Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Mating in Captivity Reconciling the Erotic + the Domestic Esther Perel Dedication To my parents, Sala Ferlegier and Icek Perel. Their vitality lives on in me. Epigraph WILD THINGS IN CAPTIVITY Wild things in captivity while they keep their own wild purity won’t breed, they mope, they die. All men are in captivity, active with captive activity, and the best won’t breed, though they don’t know why. The great cage of our domesticity kills sex in a man, the simplicity of desire is distorted and twisted awry. And so, with bitter perversity, gritting against the great adversity, the young ones copulate, hate it, and want to cry. Sex is a state of grace. In a cage it can’t take place. Break the cage then, start in and try. D. H. Lawrence Contents Dedication Epigraph Introduction 1 From Adventure to Captivity: Why the Quest for Security Saps Erotic Vitality 2 More Iintimacy, Less Sex: Love Seeks Closeness, but Desire Needs Distance 3 The Pitfalls Of Modern Intimacy: Talk Is Not the Only Avenue to Closeness 4 Democracy Versus Hot Sex: Desire and Egalitarianism Don’t Play by the Same Rules 5 Can Do! The Protestant Work Ethic Takes On the Degradation of Desire 6 Sex Is Dirty; Save It for Someone You Love: When Puritanism and Hedonism Collide 7 Erotic Blueprints: Tell Me How You Were Loved, and I’ll Tell You How You Make Love 8 Parenthood: When Three Threatens Two 9 Of Flesh and Fantasy: In the Sanctuary of the Erotic Mind We Find a Direct Route to Pleasure 10 The Shadow of the Third: Rethinking Fidelity 11 Putting the X Back in Sex: Bringing the Erotic Home Notes Bibliography Searchable Terms Acknowledgments About the Author Credits Books by Esther Perel Copyright About the Publisher Introduction THE STORY OF SEX IN committed modern couples often tells of a dwindling desire and includes a long list of sexual alibis, which claim to explain the inescapable death of eros. Recently, it seems, everyone from the morning news to the New York Times has weighed in on the topic. They warn us that too many couples are having infrequent sex even when the partners profess to love each other. Today’s twosomes are too busy, too stressed, too involved in child rearing, and too tired for sex.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  She tried to be severe. I knew she wasn’t angry, but I also knew she would become angry if I did not produce some mimicry of remorse, so I hung my head and declared that I would certainly think twice before letting myself be goaded into another fight. “You better tell Dad,” Pearl said to my mother. My mother nodded wearily. “You can tell him,” she said. She and Dwight weren’t getting along. They hadn’t gotten along since the night they returned from their honeymoon in Vancouver, two days early, silent and grim, not even looking at each other as they carried the suitcases into the house and down the hall to Dwight’s room. That night Dwight sat up drinking and went to sleep on the sofa. He did this often, sometimes three or four nights in a row, weekends especially. I was always the first one up on Saturday and Sunday because the papers came in early on those days, and when I got up I usually found Dwight asleep on the sofa, a test pattern hissing on the TV. For the first few weeks my mother was utterly cast down. She slept late, something she had never done before, and when I came home for lunch I sometimes found her still in her bathrobe, sitting at the kitchen table and staring dazedly down the bright white tunnel of the house. I had never seen my mother give up. I hadn’t even known the possibility existed, but now I knew, and it gave me pause. It made me feel for a little while the truth that everything good in my life could be lost, that it was all drawn day by day from someone else’s store of hope and will. But my mother got better, and I found other things to think about. She did not give up. Instead, she chose to believe that she could still make a life in Chinook. She joined the PTA and persuaded the head of the rifle club to admit her as a member. She took a part-time job waitressing in the bachelors’ mess hall. She filled the house with plants, mothered Pearl, and insisted that all of us spend time together like a real family. And so we did. But our failure was ordained, because the real family we set out to imitate does not exist in nature; a real family as troubled as ours would never dream of spending time together. Dwight thought that most of these troubles were my fault. And a lot of them were. I screwed up constantly, even when I meant to do well. Every screwup was good for a scene, and this fight I’d gotten into with Arthur Gayle was going to be good for a big one. When the whistle blew at five o’clock Pearl went outside to wait for Dwight. * * * HE CAME STRAIGHT to my room.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Nonetheless, the medical model persists. It (arguably) functions fairly effectively with diseases like diabetes and cancer, where the doctor holds all of the knowledge and dictates the necessary interventions for a sick patient. This is not, however, a useful paradigm for trauma healing. Rather than being a disease in the classical sense, trauma is instead a profound experience of “dis-ease” or “dis-order.” What is called for here is a cooperative and restorative process with the doctor as an assisting guide and midwife. A doctor who insists on retaining his or her protected role as “healthy healer” remains separate, defending him- or herself against the ultimate helplessness that lurks, phantom-like, in all of our lives. Cut off from his or her own feelings, such a doctor will not be able to join with the sufferer. Missing will be the crucial collaboration in containing, processing and integrating the patient’s horrible sensations, images and emotions. The sufferer will remain starkly alone, holding the very horrors that have overwhelmed him and broken down his capacity to self-regulate and grow. In a common therapy resulting from this isolating orientation, the therapist instructs the PTSD victim to assert control over his feelings, to manage his aberrant behaviors and to alter his dysfunctional thoughts. Contrast this alignment to that of shamanic traditions, where the healer and the sufferer join together to reexperience the terror while calling on cosmic forces to release the grip of the demons. The shaman is always first initiated, via a profound encounter with his own helplessness and feeling of being shattered, prior to assuming the mantle of healer. Such preparation might suggest a model whereby contemporary therapists must first recognize and engage with their own traumas and emotional wounds.† The Power of MythMythology is a function of biology. —Joseph Campbell in Myth and the Body Healing has been hindered by a nomenclature and a paradigm that, in separating the healer from the wounded, denies the universality of our responses to terror and horror. The aspiration to reinvigorate a contemporary approach to healing trauma requires each of us to connect to our biological commonality as instinctual beings; thus, we are linked not only by our common vulnerability to fright but by our innate capacity to transform such experiences. In pursuing this link, we can learn much from mythology and from our animal brethren. It is the weaving together of heroic myth and biology (“mytho-biology”) that will help us comprehend the roots and mysterium tremendum of trauma. MedusaMythology teaches us about courageously meeting challenges. Myths are archetypal stories that simply and directly touch the core of our being. They remind us about our deepest longings, and reveal to us our hidden strengths and resources. They are also maps of our essential nature, pathways that connect us to each other, to nature and to the cosmos. The Greek myth of Medusa captures the very essence of trauma and describes its pathway to transformation.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  With human posttraumatic stress disorder, chronic sufferers tend to gravitate, over time, toward shutdown. This shows up as symptoms of alexithymia (the inability to describe or elaborate feelings due to a deficiency in emotional awareness), depression and somatization. Pavlov, observing his dogs suffering with their debilitating and intractable symptoms, concluded that they had lost their capacity to make adaptive approach/avoidance responses; they had essentially “lost their purpose.” In summarizing the plight of these poor creatures, he remarked that they had lost the “reflex” or instinct of purpose; they had lost their way. A similar example of breakdown comes from nature. A Galapagos Island guide told the following story to one of my students: “When a volcano erupts, the animals frequently lose their survival instincts, get confused, and some walk straight into the oncoming lava. This includes sea lions and marine iguanas capable of swimming to another island.” It appears that under this form of extreme duress, even animals in the wild may lose their bearings in the chaos. With a rare prescience Pavlov also inferred the natural, instinctive mechanisms by which traumatized organisms could regain their purpose and will to live. In particular he realized that approach and avoidance were aligned with what he called the defensive and orienting response. In his further study of the orientation responses (approach) and defensive responses (avoidance), Pavlov provided us with the key to establishing a healthy encounter between an organism and its environment: an optimal balance between curiosity and the need to defend and protect oneself. Pavlov discovered that when animals are exposed to something novel in their environment, they first arrest their movement. Next they direct their eyes, head and neck in the direction of a momentary sound, fleeting shadow or novel scent (or follow the lead of other members of the group as they go into an arrest and alert response.). During arrest there is a brief deceleration of the heart rate, which apparently “tunes” and opens sensory perception. 122 Pavlov discovered that these orienting responses served the function of both locating a source of novelty as well as accessing its meaning (i.e., is it a source of threat, mating, food or shelter?). It was likely that Pavlov was aware of this dual function. He called the innate characteristic of the orienting response the chto eta takoe reflex (instead of the simpler chto eta). Attempts at a literal translation have resulted in its being called the “What is it?” reflex. A more exact translation, however, suggests something closer to “What is that?” or “What is going on here?” or “Hey man, what’s happening?!?” b This labelling emphasizes the amazement and curiosity inherent in the response. This dual response (reacting plus inquiring) is the dominant feature of orienting behaviors.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  This went on for some time. As we baited him Kenneth smiled in a secretive way and sucked on an empty Yellow-Bole pipe with which, he later told me, he strengthened his will power by tempting himself to smoke. Norma was mute. She sat next to Kenneth on the sofa and stared at the floor while he absently rubbed his hand up and down her back. Every time he touched her I felt despair. At last my mother came in from the kitchen and suggested that Norma take Kenneth out and show him around Chinook. Norma nodded and stood up, but Kenneth said he didn’t want to leave now, just when things were getting interesting. Norma implored him with her eyes. Finally he left with her. In the wake of his going we exchanged looks of exultation and shame. A fidgety silence came upon us. One by one we drifted away to other parts of the house. But at dinner it started up again. Kenneth couldn’t stop himself. Even when he was quiet you could feel him preparing his next charge. The only thing that could shut him up was the TV. When the TV came on Kenneth went silent, staring and still as an owl in a tree. Over the next couple of days my mother talked each of us into spending some time alone with him so we could get to know one another as individuals. This proved a mistake. Some people are better left unknown. Our walks and drives with Kenneth ended early and culminated in shouts and slamming doors. Years later my mother told me he’d made a pass at her. WE COULD ALL see that Norma didn’t love Kenneth. But she stayed next to him, and submitted to his demonstrations of passion, and refused to say a word against him. She even, in the end, married him. But not before Dwight had nearly killed himself trying to stop her. He drove down to Seattle almost every weekend, sometimes bringing us along, more often by himself, always with some new scheme for luring her away from Kenneth. Nothing worked. He returned late Sunday night or early Monday morning, eyes bloodshot from the long drive, too tired and baffled even to quarrel. Norma married Kenneth, and had their baby, and they moved into a duplex near Bothell. When we came down for visits she acted happy and never complained about anything. But she was pale and angular, all her lazy lushness

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  * Recall the discussion in Chapter 4 of Beatrice Gelder’s work demonstrating how attuned we humans are to the survival-based postures of others. These findings also relate to research on mirror neurons. A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when it observes the same action performed by another animal. Thus, the neuron mirrors the behavior of the other, as though the observer herself were performing the very same act. Such neurons have been directly observed in primates and are found in the premotor cortex and in the insula and cingulate, suggesting their importance in communicating internal bodily states and emotions. The neuroscientist Stephanie Preston, the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal and other neuroscientists have independently posited that the mirror neuron system is centrally involved in empathy and that since it is the body that is being mirrored, intimate moments are nonverbal in nature. In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex and the inferior parietal cortex. See Chapter 4 for specific references to this research.† I do this to help her keep connected with me as she goes inside, as well as to feel more grounded.‡ This is an important difference between “talk therapy” and body-oriented therapy. Rather than trying to help patients make new meanings or understand their problems, body therapy creates a space for the “body story” to unfold and complete. When this occurs, new meanings and insights emerge spontaneously, generated by the patients themselves, as an integral part of this process.§ The sense of a foreshortened life, of wordless despair, is a central characteristic of severe trauma. The person is in a fundamental way stuck in the horrific imprint of the past and thus cannot imagine a future different from the past.‖ This is an effect of dissociation. It is as though Sharon is describing what happened to another person; it is as though she is outside of her body, observing, but not really being present. She lives back at the moment of shock where dissociation is what allowed her to survive the unimaginable horror and terror. In the Hollywood, Hitchcock version of trauma, the sufferer is barraged by flashbacks. In real life, though, the numbing or shutting-down phase is often more significant and is generally characteristic of severe and/or chronic trauma. These are the people who become the “walking dead.”a Frequently, people will make exaggerated gestures as a way of avoiding feeling the underlying sensations.b I believe that this is because these very slow (“intrinsic”) movements, when done mindfully, operate through the gamma efferent system. This system is intimately connected to the brain stem–autonomic nervous system and involves the extra pyramidal motor system. Voluntary movement, on the other hand, is controlled by the alpha motor system and is independent of the autonomic nervous system.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  The sheriff came to the house one night and told the Bolgers that Chuck was about to be charged with statutory rape. Huff and Psycho were also named in the complaint. The girl was in my class at Concrete High—one of a pack of hysterically miserable girls who ran around in tight clothes, plastered their faces with makeup, chainsmoked and talked in class and did their best to catch the attention of boys who would be sure to use them badly. Somebody had knocked her up. She’d kept her pregnancy secret for as long as she could, and she was so fat to begin with that this deception came within two months of bringing her to term. Her name was Tina Flood, but everyone just called her The Flood. She was fifteen years old. The sheriff had talked to Tina, and on the basis of what she said he’d persuaded her father to hold off awhile before filing charges. Tina had said she didn’t want to charge anyone with anything, she just wanted Chuck to marry her. Mr. Flood, on the other hand, wanted to send the whole bunch of them to jail. But he must have known that this would do nothing for his daughter, and he must also have known that for Tina to marry into a family like the Bolgers would be a piece of luck wilder than anyone could have sanely imagined for her. So he had taken the sheriff’s advice. He was just waiting for Chuck to say the word. Chuck came back from the house that night and sat on his bed and told me everything. He also told me that he had no intention of marrying Tina Flood. He’d said this to the sheriff, too, said he’d spend the rest of his life in jail first. The sheriff told him not to make up his mind too fast. He would keep Mr. Flood at bay until Chuck had a chance to think about it and talk things over with his folks. But he left no doubt of the outcome if Chuck turned Tina down. He would go to prison. The charge was serious, and the case against him and the others was rock solid. Chuck said he wouldn’t do it. I told him I wouldn’t either. I encouraged him, but in my heart I was glad he was in trouble, and not just because it would take the heat off me. I was still hurt

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  5. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. AUGUSTINE. (de Cons. Ev. iii. 7.) The Evangelist had above brought down his history, of what was done to the Lord as far as early morning; he then turned back to relate Peter’s denial, after which he returned to the morning to continue the course of events, When the morning was come, &c. ORIGEN. They supposed that by His death they should crush His doctrine, and the belief in Him of those who believed Him to be the Son of God. With such purpose against Him they bound Jesus, Who looses them that are bound. (vid. Isa. 61:1.) JEROME. Observe the evil zeal of the Chief Priests; they watched the whole night with a view to this murder. And they gave Him up to Pilate bound, for such was their practice to send bound to the judge any whom they had sentenced to death. RABANUS. Though it should be observed that they did not now first bind Him, but before, when they first laid hands upon Him in the garden, as John relates. (John 18:12.) CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxxiv.) They did not put Him to death in secret, because they sought to destroy His reputation, and the wonder with which He was regarded by many. For this reason they were minded to put Him to death openly before all, and therefore they led Him to the governor. JEROME. Judas, when he saw that the Lord was condemned to death, returned the money to the Priests, as though it had been in his power to change the minds of His persecutors.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  There was never any gate- crashing on the ward. An upper-level patient would not be caught dead in the communication group. Occasionally some confused lower-functioning patient would stumble into the agenda group meeting, but once he learned where he was fear would glaze his eyes, and no one would have to escort him out. Although it was technically possible to graduate from the lower- to the upper-level group, few patients ever stayed in the hospital long enough for that to happen. Thus was the ward covertly stratified: everyone knew his or her place. But no one ever talked about it. Before I began to lead groups in the hospital, I used to think outpatient groups were challenging. It is not easy to lead a group of seven or eight needy outpatients with major problems in relating to others, and at the end of a meeting I would feel tired, often depleted, and marvel at the therapists who had the stamina to lead another group meeting immediately afterward. Yet once I began working with groups of hospitalized patients, I looked back with much nostalgia to those good old outpatient group therapy days. Imagine an outpatient group—a cohesive meeting of cooperative, highly motivated patients; a quiet, cozy room; no nurses knocking on the door to yank patients out for some lab procedure or medical appointment; no suicidal members with bandaged wrists; no one refusing to talk; no one zonked on medication falling asleep and snoring in the group; and, most important of all, the same patients and the same cotherapist there for each session, week after week, month after month. What luxury! A therapist’s nirvana. In contrast, the landscape of my inpatient groups was nightmarish—the continual rapid turnover of members; the frequent psychotic outbursts; the conning, manipulative members; the patients burned out by twenty years of depression or schizophrenia who were never going to get better; the tangible level of despair in the room. But the real killer, the ball-breaker in this work, was the hospital and insurance industry bureaucracy. Every day surveillance teams of HMO agents would swoop through the wards, nose through hospital charts, and order the discharge of one or another confused, despairing patient who had functioned relatively well the previous day and whose chart had no MD-signed note stating explicitly that he or she was suicidal or dangerous. Was there really a time, not so long ago, when the care of the patient was paramount? When physicians admitted the sick and kept them in the hospital until they got well? Was all that only a dream? I no longer talk much about it, no longer risk my students’ patronizing smiles by prattling on about that golden era when the administrator’s job was to help the doctor help the patient. The bureaucratic paradoxes were maddening.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  And I need you. Surely ninety minutes a week isn’t too much.” “No, I can’t do things piecemeal. I need a clean break. Besides, the group isn’t where I am anymore. It’s too superficial. I need to go deeper—to work with symbols, dreams, and archetypes.” “I agree, Paula.” By this time I was very sobered. “It’s what I want too, and we’re just now breaking that ground in the group.” “No, I’m too tired, too drained. Each new patient forces me to relive my own time of crisis, my own Calvary. No, I’ve decided: next week will be my last meeting.” And so it was. Paula never returned to the group. I asked her to call me at any time if she wanted to talk. She replied that it was also possible for me to call her. Although she wasn’t being malicious, her comment shifted the frame and stung me sharply. She never called me again. I phoned her a few times and twice took her to lunch. The first lunch (which was so painful that it was many months before I called her for another) began ominously. Finding the restaurant of our choice crowded, we went across the street to Trotter’s, a huge, cavernous structure, utterly without grace, that had had many previous lives: an Oldsmobile dealership, a natural-foods grocery store, a dance parlor. Now it was a restaurant featuring a menu of “dance” sandwiches—the Waltz, the Twist, the Charleston. No, it was not right; I felt it wasn’t right when I heard myself order a Hula sandwich and knew it wasn’t when Paula opened her purse, extracted a rock about the size of a small grapefruit, and placed it on the table between us. “My anger rock,” she said. From this point on, my memory is uncharacteristically spotty. Fortunately, I took some notes after our lunch—my conversations with Paula being too important to me to be entrusted to memory. “Anger rock?” I repeated blankly, transfixed by the lichen-covered boulder sitting on the table between us. “I’ve been buffeted about so much, Irv, that I’ve been swallowed by anger. Now I’ve learned to put anger away. Into this rock. I had to bring it today. I wanted it here when I met you.” “Why are you angry with me, Paula?” “I’m no longer angry. There’s too little time left to be angry. But I’ve been hurt; I’ve been deserted when I needed help most of all.” “I’ve never deserted you, Paula,” I said, but she didn’t acknowledge my comment and went on. “After the workshop I was shattered. Looking at Dr. Lee standing there tossing that chalk in the air, ignoring me, ignoring the human concerns of all patients, I felt the whole world give way under me. Patients are human.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  ORIGEN. But when the Devil leaves any one, he watches his time for return, and having taken it, he leads him into a second sin, and then watches for opportunity for a third deceit. (1 Cor. 5:1.) So the man who had married his father’s wife afterwards repented him of this sin, but again the Devil resolved so to augment this very sorrow of repentance, that his sorrow being made too abundant might swallow up the sorrower. Something like this took place in Judas, who after his repentance did not preserve his own heart, but received that more abundant sorrow supplied to him by the Devil, who sought to swallow him up, as it follows, And he went out, and hanged himself. But had he desired and looked for place and time for repentance, he would perhaps have found Him who has said, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked. (Ezek. 33:11.) Or, perhaps, he desired to die before his Master on His way to death, and to meet Him with a disembodied spirit, that by confession and deprecation he might obtain mercy; and did not see that it is not fitting that a servant of God should dismiss himself from life, but should wait God’s sentence. RABANUS. He hung himself, to shew that he was hateful to both heaven and earth. PSEUDO-AUGUSTINE. (Hil. Quæst. V. et N. Test. q. 94.) Since the Chief Priests were employed about the murder of the Lord from the morning to the ninth hour, how is this proved that before the crucifixion Judas returned them the money he had received, and said to them in the temple, I have sinned, in that I have betrayed innocent blood? Whereas it is manifest that the Chief Priests and Elders were never in the temple before the Lord’s crucifixion, seeing that when He was hanging on the Cross they were there to insult Him. Nor indeed can this be proved hence, because it is related before the Lord’s Passion, for many things which were manifestly done before, are related after, that, and the reverse. It might have been done after the ninth hour, when Judas, seeing the Saviour dead and the veil of the temple rent, the earthquake, the bursting of the rocks, and the elements terrified, was seized with fear and sorrow thereupon. But after the ninth hour the Chief Priests and Elders were occupied, as I suppose, in the celebration of the Passover; and on the Sabbath, the Law would not have allowed him to bring money. Therefore it is to me as yet unproved on what day or at what time Judas ended his life by hanging. 27:6–106. And the Chief Priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. 7. And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Fast-forward one hundred and forty years to Elliot, a patient of the eminent neurologist Antonio Damasio.128 This poor man was at the end of his rope, having burned bridge after bridge in his personal and professional life. Unable to hold a job, bankrupted by various business ventures with disreputable partners and slammed by a rapid succession of divorces, Elliot had sought psychiatric help. His referral to Damasio provided the opportunity for a thorough neurological workup. He passed one cognitive/intellectual test after another and even scored normal on a standard personality inventory. Even on a test purporting to measure moral development, he scored high and was still able to reason through a variety of complex ethical questions. However, something was clearly not “normal” with this man. Yet in his own words Elliot said, “And after all of this I still wouldn’t know what to do.” While being able to “think through” all manner of complex intellectual and moral dilemmas, he was unable to make choices and act accordingly. His moral computers were working, but his moral compass was not. Eventually, Damasio designed some clever tests that were able to pinpoint Elliot’s deficit and provide clues as to why his life was such a disaster. One of these tests was a type of card game where strategies of risk and gain were played off against one another. When needing to shift his strategy from high risk–high gain (with a probable overall loss) to moderate risk–modest gain (with ultimate gain), Elliott was unable to learn and sustain the transition. Just like the overall outcome in his life, Elliot was an abject failure; he simply could not learn when it mattered. Damasio speculated that his patient was unable to emotionally experience the consequences of his decisions or acts. He could reason perfectly well, except when something of importance was at stake. Essentially, Damasio reasoned that Elliot had lost the ability to feel and to care. He was therefore unable to make (e)valuations, integrate them into meaningful consequences and then act upon them. He was emotionally rudderless.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Rosa and Carol, the anorexic patients, began. Carol claimed that she had no problems and didn’t want to improve her relationships. “On the contrary,” she said emphatically, “what I want is less contact with others.” Only when I commented that I had never known anyone who didn’t wish to change something about herself did she tentatively offer that she was too often cowed by the anger of others, especially her parents, who tried to force her to eat. Accordingly, she posited, with little conviction, an agenda: “I’ll try to be assertive here in the meeting.” Rosa too had no wish to improve her relationships; she too wanted to stay apart. She didn’t trust anyone: “People always misunderstand me and try to change me.” “Would it be helpful,” I inquired, trying to add a here-and-now dimension to the agenda, “for you to be understood in this group, today?” “It might,” she said but warned me that it was hard for her to talk much in groups: “I’ve always felt that others are better, more important than me.” Dorothy, spittle dripping from her mouth, head deeply bowed to avoid any eye contact, spoke in a despairing whisper and gave me nothing. She said she was too depressed to participate in the group and that the nurses had told her it would be enough for her simply to listen. Nothing there to work with, I realized, and turned to the other two patients. “I have no hope of anything good ever happening to me again,” Martin said. His body was being relentlessly whittled away; his wife, along with everyone else from his past, had died; years had passed since he had last spoken to a friend; his son was sick to death of nursing him. “Doctor, you’ve got better things to do. Don’t waste your time,” he said to me. “Let’s face it—I’m beyond help. Once I was a good sailor. I could do everything on a boat. Should’ve seen me scamper to the crow’s nest. Nothing I couldn’t do there; nothing I didn’t know. But now what can anyone give me? What can I give anyone?” Magnolia put forward this agenda: “Ah’d like to learn to listen better in this group. Don’ you think dat would be a good thing, Doctah? Mah momma always tol’ me it was important to be a good listener.”

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  can stand the gaff. He quickly tires. He is the type who usually lacks courage at the crucial moment. He cannot take punishment and come back smiling.” I yielded easily to this comradely tone, forgetting while I did so that I was not the boy it supposed I was. Boy’s Life, the official Scout magazine, worked on me in the same way. I read it in a trance, accepting without question its narcotic invitation to believe that I was really no different from the boys whose hustle and pluck it celebrated. Boys who raised treasure from Spanish galleons, and put empty barns to use by building operational airplanes in them. Boys who skied to the North Pole. Boys who sailed around the Horn, solo. Boys who saved lives, and were accepted into savage tribes, and sent themselves to college by running traplines in the wilderness. Reading about these boys made me restless, feverish with schemes. My mother had allowed me to bring the Winchester to Chinook. When I was alone in the house I sometimes dressed up in my Scout uniform, slung the rifle across my back, and practiced Indian sign language in front of the mirror. Hungry. Brother. Food. Want. Great Mystery. MY MOTHER FINALLY gave Dwight a date in March. Once he knew she was coming he began to talk about his plans for renovating the house, but he drank at night and didn’t get anything done. A couple of weeks before she quit her job he brought home a trunkful of paint in five-gallon cans. All of it was white. Dwight spread out his tarps and for several nights running we stayed up late painting the ceilings and walls. When we had finished those, Dwight looked around, saw that it was good, and kept going. He painted the coffee table white. He painted all the beds white, and the chests of drawers, and the dining-room table. He called it “blond” when he put it on the furniture, but it wasn’t blond or even off-white; it was stark, industrial strength, eye-frying white. The house reeked of oil. My mother called a few days before Dwight was supposed to drive down and pick her up. She talked to him for a while, then asked to speak to me. She

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  religious content; the husband Chuck was saving for his wife was a man just dying to see the error of his ways, and to mend them. To put liquor, gambling, and fornication behind him forever, along with the bad companions of his reckless youth. Once married, children, and plenty of them. Sobriety. Fidelity. Grace at dinner and a full pew on Sundays. He wanted a good life. The good life he had in mind for himself was just as conventional as the one I had in mind for myself, though without its epic pretensions. And Chuck still had faith in his, whereas I was losing mine. I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen to me. My life was a mess, and because I understood the problem as one of bad luck I could imagine no remedy but good luck, which I didn’t seem to have. Chuck held on to his dream as if it were already actual. He was even prepared to go to prison for it. Tina Flood and the baby she carried were not real to him. They were just another entry in the ledger of past mistakes which would give drama to his future change of heart, and which the virtue of his married life would atone for. The sheriff had expected Chuck to back down after a few days. When this didn’t happen he started talking tough. Mr. Flood wouldn’t wait any longer, he said. The charges were going to be filed any day now, and once the case went to court Chuck would have no chance of probation. The sheriff wanted Chuck to understand that he wasn’t bluffing about this. A boy and a girl was one thing, but three men and a girl was something else. In the eyes of the law Chuck and his friends were men, and they would be punished as men. Chuck did not give in. The idea of going to prison scared him, but he refused to consider marrying Tina Flood. Even the suggestion made him sick. He came back from browbeating sessions at the house with his eyes burning and a feverish sheen of sweat on his face. My own idea was that he should run off and join the army, but he wouldn’t give this any thought. He was frozen in the path of the future rushing down on him, with only enough strength left to say no to poor Tina Flood. When he started crying in his bed at night, I lost my secret pleasure in his situation. I wanted to do for him what I used to do for my mother, throw an arm around him and speak some words of comfort. But that wasn’t possible between us, and anyway I could tell he was trying not to be heard.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  That’s the real strength of group therapy.” Formulating a suitable agenda was difficult, and even after attending a few sessions, most group members rarely got the hang of it. But I told them not to sweat it: “My job is to help you.” Still, the process generally consumed up to 50 percent of the meeting time. After that I would devote the rest of the time to addressing as many agendas as possible. The demarcation between formulating and addressing an agenda is not always sharp. For some patients, forming an agenda was the therapy. To learn simply to identify a problem and to ask for help was therapy enough for many in our brief time together. Rosa and Carol, the anorexic patients, began. Carol claimed that she had no problems and didn’t want to improve her relationships. “On the contrary,” she said emphatically, “what I want is less contact with others.” Only when I commented that I had never known anyone who didn’t wish to change something about herself did she tentatively offer that she was too often cowed by the anger of others, especially her parents, who tried to force her to eat. Accordingly, she posited, with little conviction, an agenda: “I’ll try to be assertive here in the meeting.” Rosa too had no wish to improve her relationships; she too wanted to stay apart. She didn’t trust anyone: “People always misunderstand me and try to change me.” “Would it be helpful,” I inquired, trying to add a here-and-now dimension to the agenda, “for you to be understood in this group, today? ” “It might,” she said but warned me that it was hard for her to talk much in groups: “I’ve always felt that others are better, more important than me.” Dorothy, spittle dripping from her mouth, head deeply bowed to avoid any eye contact, spoke in a despairing whisper and gave me nothing. She said she was too depressed to participate in the group and that the nurses had told her it would be enough for her simply to listen. Nothing there to work with, I realized, and turned to the other two patients. “I have no hope of anything good ever happening to me again,” Martin said. His body was being relentlessly whittled away; his wife, along with everyone else from his past, had died; years had passed since he had last spoken to a friend; his son was sick to death of nursing him. “Doctor, you’ve got better things to do. Don’t waste your time,” he said to me. “Let’s face it—I’m beyond help. Once I was a good sailor. I could do everything on a boat. Should’ve seen me scamper to the crow’s nest. Nothing I couldn’t do there; nothing I didn’t know. But now what can anyone give me?

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  But what about everyday, physically healthy patients in psychotherapy—men and women not facing terminal illness or a firing squad? How can we clinicians expose them to the truth of their existential situation? I try to take advantage of certain urgent situations, often termed “boundary experiences,” that offer a window into deeper existential levels. Obviously, facing one’s own death is the most powerful boundary experience, but there are many others—serious illness or injury, divorce, career failure, milestones (retirement, children leaving home, midlife, important birthdays), and, of course, the compelling experience of the death of a significant other. Accordingly, my original strategy in therapy with Irene was to use the leverage of existential confrontation whenever possible. Again and again I attempted to turn her attention from Jack’s death to her own life and death. When she spoke, for example, of living only for her daughter, of welcoming death, of spending her remaining life gazing out the window at the family burial plot, I would reflexively say something like: “But aren’t you then choosing to squander your life—the only life you’ll ever have?” After Jack’s death Irene often had dreams in which some calamity—often a firestorm—engulfs her entire family. She viewed these dreams as reflecting Jack’s death and the end of their intact family. “No, no, you’re overlooking something,” I’d respond. “This dream is not only about Jack and the family—it’s also a dream about your own death.” During the first years Irene promptly dismissed such comments: “You don’t understand. I’ve had too much loss, too much trauma, too many deaths stacked up.” Respite from pain was her quest, and the idea of death seemed more solution than threat. That is not an uncommon position: many distressed people consider death a magical place of peace. But death is not a state of peace, nor is it a state in which one continues life without pain; it is consciousness extinguished. Perhaps I was not respectful of her timing. Perhaps I made the error, as I often do, of leaping in ahead of my patient. Or perhaps Irene was simply someone who could not profit from confronting her existential situation. At any rate, finding that I was getting nowhere, I eventually abandoned this tack and sought other ways to help her. Then, months later, when I least expected it, came the episode of the still-life painting, followed by the cascade of images and dreams perfused with death anxiety. Now the timing was right, and she was receptive to my interpretations. Another dream appeared, one so arresting she could not banish it from her mind.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “So that, Dr. Lash, is why I feel like giving up. There are no men out there. And if they’re still unmarried in their forties, then obviously something’s wrong—creeps, rejects, diseased—some other woman didn’t want them and threw them out. Cleaned them out too. The last three men I’ve gone out with had no retirement. Zilch. Who can respect them? Could you? I bet you’re putting plenty away for your retirement, huh? Oh, don’t worry, I know you’re not going to answer that. I’m thirty-five. I wake up thinking, the big three-five. Halfway there. The more I think about my ex, the more I realize he murdered me. He murdered ten years of my life—the most important ten years. Ten years—I can’t get my mind around it. It’s a bad dream, and when he walks out, I wake up, I look around, I’m thirty-five, my life is shot—every decent man has been taken.” [A few seconds of silence] “Where do your thoughts go, Myrna?” “Thinking about being trapped—thinking about going to Alaska where the man-woman ratio is better. Or to business school—good ratio there.” “Stay here in the room with me, Myrna. What’s it been like being here today?” “What do you mean?” “Same thing I always mean. Try to talk about what’s going on here, between us.” “Frustrating! Another hundred-fifty-dollar pop, and I don’t feel better.” “So I failed again today. Took your money and didn’t help. Tell me something, Myrna; see if—” Braking sharply, Myrna swerved to avoid a truck cutting into her lane. She sped up, passed it, screamed, “Asshole!” She turned off the tape and took a few deep breaths. Several months ago, after their first few sessions, her new shrink, Dr. Ernest Lash, had begun recording their sessions and giving her the tape to listen to the following week as she drove to the next session. Each week she returned the cassette and he recorded the new session over the old one. A good way, he said, to use the commute time from Los Altos to San Francisco. She wasn’t so sure. The hours had been frustrating in the first place, and going through them a second time was only more frustrating. The truck, having gained on her, flashed his lights to pass. Pulling over a lane, she cursed the trucker as he gave her the finger. Suppose she had an accident because she was distracted by listening to the tape? Could she sue her shrink? Take his ass into court? That notion brought a smile to her lips. Leaning over, Myrna pressed “rewind” for a few seconds, then the “play” button. “Stay here in the room with me, Myrna. What’s it been like being here today?” “What do you mean?” “Same thing I always mean. Try to talk about what’s going on here, between us.” “Frustrating! Another hundred-fifty-dollar pop, and I don’t feel better.”

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain. If I had lived in a place where drugs were bought and sold, I would have bought them. I would have done anything to get them. But nobody I knew used drugs. The possibility didn’t even occur to us. The marijuana scare films that might have sparked our interest never made it to Concrete, and heroin use was understood to be unique to the residents of New York City. I was all through being a good sport. Everything was a grievance to me. I complained about school, I complained about the uselessness of my medicine, I complained about how hard it was to eat and dress myself. I begged for comfort and then despised it. I talked back and found fault, especially with Dwight. From behind my wound I said things to Dwight I never would have said to him before. It occurred to me that alcohol might make me feel better. I stole some of Dwight’s Old Crow but the first drink made me choke, so I replenished the bottle with water and put it back. A few nights later Dwight asked me if I had been into his whiskey. It was watery, he said. He seemed more curious than anything else. He probably would have let me off with a warning if I’d admitted it, but I said, “I’m not the drinker in this house.” “Don’t talk to me like that, mister,” he said, and jabbed his fingers against my chest. He didn’t push all that hard, but he caught me off balance. I stumbled backward, tripping on my own feet, and as I went down I threw my hands out behind me to break the fall. All this seemed to happen very slowly, until the moment I landed on my finger. I forgot who I was. I heard a steady howling all around me as I thrashed on the floor. Other sounds. Then I was sitting on the couch, drenched in sweat, and my mother was trying to calm me. It was all over, she said. This was it, this was the last time. We were getting out of here. I LEFT FIRST. After all the years of thinking about leaving, I actually did it. My mother talked to Chuck Bolger’s parents and they agreed to let me live with them in Van Horn for the next few months, until the end of the school year. By then my mother hoped to have a job in Seattle. Once she started work and found

• From Story of O (1954)

  While Colette had O sit down on the edge of the platform, which in this center portion between the columns made a vertical drop to the floor—the steps having been placed to the left and right of the columns—the two other girls, after first having closed the Venetian blinds a trifle, shut the French door. O was surprised to note that it was a double door, and Anne-Marie, who was laughing, said: “That’s so no one can hear you scream. And the walls are lined with cork. Don’t worry, no one can hear the slightest thing that goes on in here. Now lie down.” She took her by both shoulders and laid her back, then pulled her slightly forward. O’s hands were clutching the edge of the platform—Yvonne having attached them to a ring set in the platform—and her buttocks were thus suspended in midair. Anne-Marie made her raise her legs toward her chest, then O suddenly felt her legs, still doubled-up above her, being pulled taut in the same direction: straps had been fastened to her ankle bracelets and thence to the columns on either side, while she lay thus between them on this raised dais exposed in such a way that the only part of her which was visible was the double cleft of her womb and her buttocks violently quartered. Anne-Marie caressed the inside of her thighs. “It’s the most tender spot of the whole body,” she said, “be careful not to harm it. Not too hard now, Colette.” Colette was standing over her, astride her at the level of her waist, and in the bridge formed by her dark legs O could see the tassels of the whip she was holding in her hand. As the first blows burned into her loins, O moaned. Colette alternated from left to right, paused, then started again. O struggled with all her might, she thought the straps would tear her limb from limb. She did not want to grovel, she did not want to beg for mercy. And yet that was precisely what Anne-Marie intended wringing from her lips. “Faster,” she said to Colette, “and harder.” O braced herself, but it was no use. A minute later she could bear it no more, she screamed and burst into tears, while Anne-Marie caressed her face. “Just a second longer,” she said, “and it will be over. Only five more minutes. She can scream for five minutes. It’s twenty-five past, Colette. Stop when it’s half past, when I tell you to.” But O was screaming: “No, no, for God’s sake don’t!” screaming that she couldn’t bear it, no, she couldn’t bear the torture another second. And yet she endured it to the bitter end, and after Colette had left the little stage, Anne-Marie smiled at her. “Thank me,” she said to O, and O thanked her.