After my first dismal year of college, my parents sent me to a psychiatrist. It was my first meeting with the so-called helping profession. The shrink didn't seem to think that much was wrong. As far as he was concerned, I was having some growing pains and would probably be okay in the end. I'd love to kick him in the balls, but, unfortunately, he's probably dead by now and wouldn't be able to feel it.
By the 1960s, shrinks had become a standard part of the middle-class, suburban landscape, much like stationwagons, uniformed school-crossing guards, and urine-stained fire hydrants. And about as effective for me from a therapeutic point of view.
Before being readmitted to college a decade and a half later, I had to see their shrink. You have to give the Ivy League credit for its attention to theatrical detail. This particular individual was right out of the casting department. Late fortyish or early fiftyish, with a graying, well-trimmed Mephistophelean beard, a stiff, formal manner, and of course, a thick foreign accent, he knew nothing about cults. (I guess the Krishnas and the Moonies weren't on the curriculum at the German institute where he studied. A part of the world that has suffered so terribly at the hands of ideological extremists and pseudo-religious totalitarians.)
That's right, a mental health professional who doesn't know what a destructive cult is. Nor that there's a connection between our separate, individual lives and larger social, political, and historical events. Can you get a medical degree without knowing what the AIDS pandemic is?
The shrink's fallback position was to ask me about my sex life. When doing so, he hissed the word "sex," much as the snake in the Garden of Eden might have. To further complicate matters, he refused to accept, "I don't have one," as an answer. To a Freudian, that particular answer doesn't compute.
As a thoroughly institutionalized and paper-trained professional, he understood well the axiom that if the reality conflicts with the theory, it's easier to change the reality than the theory. An individual practitioner can no more "change" psychiatry than an individual priest can "change" Catholicism. Maybe the Pope can, but few of them do.
Trust me; I had no sex life. He finally gave up and spoke for the rest of the hour about his female patients who had had too much sex in the 1960s, and how it was screwing up their lives. What that had to do with me, I don't know. This guy was a real piece of work. The house psychiatrist at a major university.
My first therapist of any consequence was another psychiatrist named Robert Florin. I naively started at the top of the food chain. Having until then avoided shrinks, I had little or no idea of what to expect. Looking back, my first judgment, that it was all hocus pocus, was correct.
Nevertheless, I still harbored many romantic, media-driven conceptions about therapy. That it transforms you, reaches deep into your innermost recesses, and heals you. Those kinds of things. I give most of the people I met with credit for trying earnestly to apply the techniques they had been taught. The problem was that their techniques have had no effect, either positive or negative, on me.
In my first session with Dr Florin, I said that I was having trouble with relationships, and that I felt that my communication with others was poor.
He said, no, I wasn't. He experienced me as a person who communicated well.
I once said to him that the more attractive a woman was, the more difficulty I had in handling my emotions, the more likely they were to overwhelm me, and the more likely it was that she or I would run away. He laughed at the thought of being afraid of a beautiful woman, but I didn't think it was so funny.
At the end of the year, I told him truthfully that I didn't believe that I had gained anything useful from our sessions, and didn't see how I could continue to justify the time and money. As I was walking out the door, he looked up from his desk, where he was filling out some paperwork, and said, "It's as if human relationships don't matter to you."
He had finally understood what I had tried to tell him in our first session. So I guess there's some hope. He needed to see it with his own eyes.
One problem with the profession is denial, a serious offense when committed by a patient. No, Florin said, you aren't having a problem — you only think you have a problem. Once you rid yourself of your negative attitudes, you'll be fine. It's all a matter of changing your perception of reality.
I don't care whether this approach works for others. I only know that it doesn't work for me.
From there I worked my way down the food chain of mental health workers to psychologist, psychiatric nurse, and social worker. At each step, I kept hoping that money, power, credentials, intellectual overhead, and other institutional baggage and luggage would become less important, and that healing would become more of a reality.
I hoped that, by descending through the Darwinian tree of hairy psychotherapeutic primates, I'd be more likely to find fewer preconceptions, more flexible thinking, and a greater desire simply to help.
I also tried seeing women therapists, who were generally less hairy than the men and less comfortable with the idea of swinging all day from one tenuous branch of the ideological tree to another. I hoped as well that the women would be more empathetic.
I had marginally better luck with Marge Weishaar, a psychologist at the medical school. I had my first breakthrough in therapy after she gave me a book, which I read outside our sessions. Hope and Help for Your Nerves by Claire Weekes helped me to get a handle on my panic attacks. We didn't discuss the book in our sessions.
After Marge, I saw a psychiatric nurse named Joan Harrison. Her office was in a lovely old house on the East Side of Providence, of which there are many near the college campus. She was in her mid- to late thirties, a few years younger than me. We met weekly for about a year or a year and a half.
While living in State College, Pennsylvania, I saw a counselor named Ursula Sherrill. I tried hard to explain to her that I wasn't interested in therapeutic techniques. They had already failed to change anything about me. Drugs and techniques are things; they aren't human. I'd like to think that despite my difficulties, I'm still a human being.
My heart sank when, six months later, she went ahead and suggested two or three mechanical techniques. She apparently hadn't heard what I had said.
If you go to the witch doctor, you'll get potions and spells; if you go to the herbalist, you'll get herbs; to the western medical doctor, you'll get drugs; and to the therapist, techniques. It would be naive to expect anything else of the profession, and the first and most important step on the road to recovery is to face up to the limitations of your caregivers and take charge of your own life.
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To update this section, I did have a healing experience while in therapy with Ruth Cobb Hill. She's a world traveller, an instructor in Tagalog at the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD therapist in private practice.
Her office had a comfortable, lived-in feeling with numerous found objects and large, striking pieces of native artwork. Many had a raw, tactile feeling. The colors tended toward earth-tone browns and grays. There was much movement in the paintings and a high degree of abstraction and symbolism.
In contrast to the therapist's temperament and demeanor, the overall effect of the artwork was more challenging than soothing, and its emotions were more conflicted than settled.
Still, art is healing.
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