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 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.

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

  But the more Doug pursues her, the more he realizes how essential his effort is, and this depresses him. Despite all the kindling, he never manages to light the roaring blaze he needs. The more he tries to fill the gap, the emptier he feels. His eyes begin to wander, and when they finally focus, it’s not on Zoë; it’s on Naomi. This striking redheaded retail buyer isn’t subtle about expressing her attraction to Doug. She finds excuses to go into his office, and once there, she lingers. She’s impressed by how well he handled their boss; she likes that suit; are those new glasses? A sandwich turns into a drink turns into a five-year affair. The sex is fiery, but that’s not what the affair is about. It’s about the abundance of attention, and the exhilaration of the illicit. With Naomi, who never lacks for male attention, Doug is irresistible. She misses him on the weekends; she’s jealous about his other life. And while her possessiveness drains him, and is sometimes annoying, it also confirms exactly how important he is. When Doug comes to see me, he can barely manage the contradictions in his life. His marriage, which is supposed to be monogamous, is not. His affair, which is de facto nonmonogamous, has just ended because he couldn’t meet Naomi’s demand for fidelity. “The whole thing is insane,” he tells me. “Naomi wanted me to stop having sex with Zoë, which I told her I couldn’t do. So she started seeing someone else, and now they’re talking about marriage. She’s refusing to have sex with me, and she’s completely secretive about her relationship with Evan. I’m so jealous I’m obsessed. The thought of her in the arms of another guy makes me nuts.” “I hope the irony isn’t lost on you,” I tell him. “You demand fidelity in the very place that’s defined by infidelity.” “Yeah, but that’s her infidelity, not mine,” he answers. “Oh, yes, I forgot there’s a double standard. She and Zoë are both expected to remain faithful to you while you remain faithful to neither?” “Something like that, yeah. Not a very fair arrangement, I know. Believe me, I’m not proud.” “So why didn’t you leave Zoë?” I ask. “If you had all this with Naomi, why didn’t you follow the burning bush, the fire that never consumes?” “I love Zoë,” Doug says, shocked at the implications of what I’ve just said. “I’ve never really wanted to leave my marriage. I have a good thing with Zoë, and I don’t want to live away from my kids. Anyway, Naomi and I married? That would be a disaster.” “So this wasn’t an exit affair. Maybe more like a stabilizer, where the third person helps keep the other two in place?” “I don’t know. Maybe. The point is that I didn’t think. I just did it. I followed my gut, and now I feel like shit.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Lives—not life. I’ve had eight of them, and every one, without exception, has ended the same way—in unspeakable cruelty and murder. Look at the last one! Artemis murdered me! Threw me into a cage and nonchalantly tossed it into the river and watched me sink slowly until the filthy water of the Danube covered my nostrils. The last thing I saw in that life was her triumphant leer as my final breath bubbled out of me. And do you know what my crime was?” Ernest shook his head. “My crime was that I was being a cat.” “Merges, you’re not any ordinary cat. You are an unusually intelligent cat. I hope I may speak frankly to you.” Merges, who was licking the sides of the empty Rolling Chicken container, growled assent. “Two things I must say. First, of course, you realize it was not Artemis who drowned you. It was her grandmother, Klara, now long dead. Secondly—” “She smells the same to me—Artemis is Klara in a later life. Didn’t you know that?” Ernest was thrown off guard. Needing time to ponder that notion, he merely continued, “Secondly, Klara did not hate cats. In fact, she loved a cat. She was no murderer: it was in an effort to save the life of Cica, her own dear cat, that she acted against you.” No answer. Ernest could hear Merges breathing. Am I, he wondered, being too confrontational, not showing enough empathy? “But,” he said gently, “perhaps this is all beside the point. I think we should stick to what you said a minute ago—that your only crime was being a cat.” “Right! I did what I did because I am a cat. Cats protect their turf, they attack other, threatening cats, and the best of the cats—those bursting with catness—let nothing, nothing, stand in their way when they whiff the sweet muskiness of a cat in heat. I was doing nothing more than fulfilling my catness.” Merges’s comment gave Ernest pause. Wasn’t Merges being true to Ernest’s favorite of Nietzsche’s maxims: “Become he who you are?” Wasn’t Merges right? Wasn’t he simply fulfilling his own feline potential? “There was once a famous philosopher,” Ernest began, “that is, a wise man or a thinker—” “I know what a philosopher is,” the cat broke in crossly. “In one of my first lives, I lived in Freiburg and made nighttime visits to Martin Heidegger’s home.” “You knew Heidegger?” said Ernest, amazed. “No, no. Heidegger’s cat, Xanthippe. She was something! Hot! Cica, hot as she was, was nothing compared to Xanthippe. It was many lives ago, but I remember well that army of heavyweight Teutonic bullies I had to battle to get to her. Tomcats came all the way from Marburg when Xanthippe entered heat. Ah, those were the days!”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  “Coincidence again! You’ve got to let it go!” I insisted. “It’s bad luck, and it has no implications for the future. The dice have no memory.” “Coincidence, coincidence—your favorite term!” she scoffed. “The proper term is karma, and it’s clearly telling me that I must love no other man.” Her jinxed self-image reminded me of Joe Bfstplk, the character in the Lil’ Abner comic strip over whose head an ominous black cloud eternally hovers. How was I to undermine Irene’s belief in a cursed karma? I ultimately approached it much as I did her rage. More than words were needed: I had to offer a therapeutic act, and that consisted of disregarding her warnings, of repeatedly coming close to her, of moving into the jinxed, toxic space and remaining alive and healthy. Still another meaning of the black ooze was connected in Irene’s mind with a dream she had once had of a beautiful dark-eyed woman who wore a red rose in her hair and reclined on a sofa. As I approach closer, I realize that the woman is not as she seemed: her sofa is a bier, her eyes are dark not with beauty but with death, and the crimson rose is no flower but a bloody mortal wound. “I know I am this woman, and anyone approaching me will, ipso facto, be introduced to death—another reason not to get too close.” The image of the woman with the crimson rose in her hair recalled to my mind the plot of The Man in the Maze, an extraordinary futuristic novel by Robert Silverberg in which a man is sent to a newly discovered world to make contact with an advanced race of beings. Though he employs every imaginable communicational device—geometrical symbols, mathematical invariants, musical themes, hailing, yelling, arm waving—he is sublimely ignored. But his efforts disturbed the tranquillity of the beings, who do not allow his hubris to go unpunished. Just before he departs to return to Earth, they perform a mysterious neurosurgical procedure upon him. Only much later does he understand the nature of his punishment: the surgery makes it impossible for him to contain his existential angst. Not only is he continually buffeted by the dread of sheer contingency and his own inevitable death but he is doomed to isolation, since anyone approaching within hundreds of feet is exposed to the same withering blasts of existential dread. However much I insisted to Irene that the black ooze was a fiction, the truth is that I was often trapped in it. In my work with Irene, I suffered the fate of those who approached Robert Silverberg’s protagonist too closely: I was buffeted by my own existential verities. Again and again our sessions confronted me with my own death. Though I have always known that death is there waiting, whirring faintly just beneath the membrane of my life, I have generally managed to put it out of mind.

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

  I see people so desperate to beat back a feeling of deadness in their partnerships that they’re willing to risk everything for a few moments of forbidden excitement with someone else. I see couples whose sex lives are rekindled by an affair, and others for whom an affair effectively ends what little connection remained. I see older men who feel betrayed by their newly unresponsive penises, who rush for Viagra to soften the anxiety of the hard facts; I see their wives made uncomfortable by the sudden challenge to their own passivity. I see new parents whose erotic energy has been sapped by caring for an infant—so consumed by their child that they don’t remember to close the bedroom door once in a while. I see the man who looks at porn online not because he doesn’t find his wife attractive but because her lack of enthusiasm leaves him feeling that there’s something wrong with him for wanting sex. I see people so ashamed of their sexuality that they spare the one they love the ordeal. I see people who know they are loved, but who long to be desired. They all come to see me because they yearn for erotic vitality. Sometimes they come sheepishly; sometimes they arrive desperate, dejected, enraged. They don’t just miss sex, the act; they miss the feeling of connection, playfulness, and renewal that sex allows them. I invite you to join me in my conversations with these questers as we work toward opening up and coming a step closer to transcendence. For those who aspire to accelerate their heartbeat periodically, I give them the score: excitement is interwoven with uncertainty, and with our willingness to embrace the unknown rather than to shield ourselves from it. But this very tension leaves us feeling vulnerable. I caution my patients that there is no such thing as “safe sex.” I should point out, however, that not all lovers seek passion, or even, at one time, basked in it. Some relationships originate in feelings of warmth, tenderness, and nurturance, and the partners choose to remain in these calmer waters. They prefer a love that is built on patience more than on passion. To them, finding serenity in a lasting bond is what counts. There is no one way, and there is no right way. Mating in Captivity aspires to engage you in an honest, enlightened, and provocative discussion.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  It was in the midst of her bitterness and despair over this last loss that she dreamed of the wall of bodies. “Keep going, Irene; I’m listening.” “What I mean is, how can you understand me? Your life’s unreal—warm, cozy, innocent. Like this office.” She pointed to my packed bookshelves behind her and to the scarlet Japanese maple blazing just outside the window. “The only thing missing are some chintz cushions, a fireplace, and a crackling wood fire. Your family surrounds you—all in the same town. An unbroken family circle. What can you really know of loss? Do you think you’d handle it any better? Suppose your wife or one of your children was to die right now? How would you do? Even that smug striped shirt of yours—I hate it. Every time you wear it, I wince. I hate what it says!” “What does it say?” “It says, ‘I’ve got all my problems solved. Tell me about yours.’” “You’ve talked about these feelings before. But they have such force today. Why now? And the dream, why do you dream this dream now?” “I told you I was going to talk to Eric, and yesterday I had dinner with him.” “And?” I prompted her after another of those irritating pauses of hers that implied that I should be able to make the connection between Eric and the dream. She had mentioned this man only once, telling me that his wife had died ten years before and that she had met him at a lecture on bereavement. “And he confirmed everything I’ve been saying. He says you’re dead wrong about my getting through Jack’s death. You don’t get through it. You never get over it. Eric’s got a new wife and a five-year-old daughter, but the wound still bleeds. He talks to his dead wife every day. He understands me. And I’m convinced now that it’s only the people who have been there who can understand. There’s a silent underground society out there—” “Underground society?” I interrupted. “Of people who really know—all the survivors, the bereaved. All this time you’ve been urging me to detach from Jack, to turn toward life, to form a new love—it’s all been a mistake. It’s a mistake of smugness from those like you who have never lost.” “So only the bereaved can treat the bereaved?” “Somebody who’s been through it.” “I’ve been hearing that stuff ever since I entered this field!” I burst out at her. “Only alcoholics can treat alcoholics? Or addicts treat addicts? And do you have to have an eating disorder to treat anorexia, or be depressed or manic to treat affective disorders? How about being schizophrenic to treat schizophrenia?” Irene knew how to press my button. She had an uncanny knack of locating and zeroing in on my major irritants. “Oh, no, you don’t!” she shot back. “I was captain of the varsity debating team at Radcliffe and I know that strategy—reductio ad absurdum!