Thanks for your fine letter. It reminded me of the essay about counselling you submitted to the Journal a few years ago when I saw for the first time that you had in fact grasped some of the substance of Rosenfelsian psychology.
I should say a few words about homophobia, since it's an important concept. When Paul talks about homophobia in the gay community he was enlarging on the fact that his idea of homosexuality had always been more than just "enjoying sex with other men." Love and power for him were basic goals which needed to grow without artificial limits if civilization was to express the best in human nature, and he often used the word homosexual to characterize that stage of civilization when artificiality of any kind is no longer sanctioned by creative people. This is why his last book is entitled Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process. Similarly, homophobia means fearing this basic need to be involved with other men, being outer-directed, conformist, letting society tell you what to do and think. We all know the gay world is full of that kind of human failure. In Paul's model, homophobia is drummed into all of us in childhood by the opportunism and cynicism of society, and a major purpose of the Center is to encourage us to work out the residue of homophobic defenses which block our development.
But I'd hate to see the concept of homophobia degenerate into a hip slogan brandished by the in-crowd at the Center to banish anybody they find difficult. Everyone who joins a religion wants to be "holier than thou," so I suppose it's only natural for homosexuals to want to be "gayer than thou," but that's not what Paul's talking about. Settling down into smug and sanctimonious finger-pointing is not really going to get the job done.
As to your idea that I should have hugged you instead of pointing out that you were in a helpless state, I'm very relieved that you never had the opportunity to accuse Paul of such a transgression because he would have kicked your ass into outer space and you would have left the Center in a huff like so many other otherwise fine people have done. Paul liked to give his patients a hug and a kiss on the cheek when they came in the door, but after that it was all work, work, work. He wasn't there to cheer people up, to uplift them, or to make their problems go away. If they were being helpless or reckless, they were so informed in no uncertain terms, and it was then entirely up to them to decide to lay aside those defenses. His candidness didn't make things very easy for people sometimes, but it certainly helped to weed out the grain from the chaff and those who survived were stronger for it. In fact, a lot of the hangers on who fogged up our work in the first year of the Center's existence were pushed out precisely by Paul's reputation for not being permissive. What I personally didn't like was not his refusal to indulge in permissiveness but rather the unnecessary brutality with which he could treat neophytes, but within two years of seeing how exhausting his regimen could be even for the best of us he changed his tune completely and began recommending massive doses of rest and recreation for the troops. But then he was very careful to distinguish between fun and pleasure and permissiveness. Fun and pleasure had always to take second place to truth and right. (In other words, if a gooey hug would blur an important lesson, maybe you could do without it.) While you're in a two-dimensional childlike state, your three-dimensional parental self is monitoring the parameters of your involvements and guarding the perimeter of the bubble of relaxed discrimination. Much to the dismay of gay public relations experts, this model ruled out drugs and promiscuity, and they retaliated by branding Paul a good example of rampant homophobia.
As to my personal feelings towards you, I've simply never felt sexually or even romantically attracted to you, but I'd be careful not to explain this away merely as a result of homophobia. No man capable of taking his homosexuality seriously is thereby automatically attracted to every other man in his life. Are those Center members who don't have lovers right now suffering merely from homophobia? Is every one of us who has failed to make a pass at you demonstrating "secret homophobic tendencies"? You must be one hot cookie if so.
When I think about my early years with Paul I can remember no single occasion on which he said I was homophobic. What he did say in fact was that I was a "pure homosexual type," a claim that wasn't at first very clear to me given the fact that my first lover was a woman. But he saw that men had always been the real focus of my need to be important in the world, and that my power drives would be well served by my learning to trust the homosexuality that other men would feel toward me. Just as celebrative humor easily ripples through a feminine audience, their sexuality could resonate in my feeling tone. It sounded like a good idea (I'd read Plato), and once I had made up my mind to try to accept the influence of his love in my life, it was easy to explore sensuous and erotic experience with him, even though he was balding, overweight, three times my age, and much less fun than Maude was for Harold. And sexualization quickly became a valuable asset in building our relationship.
I mean, just how difficult do you imagine it is for a man to be sexual with another man? It's not much more difficult than tying a shoelace, really, or rubbing your penis until it squirts. It's much easier than most straight parents, for example, want to believe: even locked-up felons do it. Isn't the big surprise of "coming out" (and sex in general) just how easy it all is? Didn't you notice that the morning-after look on Harold's face was not grim fatigue but surprised delight? Paul loved to remind us how easy it was for animals to become homosexual. Their secondary sex characteristics can be obscured to the extent that they'll even do it by accident. Masculine sexuality is so superficial that I can get a hardon when a kitten crawls into my lap.
Paul and I found it pertinent and natural to build a home for our own kind of sexual release within the larger world of love and power in which we both believed. That doesn't mean that I now became obsessed with gay erotica or that I found myself cruising Christopher Street at midnight. When people mate, it actually lessens their need to look for sexual stimulation elsewhere, and you'll find that people who have known the fulfillment of having a mate are much less enticed by the thrills of the singles scene than are adolescents who don't know any better. Your sexual responsiveness becomes tied in with those attributes that distinguish your lover, regardless of his age, statistics, plumbing, or who gets to do what to whom. It's very Pavlovian: mates employ all kinds of idiosyncratic signals to indicate their readiness to fool around. Perhaps some actual experience will someday convince you that you don't need studded collars or leather masks to perceive beauty in another man. (Say, you don't suppose this could be a symptom of homophobia, do you?)
As a courtship tactic in any case, Bob, I doubt that accusing someone of homophobia is a good way of getting them to relish the thought of sexual feeling. I've never let anybody scold me into feeling shame (on the contrary, I became a heretic and decided that all adults are liars), so why should I start with you? The only approach that receives anything like a sexual response from me is when someone loves me in a sincere and devoted way, and that kind of commitment would be utterly foreign to the severity of your withdrawal. As to the public relations level of social progress, there too I think we'll attract more flies with honey. I much prefer seeing the occasional gay love story in a soap opera than a rapid gay social critic yet again blasting rampant homophobia. Didn't we all get sick of minority members who resorted to labelling anyone who didn't cater to them a racist? If black is beautiful, let's celebrate the beauty. If gay is good for people, I'll rather champion that goodness.
Would I like a male lover? You bet I would. I've come to hundreds of talk groups in search of one. Soon after we opened the Center, Paul and I decided to be open to whatever courtships we would find, and for months I just couldn't wait to find the fantastic philosophical youth of my dreams (I told you I'd read Plato) who I knew would walk in the door the next minute. But apparently mere homophilia is not much more of a blessing than homophobia is a curse because it just didn't work out that way. And although I'm not so pure that I haven't enjoyed a clandestine moment or two with an available feminine that I knew beforehand I'd never see again, oddly enough, and for reasons the gay chauvinists will find hard to understand, I'm not always very proud of these moments. Sex and celebration have turned out not to be very easy to integrate into the ebb and flow of an institution as serious and dedicated to psychological purposes as the Center. Sometimes it's more like a monastery than a real community. But the struggle is worth it, and we'll slowly improve over the long haul. And while I don't claim to be able to juggle the complexities of a creative life much better than any one else there, it would do me no good to feel a complete failure either. The point is not to give up, remember, and to measure yourself against where you were yesterday, not against where the next guy is today.
Finally, the psychological principle I really must advance here is my right to a masculine personality. Many psychoanalysts have undermined thousands of masculines by telling them to "open up to their real feelings" (about their parents, usually), to explore the memories of their past traumas so as to undo the repression of emotional richness characteristic of (feminine) children. But opening up to feeling is bound to be seductive for me unless the object of that feeling is truly in love and (analogously) active in his submission. All my life I've never gotten comfortable about feeling towards a feminine until they're also getting comfortable about acting towards (ie. serving) me. But I always enjoy people who are aware of, and can exhibit in some charming and socially responsible way, their own sexiness. In our private life Paul could be quite flirtatious. My lack of sexual warmth towards you has much more to do with the utter absence of pride in your personality. Your most inspired momentum can be halted by a floating feather. Why in the world should I feel towards someone who begins every encounter by lying in the gutter and saying "Spit on me, it's all I deserve"? I wouldn't know how to do it, and would be ashamed if I did. Neither have I any respect for the kind of panhandler whose body language says, "I don't want to try anymore, but you're a sucker so give me that money." It's just not the kind of social pathology that I chose to regard as an honorable obstacle. So rather than to try to feel more sexual towards you, and at the risk of being judged homophobic, I think I'll continue to try to cure you of your lack of self-esteem. I intend to specialize in deepening and empowering the creative individual who has chosen independently of my influence to live at a higher level than the herd. It's still not clear to me whether your claim to have made this choice isn't merely what you think we want to hear.
Do you remember Paul's discussion of the "war between masculines and feminines"? They each try to drag the other into the world they're most comfortable with. My feminine friend Barry complains that his masculine buddies always try to cheer him up and talk him into being more of a "go-getter." It's comfortable for them to regard him as merely a budding masculine who just needs a little encouragement. But just as feminines shouldn't be seen as frustrated men of action who are sitting on a powder keg of energy about to explode, masculines shouldn't be treated as hiding an underground storehouse of "secret feelings" they must somehow learn to be more honest about.
Usually, people like me don't feel very much of anything except about what it is that I'm doing right in front of me. I'm more or less just what my behavior makes me appear to be. My life is an open book to those who can read, and my door is open to anyone willing to knock, liberated or oppressed, masculine or feminine, male or female, just so long as they believe in the higher ground we're all groping towards. What I have isn't repressed secret feelings, but rather a history of renouncing my impulse toward power, toward taking responsibility for others, toward being in charge of some part of the world in a way that would express and fulfill the inherent nobility of my human nature. My famous acerbic wit is the most obvious symptom of the early flooding of my celebrative nature with hateful bitterness, but this is a result of feeling too much not too little, and surely it's not the only one. It's these renounced impulses that I need to try to get at, to revive and work on, Bob, just as I recommend to feminines that they work on their repressed desire to love more deeply the external embodiments of beauty in their world. It doesn't exactly help me when people like you mimic the push-button prescriptions of the mystified mediocrities infesting the psychiatric profession.
Perhaps the salient clue here about your motivation is that this one difficult occasion is the only time you've ever said that you thought I was homophobic (unless we need to count the time you asked if I too had secret gay fantasies and I said that I didn't). Like anyone else who believes in the importance of homosexuality for the mental health of mankind, I'm interested in expunging any residue of homophobia in my personality. But if you really thought homophobia was an important theme in my development, you could have brought it out earlier in our discussions. (And don't resort to the old "I knew you'd never believe me" defense. Anybody unwilling to deal with me fairly and honestly had better do me a great favor by staying way the hell away.)
In your letter you compare me to Caesar. You'll be surprised that I'm pleased by the comparison. I like people who take their power seriously, even tyrants like Patton and Teddy Roosevelt, because ever since I began involving myself in the gay liberation movement twenty years ago I saw how severe is the apraxia that inhibits men from acting in their own self-interest. Do you ever wonder how someone gets to be a Caesar, Bob? It's not easy to be willful in a decadent society that caters to weaklings, and man's social life has always been marred by passive corruption. Willfulness just looks odd, and people take pot shots at you. The first time Disraeli spoke in Parliament they made fun at him. "You can laugh at me today," he said firmly, "but there will come a time when you will listen." Yes, most of them fail, at least on the scale of values that we enlightened sophisticates employ, but I have more appreciation than most for the courage they must at some point in their development have marshalled. Trotsky says that his first experience of courage was in a school yard when those who chose to rebel from authority stepped forwards and were counted. This was such a powerful moment that those who found their courage always had it for the rest of their lives, he says, while those who didn't were always shamed stragglers. I'm always on the side of those who want to count for something in this world. Incidentally, we can learn sometimes from examples of failure as much as examples of success.
I appreciate your wanting to cure me of cruelty, and enjoy your fantasy of the world beating a path to my door. Whatever cruel habits are within me I hereby renounce. (That does a lot of good, right?) But it would be naive to believe that many more men will follow me as I become kinder and more soft-spoken. We'd best leave the cultivation of civility to Jesse Jackson and other more conventional leaders who need to win popularity polls. Did the populace follow Paul? No, they resented his contempt for being more "sociable" towards them, even as they reluctantly asked him for help. And let's leave grace to ballet masters and the charistmatics. There's nothing terribly graceful about a man in a state of growth.
Saying "Trying to be your friend is making me crazy right now" would indeed have made much more sense and would have been truly informative. Exhaustion is something that only you can judge because we're so used to concealing it, not only from others but from ourselves.
I do recommend that you pursue counselling with someone else for now, perhaps Gabe. That doesn't rule out our being close again at some future point when it's good for you. But there's no need to feel any loyalty to the particular style or content of my counselling. I don't feel any more adept at it than any of Paul's other students do. You may, for example, be better off in the hands of another feminine; it's one of those things you just have to learn by doing. And since I prefer to establish my own standards of excellence, I'll choose to disagree with your statement that the quality of my counselling was "top drawer." I don't think even Paul could foresee what top-drawer counselling may someday become for mankind.
[NOTE: I considered reading the following statement at the April, 1994 Board meeting but decided not to and to deal with Bob personally.]
I have a brief statement to read, and then I will be glad to listen to anything anyone here has to say about it. Until then I ask only that you allow me to finish.
Twice in as many months, Bob, you have expressed outrage at what you considered reckless and irresponsible consequences of actions taken by me in pursuit of the Center's interests. Last month, after I stored Edith's negatives of family photographs in the Center's storeroom, you accused me of risking a fire which might bring a lawsuit that, because your name is on the lease, might cause your salary to be garnished and your retirement years to be ruined. The overall solution that most appealed to you was to insist that they be kept in my storeroom instead.
The second incident occurred the Friday before last. By my having several weeks before asked to have keys to your apartment, in case you die and the Center's checkbook and other records need to be quicked recovered, you accused me of intending to treat your apartment as my own and thereby make your apartment unnecessarily untidy.
In each incident, you addressed your concerns by making accusations of my ostensible irresponsibility and recklessness to Jennifer rather than myself.
After the first incident, both Jennifer and I felt that your emotional reaction, while certainly colored by the phobic and self-indulgent distortions with which your personality defends itself, had at least a remote basis in reality. I immediately calmed you down by reminding you of a fact that I was very surprised that you had forgotten. "For heaven's sake, Bob," I said, "we're friends."
At an informal meeting that next Sunday, Jennifer, you and I decided that it did no harm to go to extra lengths to make the stored negatives as safe as possible, even to the extent of copying and then destroying them, if it helped to alleviate the anxiety of one of our own. Additionally, I told you that I had not realized that your name was on the Center's storeroom lease and that, if this made you feel exposed to financial risk, my name would go on the lease instead.
Friday night's confrontation, however, was quite different. It has made me face issues I have been avoiding for years. In the first place, it had no basis in reality whatsover. Late at night, over dessert and after a tiring discussion group, you intentionally provoked me into an angry outburst by making patently false accusations about me to Jennifer while I was in fact sitting next to her and listening to your conversation. You asked, coyly, "If I give Dean my keys, Jennifer, don't you think he'll just come over when I'm not there and watch my porno tapes?" She said no, but a few minutes later you found an excuse to ask it again. When I finally started yelling at you about the rank stupidity of this line of questioning, you seemed very satisfied that at least your oft-repeated charge that I yell at you had been demonstrated. It was not the first time you have used sadism to try to put me in a bad light in front of other people.
The Center's rule has always been that its books must be open to inspection by any board member for any reason at any time, and this had always been interpreted to mean that the books should stay at the Center where all board members had 24-hour access. Yet, my personal attitude towards trusting people has always been that they should be considered innocent until proven guilty, and when you asked permission two and a half years ago to keep the Center's checkbook and other financial records at your apartment, I immediately approved because there was no evidence that you had ever proven to be irresponsible under such circumstances. I also gave you a set of keys to my apartment in case I died and the board needed to recover Center property stored there quickly. I did not ask around to find out whether you had ever been proven innocent of abusing the responsibility of having the keys to other people's apartments. And it only occurred to me very recently to ask if you would reciprocate by giving me keys to your apartment. Frankly, if you had simply dropped this matter I probably would have forgotten all about it.
In contrast, your attitude towards trusting your fellow Center officers is increasingly proving to be one of considering them guilty until proven innocent. Thus you felt perfectly correct in justifying a reluctance to give me keys to your appartment on the grounds that I could not today prove that I might not at some time in the future watch your porno tapes and make your place untidy. You didn't bother asking anyone from the Center whether I had ever abused my key priveledges. You didn't ask Jennifer about the several years when I had copies of her apartment keys. But no one, Bob, can prove that they might not commit some crime in the future. In fact, any one with any imagination can envision O.Henry-like scenarios in which what at first look like crimes are committed for good and even heroic reasons. It would be inappropriate for that reason alone for me to promise never to enter your apartment before telling you or never to watch your porno tapes. What if I needed to?
It would be enough for most people to extract a simple non-specific promise not to abuse such a priveledge as the lending of apartment keys, but you have asked for something vastly more detailed, and after fifteen years any such formal pledge between us would be insulting at best. The point, Bob, is that you no longer have any apparent capability to imagine that even people who have stood by you and tried to befriend you are capable of responsible behavior, and you increasingly choose to believe the worst about them to justify your own increasingly cynical and niggardly attitude towards your fellow man. You don't investigate, you don't experiment, you just condemn.
Outside the restaurant that Friday night you marched away after having angrily accused me of not ever allowing you to speak your mind. This last straw was offered after my having run discussion groups for fifteen years at which you were always welcome, after my having conducted a study group for seven years to each meeting of which you had always been mailed a personal invitation, and after three years of my having welcomed you into my home each week for co-counselling. Jennifer and I were speechless.
The President of a psychological organization has to be a psychologist. He has to be able to judge the mental health of his staff and decide when a sick member needs to be quaranteened. Although he can try to be a friend and therapist, anyone who takes therapy seriously must learn to tell when help for the afflicted is either not possible or not wanted.
As of Friday night when you turned your back on Jennifer and me, I have no longer been your friend or therapist. Your delusions have become more real and more trustworthy to you than all my attempts to help you escape them. From now on, I will be a colleague but no more. If you want to talk to me about Center business in your current capacity as Treasurer, you will ask for an appointment and I will tell you when I can schedule time for you.
Additionally, I hereby find your current attitude toward the Center property that I have allowed you to keep at your apartment to be reckless and irresponsible. Accordingly, you will no longer keep Center property at your apartment except as I may from time to time allow. All Center property now in your apartment will be kept in my apartment, since that is the only location that all board members have access to. You may schedule one afternoon per month to access these books in the performance of your duties. Actually, this ought to considerably reduce the amount of resented time you say you spend with these books.
If these new arrangements make it impossible for you to consider in your capacity as Treasurer, your resignation is accepted immediately and you will turn over all Center property in your possession to me as soon as possible. If you want to try to live within the new rules, your service will be considered conditional and probationary.
Finally, I would like to state a personal opinion. Just as your creative investment in the Center has deteriorated over the last ten years into a set of decreasingly-meaningful compulsive rituals, your involvement has seemed me to become less and less in your own best interest. Evidence of this mental erosion includes the following:
In looking back over the last few months it has become apparent that your attendance at my Study Group has become just one more oppressive duty by which you try to convince people (including maybe yourself) just how loyal and serious a fellow you are.
What evidence is there that the Study Group isn't good for you? When you arrive you are already talking and laughing to yourself as if in some autistic reverie. Once the group starts you add nothing to the conversation but instead stare at the ceiling, rock back and forth and roll your eyes. You give dirty looks to people you judge to be speaking out of their depth. Occasionally you'll ask a ludicrous question like "What's the difference between publishing a book and having a conversation?" with a straight face so other members will feel sorry for your simple-mindedness and lower the level of discourse to your level.
In recent months the only time you've seemed to come alive is when you could make fun of someone or butler the snack food. At the close you often shout demands at no one in particular ("I need someone to help me lead the next open group!") to show that you regard your fellow members as vainglorious eggheads unable to attend to practical affairs unless yelled at (and therefore damned lucky to have someone like Bob around to mind the store).
The Ninth Street Center — which is where I come in — is not about being a Boy Scout outwardly obedient to principles that are secretly held in contempt. In fact, it isn't about conforming to anything. It's about learning how to value one's mental health (whether or not it looks like anybody else's mental health) and how to avoid oppressive stress. It's about sharing what you learn, but only with those few individuals with whom you resonate (certainly not the public at large, for example), if and when you can find them. It's also about respecting the interpersonal communication, peer counselling and various kinds of talk groups we sponsor even when your own path leads you towards temporarily recuperative withdrawal or indifference. Far from being helped by the Center's agenda, your increasingly cynical and robotic performances indicate that you have now almost completely given up on learning how to make any of these ideas work for you.
Bob, I have tried to believe in you and encourage you for twenty years. You have always been welcome at any activity I sponsored, and with more warmth than anyone else at the Center had for you. But if you claimed a respected seat at my court, it was only because the newcomers were still conventional enough to respect seniority. Once they got to know what the level of your contributions in fact were, they stopped looking to you for psychological insight.
And the fact is, you set a very bad example to people at your open talk groups because you water down your morality tales to insubstantiality and then wonder why people don't even laugh. The newcomers simply tell interesting stories of real life and allow listeners to draw their own conclusions, but you can't believe any outsider is as smart as you are so you either predigest your stories and serve them up dry and lifeless or, more frequently these days, sit in the back and sulk. You don't talk to these people, you recite the kind of speeches you imagine someone you would be able to idealize might recite — once again you are living in your head and not in the world, trying to love yourself so you can avoid risking giving love to anyone else. I can't begin to explain to Jen and John why you won't talk to them at the Study Group, but having a low membership number certainly gives you no right to snub newer members, not when I have anything to say about it.
In my judgment, the only remaining chance that the benefits of inner growth will become real, and therefore attractive, to you is if you stop going through the motions, give up listening to other people talk the talk, and find your own sense of mental health in a world of independently chosen experiences. For this purpose I want you to take a sabbatical from the Study Group for a few sessions. Perhaps it's just a little fresh air you need, but you may equally legitimately conclude that our focus on reading difficult texts that don't seem to interest you is more of a distraction than you need right now. In any case, if in October you feel interested in trying to make the group a useful experience, I welcome you to try again.
In the meantime I will be available to talk about this and other topics relating to the Center.
Although it was a lot of work — my throat was sore by the end of the day — I feel we accomplished a lot Sunday by going over in greater depth than ever before our understanding of what Jennifer is going through.
It occurred to me afterwards that we should bear in mind that the things she's focusing on right now might not be the things she talks about with you. For example, in her group on childhood victimization she may be focusing on how to let her mother, and her expectation of ultimate reconciliation with her mother, go. When she's having lunch with you, however, since one of the major things you two have in common is an interest in me, she may lapse into whining about me without really meaning to just because the conversation sooner or later winds up in that rut.
I remind you of this so that neither of us need believe that she really believes her line about having been "abandoned", or (even if she believes it) that she thinks it has anything to do with where she must go now in her life. Nevertheless, it is important for us to understand why this charge would be a defense against her reaching for a more independent, mature and creative relationship to life.
To reiterate a bit, remember that Paul never used the term "abandonment" when referring to relationships freely chosen by creative adults. He always maintained that being independent meant allowing the other person the right to 1) find someone more suited to them, 2) be hit by a truck, 3) go crazy, or 4) simply vanish without an explanation. The last is obviously the most potentially stressful, yet in Paul's eyes it was sometimes the most telling. For even silence can express meaning if you understand human nature.
(Do you recall the classic incident when Carl complained that his latest fling just walked into the sunset without so much as a fair-thee-well? "At least he could have told me WHY he was leaving!" said Carl. "Oh, I think his silence speaks volumes," said Paul, gently.)
Paul used the term "abandonment" only to refer to what can happen to truly dependent people: children and institutionalized adults. These are the individuals who genuinely have nowhere to turn to when their relationship with their custodians breaks down. For instance, when Jen's mother turned out to be a cruel witch, Jennifer really did have nowhere to turn to except endless crying, sulking and self-pity — all of which patterns were well built up before she had any idea that her submissiveness might also be a good thing, a resource that she could use to enrich her own life.
My relationship with Jennifer was always marked by chronic emotional abuse on her part in the following pattern: 1) I would either say no, not want to do what she wanted me to do, raise my voice, or in some other way act contrary to her (romantic) expectations, 2) she would feel intense chagrin and humiliation all out of proportion to the reality of what was going on around her, 3) instead of seeing that she needed to take reality more seriously and her fantasies less so, she would fall into a crying jag which at least gave her the emotional reward of feeling like a "significant victim." (The "I'm important because I have suffered great injustices" syndrome.) It was this collapse into virtual catatonia that we called her "black hole".
For many years I would become immediately solicitous in these moments, put on my "supportive therapist" hat, and console her in eloquent language that I meant no harm, loved her more than ever, and would sit by her patiently until she no longer felt the ghosts of past slights (at the hands of her mother). And for the first few years this approach worked. She would calm down, dry her eyes and soon we'd be hugging and kissing as if nothing had happened. For in truth, nothing had!
In the last three years, however, her tendency to throw these temper tantrums had increased. This was no doubt partly due to her frequently misinterpreting what she only partly heard — thanks to increasing hearing difficulties which she was in denial about due to her lifelong over-identification with her "body image") — and perhaps partly due to what my friend Judy, who has a medical degree, thinks may be mere menopausal irritability.
I know you enjoy sympathizing with Jen, but I now ask you for a moment to consider what it has been like for me to try to be lovers in a fully equal sense with a person who is sick and having great trouble leaving behind the sick defenses she invented in childhood. Just as feminines need masculines to embody moral integrity, masculines need feminines to embody emotional continuity. Being with Jennifer meant being loved for two months and then despised for two days. Believe me when I say that two days can cause more harm than the good built in two months. You get the feeling that the love simply isn't there in any permanent, reliable way, but more like a carrot being held under your nose to get you to behave yourself. Love that descends to manipulation is aggression.
After ten years of working with Jen on leaving her black hole behind, and all the attendant theatrical performances we're all too familiar with, it became clear that she was becoming not less intent on using her sulks to punish me, but more, and that my well-rehearsed reaction of being solicitous and empathetic was doing more to enable her to be sick than to cure her. So I began another tactic: that of saying goodnight whenever she flew into a tantrum. I did this as gently as I could three or four times in the last two years and it seemed to cool her down more quickly than when I became enthralled in her inspired performances.
Last November, after saying "Oh, I knew you'd be like that!", she marched down the street, beginning once again act one of that timeless classic "Let's Humiliate Dean in Public". This has never worked that well for her because I couldn't care less what people on the street think, but she enjoys re-enacting this role in public settings anyway. Well, I trundled along a few paces behind as usual asking that we just calm down and realize that nothing had happened to cause either of us to be upset. But then I found myself slowing down and thinking, "Am I just being an 'enabler' again?"
I calmed down, took a breath, and said, "Jen, this really has nothing to do with me, you know? I'm going to go home and when you feel better give me a call." I then hailed a cab and ended the whipping boy session. She looked so perplexed!
When I got home, I left a very friendly message on her answering machine saying, "Jen, I know it was disappointing that we got lost in a construction site, but sooner or later some rain falls on everybody's parade and it does no good to point fingers or get upset. So let's just chalk it up to bad luck and not let it influence the fact that we love and need each other. Call me when you get in." (I have this message on tape, by the way, if you want to hear it.)
You know the rest. Did she call me when she got home? No, she put me through days of ostracism, of feeling utterly unloved when the moment before I had been king of the world, and, yes, of crying my eyes out.
Like the battered housewife who finally decides that she deserves better than to be beaten up by a drunk every weekend, I've slowly decided that I deserve better than to be loved one second and hated the next. In the final analysis, it's not healthy for me. And if what she's dishing out is not healthy for me, than it can't be right for her to think that this is a good way to relate to men.
Again, she may only draw the abandonment card with you because she doesn't know what else to talk about and because you're fun to squeeze sympathy out of. But always remember that what she really means by this is that I slowly but surely moved away from being caretaker and nursemaid during her temper tantrums to being friend and therapist who challenged her to stop behaving badly and live up to more mature standards with me. If she thinks I was firm, thank heavens she never met Paul!
Many people who fail to accept inner growth as a lifelong avocation grow as much as the inspiration at hand allows, then stop and declare that wherever they've arrived at is "mental health". They then look for other people who have reached similar compromises and settle in for life's last act. But there is no endpoint to growth for people like us. If Jen has declared that she has grown as much as she can, and that anyone who wants her love must accept her angry tantrums and ghost-busting, then we must of course allow her that right. But we must never agree that what she has done is right.
I still hope that Jen finds in herself the ability to rise up to her full stature and relate to me as my equal in every sense, and I ask you and John not to give up on her. In a paradoxical way, she needs us now more than ever. But the "sick child" routine just won't work anymore.