Fear

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)

  Taking the PlungeWhen the first plane hit the building, only ten stories above her office, the explosion sent a shock wave of terror through her body. People’s immediate reaction to such terrifying events is to arrest, orient and then escape. This usually entails an intense urge to run. However, trapped eighty stories above ground with thousands of other people, Sharon needed to inhibit this primal reaction. Against the intense impulses to flee, she compelled herself to stay “calm” and walk in an orderly line down the stairs along with dozens of other terrified individuals; this was the case even though her body was “adrenaline-charged” to run at full throttle. Surely Sharon also felt the potential for any one of the other trapped office workers to suddenly panic and start a stampede that would further imperil them all. They, like her, also had to restrain their powerful primal urge to run. As Sharon slowly recounts the details of the escape, while feeling her bodily response, step-by-step, she recalls encountering yet another moment of stark terror when she found the door at the seventieth floor locked and impassable. Because of the physical comfort she found in contacting the spontaneous, expansive gestures and the images of the Hudson River, I now trust that Sharon can more safely face some of this highly charged material without becoming overwhelmed and consequently retraumatized.f In following her “body story,” islands of safety (Steps 1 through 3 in Chapter 5) are beginning to form in Sharon’s stormy trauma sea. The safety experienced from these internal islands allows her to deal with increasing levels of arousal and to move through them without undue distress. From this assessment, I guide her back to the moment of the explosion and then have her locate where and how that violent imprint feels in her body. As she attends to this “felt sense,” she becomes aware of an overall feeling of agitation in her legs and arms and tight “lumps” in her gut and throat. She says that she feels stuck. Here I introduce her to using the “voo” sound as a way to help her dissolve and transform the stuck sensations (see Chapter 6). As she focuses on those uncomfortable physical sensations (with the help of the vibratory sounds), the inclination to try to understand or explain them is reduced. With keenly focused attention, I guide her away from interpreting what she is feeling because I do not want the meaning to come from a mental place. The body needs to tell what’s on its “mind” first in order for new perceptions to arise in present time. (This warning about “premature cognition” was displayed on a bumper sticker I recently saw: “Reality: It’s not what you think!”)

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  I feel alternating waves of fear and sorrow. (20. This discharge in waves allows for the natural experience of pendulation—expansions/contraction as discussed in Step 3 in Chapter 5 —and softens the feelings of sorrow and fear.) It comes to me as a stark possibility that I may be seriously injured. (21. It is part of a mammalian response to injury to scan the body and to assess the nature and level of the injury.) Perhaps I will end up in a wheelchair, crippled and dependent. Again, deep waves of sorrow flood me. I’m afraid of being swallowed up by the sorrow and hold onto the woman’s eyes. (22. I am now actively engaging the woman as a resource.) A slower breath brings me the scent of her perfume. Her continued presence sustains me. As I feel less overwhelmed, my fear softens and begins to subside. I feel a flicker of hope, then a rolling wave of rage. (23. Rage is a strong defensive response—it is about the impulse to kill! Hence people become terrified by this impulse and try to suppress it. The pediatrician is helping me to contain this rage and not be overwhelmed by it.) My body continues to shake and tremble. It is alternately icy cold and feverishly hot. (24. This is indicative of a continued strong discharge.) A burning red fury erupts from deep within my belly: How could that stupid kid hit me in a crosswalk? Wasn’t she paying attention? Damn her! (25. More rage—accompanied with the human neocortical tendency to blame.) A blast of shrill sirens and flashing red lights block out everything. My belly tightens, and my eyes again reach to find the woman’s kind gaze. We squeeze hands, and the knot in my gut loosens. I hear my shirt ripping. I am startled and again jump to the vantage of an observer hovering above my sprawling body. (26. The abruptness with which the shirt is removed restimulates the dissociation.) I watch uniformed strangers methodically attach electrodes to my chest. The Good Samaritan paramedic reports to someone that my pulse was 170. I hear my shirt ripping even more. (27. As I notice that I’m dissociating, I am able to bring myself back to my body.) I see the emergency team slip a collar onto my neck and then cautiously slide me onto a board. While they strap me down, I hear some garbled radio communication. The paramedics are requesting a full trauma team. Alarm jolts me. I ask to be taken to the nearest hospital only a mile away, but they tell me that my injuries may require the major trauma center in La Jolla, some thirty miles farther. My heart sinks. Surprisingly, though, the fear quickly subsides. (28.

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

  Ironically, even the closeness generated by good sex can have a boomerang effect. Like John and Beatrice, many couples experience their relationship as a dance in which great sex brings them close, but then this very closeness can make sex difficult again. The initial rapture facilitates a swift bonding and establishes an immediate connection. But while many of us relish the idea of losing ourselves in sex, the very oneness that we experience through the merging of our bodies can evoke a sense of obliteration. The intensity of sexual passion triggers a fear of engulfment. Of course, few of us are aware of these undercurrents as they’re happening. What we feel instead is the urge to pull out right after orgasm, or the sudden desire to make a sandwich, to light a cigarette. We welcome the intrusion of any random thought: I meant to send an e-mail to…These windows need cleaning…. I wonder how my friend Jack is doing? We appreciate being left alone to meander leisurely in our own mind because this reestablishes a psychological distance, a delineation of the boundaries between me and you. From “inter-” we go back to “intra-.” Having been all over each other, we retreat back into our own skin. Nowhere is the passage from connection to separateness represented more clearly than at the end of a sexual act. In his book Arousal, the psychoanalyst Michael Bader offers another explanation for John and Beatrice’s erotic impasse. In his view, intimacy comes with a growing concern for the well-being of the other person, which includes a fear of hurting her. But sexual excitement requires the capacity not to worry, and the pursuit of pleasure demands a degree of selfishness. Some people can’t allow themselves this selfishness, because they’re too absorbed with the well-being of the beloved. This emotional configuration is reminiscent of how John felt toward his mother—his awareness of her unhappiness overwhelmed him with worry and a sense of burden. The very caring he experiences makes it harder for him to focus on his own needs, to feel spontaneous, sexually alive, and carefree. John has faced this vexing problem of loss of desire in every intimate relationship he’s been in. In the past, every time the block set in he interpreted it as meaning that he no longer loved the woman. In fact, the contrary is true. It is because he loves her so much that he carries this sense of responsibility for her and can’t enjoy the blithe quest for erotic rapture. Patterns Are Equal Employment Opportunities

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  You are the leader of a group. Something dangerous is about to happen—I’m not sure what, but you are leading the group into the woods to some safer spot. Or you are supposed to be. But the trail you take us on gets rockier, narrower, darker. Then it disappears entirely. You vanish, and we are lost and very scared. The second: We—the same group—are all in a hotel room, and again there is some danger. Maybe intruders, maybe a tornado. Again, you are leading us out of danger. You take us up afire escape that has black metal steps. We climb and climb, but it goes nowhere. It just ends at the ceiling, and we all have to back down. Other dreams followed. In one she and I take an exam together, and neither of us knows the answers. In another she looks at herself in the mirror and sees red spots of decay on her cheeks. In another she dances with a wiry young man who suddenly leaves her on the dance floor. She turns to a mirror and recoils to see her face covered with sagging red skin pockmarked with hideous boils and blood blisters. The message of these dreams was crystal-clear: danger and decay are inescapable. And I am no savior—on the contrary, I am unreliable and impotent. Soon a particularly powerful dream added a further component. You are my travel guide in an isolated site in a foreign country—maybe Greece or Turkey. You are driving an open Jeep, and we are quarreling about what to visit. I want to see some beautiful old classical ruins, and you keep wanting to take me to the modern, tacky, flimsy city. You begin to drive so fast that I get scared. Then the Jeep gets stuck, and we are tottering, swaying back and forth, over some huge pit. I look down and can’t see the bottom. This dream, involving the dichotomy between beautiful ancient ruins and a modern tacky city, reflects, of course, our ongoing “treason versus reason” debate. Which route to take? The old, beautiful ruins (the first text) of her old life? Or the deplorably ugly new life she saw stretching ahead of her? But it also suggested a new aspect of our work together. In the earlier dreams I am inept: I lose the path in the forest; I take Irene up a fire escape that leads to a ceiling with no escape; I do not know the answers to the examination. In this dream, however, not only am I inept and fail to protect her, I am also dangerous—I lead Irene to the brink of death. A couple of nights later she dreamed that she and I embrace and gently kiss. But what starts off sweetly turns to terror when my mouth opens wider and wider and I begin to devour her. “I struggle and struggle,” she reported, “but cannot wrench free.”

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

  As a matter of fact, the more he cares about her, the less he can freely lust after her. For him, as for many other men in this predicament, erotic shutdown is not subtle. He is at the mercy of a stubborn penis that simply will not respond. But why? What is the erotic block that stops him from pursuing pleasure with Beatrice, the same woman with whom he lay in a languorous paradise not so long ago? Ironically, even the closeness generated by good sex can have a boomerang effect. Like John and Beatrice, many couples experience their relationship as a dance in which great sex brings them close, but then this very closeness can make sex difficult again. The initial rapture facilitates a swift bonding and establishes an immediate connection. But while many of us relish the idea of losing ourselves in sex, the very oneness that we experience through the merging of our bodies can evoke a sense of obliteration. The intensity of sexual passion triggers a fear of engulfment. Of course, few of us are aware of these undercurrents as they’re happening. What we feel instead is the urge to pull out right after orgasm, or the sudden desire to make a sandwich, to light a cigarette. We welcome the intrusion of any random thought: I meant to send an e-mail to…These windows need cleaning…. I wonder how my friend Jack is doing? We appreciate being left alone to meander leisurely in our own mind because this reestablishes a psychological distance, a delineation of the boundaries between me and you. From “inter-” we go back to “intra-.” Having been all over each other, we retreat back into our own skin. Nowhere is the passage from connection to separateness represented more clearly than at the end of a sexual act. In his book Arousal , the psychoanalyst Michael Bader offers another explanation for John and Beatrice’s erotic impasse. In his view, intimacy comes with a growing concern for the well-being of the other person, which includes a fear of hurting her. But sexual excitement requires the capacity not to worry, and the pursuit of pleasure demands a degree of selfishness. Some people can’t allow themselves this selfishness, because they’re too absorbed with the well-being of the beloved. This emotional configuration is reminiscent of how John felt toward his mother—his awareness of her unhappiness overwhelmed him with worry and a sense of burden. The very caring he experiences makes it harder for him to focus on his own needs, to feel spontaneous, sexually alive, and carefree. John has faced this vexing problem of loss of desire in every intimate relationship he’s been in. In the past, every time the block set in he interpreted it as meaning that he no longer loved the woman. In fact, the contrary is true. It is because he loves her so much that he carries this sense of responsibility for her and can’t enjoy the blithe quest for erotic rapture.

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

  It’s an ebb and flow.” Love and desire are two rhythmic yet clashing forces that are always in a state of flux and always looking for the balance point. Ben has been going out with Adair for the past eight months—a record for him—and something different is happening. “I think I’m in love with this woman,” he says. “OK, I think I’m in love with every woman, but this one is different. OK, everyone is different, but this one is really different. She grounds me. I can be freaking out about something—you know how I get—and she doesn’t react. Not that she doesn’t care, or doesn’t respond, but she doesn’t get in there and panic right along with me. There’s something quiet about her, and, you know, I’m anything but quiet. I think this could work. I like being with her. And the sex is still pretty good...” “I’m waiting for the but...” I tell him. “But I do feel it changing. I’m getting nervous, restless. I really don’t want to fuck this up. I’m forty-three-years old, for God’s sake. I want to have a kid, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to stick around.” I have never met Adair, but something about the way she handles Ben makes me feel optimistic. Unbeknownst to him, he has a foil for his (dare I say?) fear of intimacy. In the past his girlfriends have been only too happy to merge with him; but Adair is able to hold her own—she seems to have a real sense of self that exists independently of him. Even after eight months, she is fiercely discreet about her private life. She exudes a quiet equanimity, a sober and subtle intelligence. She is a nurse in a pediatric oncology unit and works in the looming presence of death. Ben makes her laugh; he brings lightness into her world. His thirst for life enlivens her. His erotic ardor is the opposite of morbid. She likes the contrast. Ben certainly brings an entire emotional history to his predicament, and he’s got a lot of stuff to deal with. But the difficulty of reconciling security and excitement is not purely the result of his personal problems. It is the challenge of the modern ideal of love. With this in mind, we examine what sexuality means for Ben. Most of us lament the wilting of erotic passion with melancholy, quiet acquiescence, or severe agita; but maintaining erotic vitality doesn’t become the organizing principle of our lives. Not so for Ben. Sex is where he finds himself most alive. It has a regenerative power that allows him to go back into the world feeling enriched and renewed. In lovemaking he feels connection and nurturance that he does not get anywhere else. He is at once vulnerable and masterful, exposed and confident.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The center of the dream—the loud whoosh—was immediately clear to me. As a child I was plagued with chronic sinusitis, and every winter my mother took me to Dr. Davis for a sinus draining and flushing. I hated his yellow teeth and his fishy eye, which peered at me though the center of the circular mirror attached to the headband otolaryngologists used to wear. As he inserted a cannula into my sinus foramen, I felt a sharp pain, then heard a deafening whooooosh as the injected saline flushed out my sinus. Looking at the quivering, disgusting mess in the semicircular chrome drainage pan, I thought that some of my brains had been washed out along with the pus and mucus. Just as Freud had suggested, my first dream anticipated layer after layer of years of analytic work: my fears of exposure, of losing my mind, of being brainwashed, of suffering a grievous injury (deflation) to a long, firm body part (depicted as a shinbone). Freud and many subsequent analysts have cautioned against plunging too quickly into the meaning of the first dream lest early interpretation and exposure to unconscious material overwhelm patients and immobilize our dreamweaving homunculus entirely. Such admonishments have seemed to me directed not so much toward increasing the effectiveness of therapy as toward protecting the parochial self-interest of the analytic discipline, and I’ve always resisted them. From the 1940s to the 1960s, a walking-on-eggshells approach to therapy reigned. The precise, delicate phrasing of interventions was the topic of endless arcane debates within analytic institutes. Bombarded with propaganda about the necessity for exquisitely timed and formulated interpretations, novices—full of awe and fear—tiptoed carefully through therapy, stifling their spontaneity—and their effectiveness. I found that such formalism was counter-productive because it interfered with the greater goal of establishing an empathic, authentic relationship to the patient. To me, Freud’s warning not to work on dreams until the therapeutic alliance is firmly established seems strangely inverted: working together on a dream is an excellent way to build the therapeutic alliance. So I plunged right into Irene’s dream. “So you hadn’t read either text,” I began, “especially not the old one.” “Yes, yes, I expected you to ask about that. Of course, it doesn’t make sense; I know that. But that’s exactly the way it was in the dream. I had not read the assignment—I hadn’t read either text, but I especially hadn’t read the ancient one.” “The one that would have prepared you for the new text. Any hunches about the meaning of the two texts in your life?” “Hardly a hunch,” Irene replied. “I know exactly what they mean.” I waited for her to go on but she simply sat in silence, looking out the window. I hadn’t yet learned of Irene’s irritating trait of not volunteering a conclusion unless I explicitly requested it. Annoyed, I let the silence last a minute or two. Finally I obliged: “And the meaning of the two texts, Irene, is—”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  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. I am in the screened porch of a flimsy summer cottage and see a large, menacing beast with an enormous mouth waiting a few feet from the front door. I am terrified. I worry something will happen to my daughter. I decide to try to satisfy the beast with a sacrifice and toss a red plaid stuffed animal out of the door. The beast takes the bait but stays there. Its eyes burn. They are fixed on me. I am the prey. Irene immediately identified the plaid stuffed sacrificial animal: “It’s Jack. That’s the color of his pajamas the night he died.” So strong was the dream that it lingered in her mind for weeks, and she gradually grew to understand that though she had first displaced her anxiety about death onto her daughter, she was really death’s prey. “It’s me the creature is watching so fiercely, and that means there is only one way to read this dream.” She hesitated. “The dream is saying that I’ve unconsciously viewed Jack’s death as a sacrifice so that I might continue living.” She was shocked at her own thought and even more by the realization that death was out there waiting, not for others, not for her daughter, but for her. Using this new frame of reference, we gradually reexamined some of Irene’s most persistent and painful feelings. We began with guilt, which tormented her, as it does most bereaved spouses. I once treated a widow who had rarely left the bedside of her husband for weeks as he lay unconscious in a hospital. One day, in the few minutes it took her to slip down to the hospital gift shop to purchase a newspaper, her husband died. Guilt for having deserted him plagued her for months. Irene, similarly, had been inexhaustible in her attentiveness to Jack: she had nursed him with extraordinary devotion and rejected all of my urgings to take time off, to give herself some respite by hospitalizing him or engaging a nursing service. Instead, she rented a hospital bed, placed it next to her bed and slept by him until the moment he died.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The great Leningrad flood of 1924 caused the water to rise in Pavlov’s basement laboratory precipitously close to the level of his caged experimental dogs. Fortunately, his assistant rescued the dogs from their cages and carried them to safety. While the animals had suffered no physical harm, and looked from all outward appearances to be completely normal, very strange changes had come over them. First of all, these terrorized animals had “forgotten” or had reversed the conditioning that they had learned prior to the event. Secondly, some of the dogs that were previously docile in nature attacked anyone who approached them, while those with previous aggressive tendencies often shook and cowered in their cages. In addition, Pavlov observed physiological changes such as elevated and depressed heart rates under mild stress and full startle reactions to mild stimuli, such as tones or the sounds and movements of an approaching experimenter. Embarking (no pun intended) on his new career, Pavlov began to systematically study these phenomena with his dogs. He must have been aware of the traumatic breakdown of soldiers and the salient need for treatment considering that Russian military losses in October 1916 were between 1.6 and 1.8 million killed and another two million held as prisoners of war. Pavlov remained focused on his experimental study of animals breaking down under stress during this epoch. He formulated the following sequence by which his dogs (and presumably humans) break down under extreme or protracted stress, thereby losing our sense of direction and purpose. In the first stage, the equivalent phase, the animal gives the same response to both weak and strong stimuli. This can be observed in humans who are deprived of sleep for even a couple of days. Under this type of stress, people may react to an innocuous question with the same degree of irritability and confusion as when they are exposed to a significant provocation. One wonders how many domestic arguments, often around trite frictions, arise out of simple sleep deprivation. In the paradoxical phase, or Pavlov’s second reaction to protracted stress, the animals exhibited a reversal of their conditioned responses. Something had happened in their brains that made the dogs respond more actively to weak stimuli than to strong ones. This is something that does not normally happen to individuals unless they have been traumatized. The Vietnam veteran who ducks for cover when a distant car backfires, but spends his afternoon at the firing range, demonstrates this phase of breakdown. Another example might be the rape victim who startles to every passing shadow yet hangs out in seedy bars.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  To review, fear both greatly enhances and extends immobility and also makes the process of exiting immobility fearful and potentially violent. An individual who is highly terrified upon entering the immobility state is likely to move out of it in a similar manner. “As they go in, so they come out” was an expression that Army M.A.S.H. medics used when describing the reactions of their war-wounded patients. If a soldier goes into surgery terrified, and needing to be held down, he or she will likely come out of anesthesia in a state of frantic and possibly violent disorientation. The same consequences are sadly true when children are frightened and abruptly separated from their parents before surgery.41 If they go into the surgery in an agitated state, are held down and then surrounded by gowned and “masked monsters,” they come out of the anesthesia frightened and drastically disoriented. David Levy, in 1945, studied hospitalized children, many of them being treated for injuries requiring immobilization, such as splints, casts and braces. He found that these unfortunate children developed shell-shock symptoms similar to those of the soldiers returning from the war fronts in Europe and North Africa.42 Some sixty-five years later, a troubled father recounts “an all-too ordinary” story about his son Robbie’s “minor” knee surgery, a virtual guarantee for trauma. The doctor tells me that everything is okay. The knee is fine, but everything is not okay for the boy waking up in a drug-induced nightmare, thrashing around on his hospital bed—a sweet boy who never hurt anybody, staring out from his anesthetic haze with the eyes of a wild animal, striking the nurse, screaming “Am I alive?” and forcing me to grab his arms … staring right into my eyes and not knowing who I am.43 The immobilization effects Levy observed in children also occur in adult patients. In a recent medical study, more than 52% of orthopedic patients being treated for broken bones were shown to develop full-blown posttraumatic stress disorder, with a majority not recovering and worsening over time.44 This result should come as no real surprise when one recognizes that many orthopedic procedures follow frightening accidents, stressful ambulance rides endured while one is strapped down and terrifying and depersonalizing emergency room visits. Further, many of these patients have also undergone immediate surgeries, and often in an agitated state. This chain of events often precedes immobilization and is followed by painful rehabilitation regimens. In a recent study of children undergoing even “minor” orthopedic procedures, to quote the authors, “High levels of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms (in over 33% of all children studied) are common in the recovery period after pediatric orthopedic trauma, even among patients with relatively minor injury. Children admitted to the hospital after injury are at high risk for such symptoms.”45

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

  The harsh realities of violence, rape, sexual trafficking, child pornography, and hate crimes require that we keep a tight rein on the abuses of power that pervade the politics of sex. The poetics of sex, however, are often politically incorrect, thriving on power plays, role reversals, unfair advantages, imperious demands, seductive manipulations, and subtle cruelties. American men and women, shaped by the feminist movement and its egalitarian ideals, often find themselves challenged by these contradictions. We fear that playing with power imbalances in the sexual arena, even in a consensual relationship between mature adults, risks overthrowing the respect that is essential to human relationships. By no means am I calling for a reversal of history or an antifeminist agenda. Any discussion of modern-day couples and sexuality would be perversely wrongheaded if it did not recognize the enormous and vastly salutary influence of feminism on the shape of American family life. The women’s movement sought to eliminate deep-rooted gender inequalities and to unearth the structures that perpetuated male domination in all spheres of life, including sexuality. It challenged the double standard that encouraged sexual experimentation by men, even seeing it as a necessary developmental stage, but forbade that same curiosity in women. This same double standard demanded sexual loyalty from women, while turning a blind eye on roaming men because “That’s how men are.” (There are still countries today where a man can murder his unfaithful wife with no legal repercussions whatsoever. In some cultures, killing her is the only way to restore his honor and that of his family.) Gender differences and their ensuing taboos and prohibitions had long been viewed as categorical imperatives, biologically rooted and therefore immutable. Feminism showed that these undisputed truisms and characterizations were, in fact, social constructions that reinforced a long-standing gender ordering—one that obviously favored men. Books like Our Bodies, Ourselves and The Women’s Room aimed to restore a sense of sexual ownership to women, both legally and psychologically, and to free them from the constraints that had governed female sexuality. Female sexual pleasure could not be set free until women were relatively safe from the traditional and very real dangers associated with sex. Sexually transmitted diseases, rape, and unwanted pregnancy brought not only shame but also ruination, and childbirth always carried the threat of fatality. Early feminists were much more interested in the subject of sexual sovereignty than in the subject of pleasure. First things first, they thought. As long as men completely dominate business and political life, as long as women are economically dependent on men, as long as the burden of child care falls wholly on women’s shoulders (toppling even the most egalitarian couples), you cannot speak of a liberated female sexuality. Undeniably, American feminists achieved momentous improvements in all these aspects of women’s lives; and no real freedom, sexual or other, is conceivable without them.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  But there were others; for example, the belief that she was poisonous, contaminated, fatally jinxed. “Anyone,” she said to me one session, “who sets foot in the black ooze is signing their own death warrant.” “So you dare not love again because you can offer only a Medusa-love that would destroy anyone who approaches you?” “All the men I’ve loved have died—my husband, my father, my brother, my godson, and Sandy, whom I’ve not yet told you about—a mentally ill boyfriend who twenty years ago committed suicide.” “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.

• From Story of O (1954)

  She was standing in the middle of the drawing room, and her arms, raised and held together by the Roissy bracelets, which were attached by a chain to a ring in the ceiling from which a chandelier had formerly hung, thrust her breasts forward. Sir Stephen caressed them, then kissed them, then kissed her mouth, once, ten times. (He had never kissed her.) And when he had put on the gag, which filled her mouth with the taste of wet canvas and pushed her tongue to the back of her throat, the gag so arranged that she could scarcely clench it in her teeth, he took her by the hair. Held in equilibrium by the chain, she stumbled on her bare feet. “Excuse me, O,” he murmured (he had never before begged her pardon), then he let her go, and struck.

• From Story of O (1954)

  In the wee hours of the night, just before dawn when it is darkest and coldest, Pierre reappeared. He turned on the light in the bathroom, leaving the door open so that a square of light fell on the middle of the bed, on the spot where O’s slender body was curled, making a small mound beneath the cover, which silently he pulled back. Since O was sleeping on her left side, her face to the window and her legs slightly drawn up, the view she offered him was that of her white flanks, which seemed even whiter against the black fur. He took the pillow from beneath her head and said politely: “Would you please stand up,” and when she was on her knees, a position she managed by pulling herself up with the chain, he gave her a hand, taking her by the elbows so that she could stand up straight with her face to the wall. The square of light on the bed, which was faint, since the bed was black, illuminated her body, but not his gestures. She guessed, but could not see, that he was undoing the chain to rehook it to another link, so that it would remain taut, and she could feel it growing tighter. Her feet, which were bare, were solidly planted on the bed. Nor was she able to see that he had in his belt not the leather whip but the black riding crop similar to the one they had hit her with while she was tied to the stake, but they had only used it twice on her and had not hit her hard. She felt Pierre’s left hand on her waist, the mattress gave a little as, to steady himself, he put his right foot on it. At the same time as she heard a whistling noise in the semi-darkness O felt a terrible burning across her back, and she screamed. Pierre flogged her with all his might. He did not wait for her screams to subside, but struck her again four times, being careful each time to lash her above or below the preceding spot, so that the traces would be all the clearer. Even after he had stopped she went on screaming, and the tears streamed down into her open mouth.

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

  to the next corner, turned, turned again half a block later and ran through an alley. Only then did I slow down and look behind me. She could not possibly have kept up, but I needed to look to be sure. She wasn’t there. I had lost her. I believed I had lost her forever, but in this I was mistaken. The alley ended across the street from a diner. The street was under repair. No cars, only a few pedestrians. I waited for a time, trying to get my wind back, then crossed over to the diner. It was almost empty. The cashier grunted when I came in but didn’t look up from the tablet he was writing on. I walked to the back and locked myself in the men’s room. I leaned against the door. I stood there, just letting myself breathe. My eyes burned with sweat and my shirt was soaked through. My throat was raw. I bent my head to the faucet and let the water run into my mouth. Then I stripped to the waist and bathed myself with paper towels. When I was dry, I took off my pants and stuffed them into the overnight bag with my shirt and my glasses. I took out my Boy Scout uniform and slowly, carefully, unfolded it and put it on. I ran a damp tissue over my shoes, then straightened up and inspected myself. Everything was as it should be, the set of my scarf, the alignment of my belt buckle, the angle of my cap, the drape of my two sashes. One was the Order of the Arrow sash, a red arrow on a brilliant white background. The other was my merit-badge sash. It was thick with proofs of competence. At camp that summer, with little else to do, I had worked myself into a delirium of badge-grubbing. I was a Life Scout now, with only one merit badge to go for Eagle. That badge was Citizenship in the Nation. I had already fulfilled the numerous requirements for it, including attendance at a jury trial to observe the rule of law, but Dwight refused to send in my papers. He wouldn’t explain why, except to say I didn’t deserve to be an Eagle. It was an issue between us. I shouldered my bag and left the diner. BETWEEN MY FLIGHT from the drugstore and my return, no more than fifteen minutes had gone by. An empty police car was parked outside the store with its light blinking. Calmly, eyes front and center, I walked past and up the street to the hotel where the banquet was to take place. Though an hour remained until chow time the lobby was already full of Scouts in OA sashes, preening themselves and looking each other over. I checked my bag and said hello to some acquaintances from other troops. One of

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He shifted his position at this, he released one of my wrists to wrap his arm around my neck, not choking me but taking hold of me, pressing the links of the chain into my skin. We don’t need that, he said, I don’t like them, he spoke close to my ear, intimately, persuasively, and it will hurt you more if I use one. He started to move again, pressing forward though I resisted him, you need a condom, I said, please, there’s one in my pocket, let me get it, and I moved my free arm as if to lift myself up, setting it as a brace at my side. Kuchko, he repeated, not quite sternly but with disapproval, and then crooned again, don’t you want to please me, don’t you want to give me what I want? I did want to please him, and not only that, I wanted him inside me, I wanted to be fucked, but there was real danger, especially in this country; many people here are sick without knowing it, I knew, and knew too that he wouldn’t be gentle, that I was likely to bleed, it’s necessary, I said, please, I have one, we have to use it. Hush, he said again, kuchko, let me in, his voice quiet but his arm tightening around my neck, my throat in the crook of his elbow, let me in, and he pressed forward with real force. For a moment I wavered, I almost did let him in; it’s what you wanted, I thought, it’s what you said you wanted, I had asked him to make me nothing. But I didn’t let him in, I said No, repeating it several times, my voice rising; no, I said, stop, prestanete, still using the polite form. Open, he said, but I didn’t open, my whole body clenched in refusal, I did try to lift myself up now, but found I could hardly move at all. I was used to being the stronger one in such encounters, being so tall and so large, I was used to feeling the safety of strength, of knowing I could gather back up that personhood I had laid aside for an evening or an hour. But he was stronger than I was, and I was frightened as he held me down and pressed against me, shoving or thrusting himself. But he couldn’t enter, I was clenched and dry and there was no forcing himself inside, and he grunted in frustration and said again Bitch, spitting the word, bitch, what are you to say no to me, and then he pulled back on my neck and bit my shoulder very hard, nearly breaking the skin, making a ring of bruises I would wear for days.

• From Story of O (1954)

  “I consent to whatever you both desire,” and lowered her eyes toward her hands, which were waiting unclasped in the hollows of her knees, then added in a murmur: “I should like to know whether I shall be whipped.…” There was a long pause, during which she regretted twenty times over having asked the question. Then Sir Stephen’s voice said slowly: “From time to time.” Then O heard a match being struck and the sound of glasses: both men were probably helping themselves to another round of whisky. René was leaving O to her own devices. René was saying nothing. “Even if I agree to it now,” she said, “even if I promise now, I couldn’t bear it.” “All we ask you to do is submit to it, and, if you scream or moan, to agree ahead of time that it will be in vain,” Sir Stephen went on. “Oh, please, for pity’s sake, not yet!” said O, for Sir Stephen was getting to his feet, René was following suit, he leaned down and took her by the shoulders. “So give us your answer,” he said. “Do you consent?” Finally she said that she did. Gently he helped her up and, having sat down on the big sofa, made her kneel down alongside him facing the sofa, on which reclined her outstretched arms, her bust, and her head. Her eyes were closed, and an image she had seen several years before flashed across her mind: a strange print portraying a woman kneeling, as she was, before an armchair. The floor was of tile, and in one corner a dog and child were playing. The woman’s skirts were raised, and standing close beside her was a man brandishing a handful of switches, ready to whip her. They were all dressed in sixteenth-century clothes, and the print bore a title which she had found disgusting: Family Punishment. With one hand, René took her wrists in a viselike grip, and with the other lifted her skirts so high that she could feel the muslin lining brush her cheek. He caressed her flanks and drew Sir Stephen’s attention to the two dimples that graced them, and the softness of the furrow between her thighs. Then with that same hand he pressed her waist, to accentuate further her buttocks, and ordered her to open her knees wider. She obeyed without saying a word. The honors René was bestowing upon her body, and Sir Stephen’s replies, and the coarseness of the terms the men were using so overwhelmed her with a shame as violent as it was unexpected that the desire she had felt to be had by Sir Stephen vanished and she began to wish for the whip as a deliverance, for the pain and screams as a justification. But Sir Stephen’s hands pried open her loins, forced the buttocks’ portal, retreated, took her again, caressed her until she moaned. She was vanquished, undone, and humiliated that she had moaned.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  My Uncle Abe reaches out to pinch my cheek, clucking, “Darling Sonny,” as he used to do. Then others reach out for my cheeks. At first affectionate, the pinching grows fierce and painful. I awake in terror, cheeks throbbing, at three A.M. The dream depicted a duel with death. First, I am called by my dead mother and see all the dead of my family sitting in eerie stillness on the stairs. Then I try to negate deathly quiescence by infusing the dead with the movement of life. I especially note my Aunt Minny, who had died the year before after a cataclysmic stroke had left her completely paralyzed for several months, unable to move a muscle in her body aside from her eyes. In the dream Minny begins to move but quickly veers out of control and into frenzy. Next I try to alleviate my dread of the dead by imagining them affectionately pinching my cheeks. But that dread breaks through once again, the pinching grows fierce and malignant, and I am overwhelmed with death anxiety. The image of my aunt vibrating like a bumblebee haunted me for days. I couldn’t shake it loose. Perhaps, I thought, it is a message telling me that my own frenzied life pace is but a clumsy attempt to quell death anxiety. Is the dream not telling me to slow down and attend to the things I really value? The idea of value brought Paula back to my mind. Why hadn’t I called her? She was one who had faced death and stared it down. I remembered the way she had guided the meditation at the end of our meetings: her eyes fixed on the candle flame, her sonorous voice leading all of us into deeper, quieter regions. Had I ever told her how much those moments meant to me? So many things I had never said to her. I would say them now. On the flight home from my mother’s funeral, I resolved to renew my friendship with her. But I never did. Too much to do: wife, children, patients, students, writing. I wrote my page a day and ignored all else—friends, mail, phone calls, invitations to lecture. Everything, all the other parts of my life, would wait until the book was finished. And Paula too would have to wait. Paula, of course, did not wait. A few months later I received a note from her son—the boy I had envied for having Paula as a mother, the son to whom years before she had so wonderfully written of her approaching death. He wrote simply, “My mother died, and I am certain she would have wanted me to let you know.” 3 Southern Comfort I put in my time.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  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.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  The Greek root for angst is descriptive, meaning to “press tight” or to strangle. As conveyed in Edward Munch’s iconic painting, The Scream, our entire physiology and psyche become precipitously constricted in anxious terror. While it may afford a last-ditch survival function, fear is the killer of life. Pi (in the book The Life of Pi) tells us about this Achilles heal: It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease … Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons of technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread. Fear turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear. [They are constantly on the prowl for more objects of fear.] Recall the case story of Sharon (in Chapter 8). She was the woman who had the horrific experience of working on the eightieth floor of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. During her session I guided her to the experience of being led down the staircase by a Port Authority employee and encountering a locked door on the seventieth floor. Suddenly trapped and unable to complete the escape, her body became paralyzed with fear. In working through this experience, which reestablished her running reflexes, she opened her eyes (toward the end of our session), looked at me and said, “I thought it was fear that gets you through … but it’s not … It’s something more powerful, something much bigger than fear … It’s something that transcends fear.” And what a deep biological truth she reveals here.