarzan frequently walked a narrow, rope bridge, across a dangerous chasm. If I reach an understanding of the king, walking on a narrow bridge, then Humpty’s fall is less ﬁnal, the loss, less lasting. When the prophet Elias comes again, so the Scriptures predict, he will reconcile father to son and son to father. He is to heal the generations. But are we to await that event in the future or does it occur at our deaths?

End Thoughts

Or, is that the task of a psychoanalyst? When I read chapter one of Broken Fathers/Broken Sons at Canio’s Books, in Sag Harbor, New York I learned again what I had known many years ago. Before I ﬁlled my own life with accomplishments, I knew that what binds us humans together is our common imagination and our life pain. Each person I work with teaches me this truth. Each patient’s journey is an individual patchwork quilt sewn together by patient and analyst, pieces of the past, moments from the present threaded by words. We hope to make a healing cover, aware that there is no absolute certainly in the personal history we are ﬁnding as well as creating. Memory is as selective as perception itself is. Memory, all to often, is a child of desire. What we experience as reality depends on the meaning we give it. We are children of the language our culture speaks. We just have to know that there are and were many cultures and many languages. In sharing my writing with the forty or so friends and participants in that small, book-ﬁlled store, I found that what I was speaking about was not just my memories, my experiences, my imagination; they were, in some real way, everyone’s. I had, it seems, just borrowed them. It was only a minute ago when I was young, Roosevelt was President and we were waging one of our many wars. We were, I sensed, united by a common imagination of who we were and who we should be. Our task, with both our patients and our fellow citizens, seems to be ﬁnding a common imagination. Only then can we walk the same bridge. And if we lose the capacity to be bound by imagination, will we loose a sense of who we are and who we can be? Psychoanalysis presumes a common imagination just as democracy does. If we stayed only with the facts, Humpty would have never come back together again. It was only in view of what could be that 137

BROKEN FATHERS-BROKEN SONS

I was able to venture onto the task of reassembling him. But it was a common venture. Not possible without my white haired gentle psychiatrist, my ﬁercely dedicated Mrs. Bush, my Carmelite brothers along with Fathers Francis and Ernie, not possible at all, I now know without my loving Julia, my Paul and Connie and Dr. Tom. As I work with patients, I know that the reassembling continues and will continue. I know that to reach such a place we may have to hate a little, but hate can be only, when all goes well, a momentary stop. It can be productive if we get through it and ﬁnd a more real world after such an interlude. I read my poems to my father and he listened.

138

Epilogue (Summer 2002)

I

am listening now to my musings, as I hear the endless mild-mannered waves of the ocean come home to their shores on this sunny September afternoon, sitting, as I am, on a sparsely peopled Amagansett beach, knowing, as we all know, that there are other private, seemingly separate selves sitting like me, by water’s edge, millions of us, listening to the waves, listening to ourselves, wanting, forgetting, killing, loving, talking to parents, forgetting our own names, ﬁnding consciousness, losing it to reverie, to violence, to drugs, to facts, needing the moment to stay for just a second longer, forgetting that we are close relatives with the seas which haunt us, engulf us and feed us, seeking the Humpty of our youth, or our hopes, if we can still have them, and knowing that kings and armies pass, parents fade into forgotten tales, facts deceive, and matter breaks repeatedly, and it is only in the touch of ﬁnger to ﬁnger that we feel created because we let someone close, and in the telling of our common tale of Humpty’s

fall and rebirth, we know that consciousness is noble, wherever its epiphany, and we owe each and every moment of its appearance the dignity of healing. Humpty was tired from all that had happened. He had remembered more than he was able to tell. Some childhood griefs are not captured by words, they come back in waves of feelings, in momentary moods. The task of coming together had not been easy. He asked if he could rest awhile at the foot of the wall. I took his head in my lap, held him close and told him to close his eyes. I knew that life had been generous with me. I would stand vigil for his dreams.

Appendix Poems For Late Night Reading (A few more selections)

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

SILENT SPELLS I am not a maple tree Japanese in its delicacy Its leaf Five-pointed Diminutive Is innocently green From my silence Could I grow that delicately Push out from the jumble of my roots A sacred pointed leaf Whose dance with the wind Is quite enough for it to be. A water maple vigils nearby Enfolding, like an ancient Cathedral The hard-one innocence of the lighter green. And I I am just a mirror To the scene Wondering who will catch the image next And what it is That they will see.

142

Appendix

TASKS Elephants walk softly at night Between giant leaves and sleeping trees. Columned legs Support their tilting frame Haphazard trunks Push and Gently sway. I walk Not so quietly Through my nights Trying for a lightness to my step Waiting for the dawn While elephants Bury their old bones Sometimes their young Such unleaving Done Beginning As we do….

143

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

JUNE THOUGHTS Butterﬂies are more Than a yellow breeze Alighting arbitrarily Delicate, Like love So easily undone If you wave them away In a moment of forgetfulness Your loss will be an empty memory.

144

Appendix

CHOICES Night choices, Or those made in ﬂight From day Decision lost to view Become Beckoning memories; Residues, Deﬁning Who we are.

145

BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

VAN GOGH On a hot, Good to the skin hot July day Through ﬁelds of sunﬂowers Vincent walked He, their creator Gun in hand, looking to undo the death he had lived with But could not heal. Wounded, Gentle man, Preface to the dawn, I see your sunﬂowers In the starry night.

146

Appendix

AFRICAN MEMORIES I do not believe That Pegasus is dead. I think he knew the African sky was to be sheared by metal, Mother’s garments divided By hand The black dirt cemented To catch the fall of rubber trees mixed with cotton And the smell gone. He had to leave her ﬁrst On a silent blackﬁlled space He understood, Leave now She will love you forever, Stay And you will be unseen by silver birds Who do not sing, Even to their children. I do not believe Pegasus is dead. He is waiting for Memsahib In the hills.

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BROKEN FATHERS/BROKEN SONS

HOSPITALIZED I was, for many years, an orphan And when I found my father He was dying. A brief encounter An accidental turn, as we walked the corridors Chlorine swept with muted walls When he, renouncing his youth No longer captured by winter’s injuries Sat, for just a momentary pause And spoke the love He could not speak before. I have seen an oak tree fall And still I am very small.

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Appendix

LAST THOUGHTS As waves rush in In Vengeances Or in love They touch the ﬂattened sand How much Still escapes my hand. Patiently a sea gull Waits To dance And leave an etching For a moment’s view, I am waiting Too.

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IN MEMORY OF ELIOT The Hippo has returned to me Eliot’s belated legacy The trouble with the true church found Is clearly that there’s none around To comfort us when host is ground We know now, who we are As God becoming is not far From man’s inventive industry Tis just one step to theology. I would rather no words speak Quell desire to the still. And as the willow rests upon the ground, Let the mystery be found.

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About The Author

Gerald J. Gargiulo, Ph.D., is a faculty member and former president of The Training Institute of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis as well as of the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education. He has lectured extensively both in the US and abroad and has published over ninety articles, in both popular and professional journals. He coedited Soul On The Couch and is the author of Psyche, Self and Soul. Dr. Gargiulo lives on Long Island with his wife Julia, and has two children and two grandchildren. He maintains a psychotherapy and marriage counseling practice in Setauket, New York and White Plains, New York.

Broken Fathers Broken Sons: A Psychoanalyst Remembers (Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies)

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