I was extremely secretive. So was she; but she didn't have to reveal herself to me because I paid her to sit and assume an authoritative distance bolstered by an artifice of science, implied magic, and an assumption that she had conquered the demons with whom I tangled. I paid her to provide me with a precisely cropped version of unconditional love, which she was quite capable of dishing up in small, controlled doses. But I asked for other things too, under the surface of our structured discourse.
I knew intuitively that she was as dark as I was, and as damaged; and that she was capable of the cruelty and judgment I craved at that time. I wanted to feel the full extent of her coldness, and find where she was vulnerable. I'm struggling here to give clarity to a murky pond of emotions. And, of course, this is just my version.
Maybe in truth my attraction for my therapist started the first time I walked into her office, which was full of esoteric kitsch and smelled like Frankincense and candles. She had all the exotic potential of an open market in a North African country invented by Paul Bowles. She intrigued me enough that I drove 90 miles south every two weeks from Deming to Seattle for 50-minute appointments.
Back then, I worked driving a flower truck between the rural town where I ran a floral production line and the Seattle grocery stores that sold the company's bouquets. I used flowers as symbols, tendrils to slip behind my therapist's professional façade once the web of our misguided love began. Sometimes I'd leave 100 dark-purple freesia on her doorstep. Or I'd bring her fresh lizianthus, more brittle and tender than any rose. I was manipulative. Relentless.
There's a mundane, textbook explanation for what happened between us. In a nutshell, I made her into the erotic goddess of my emotionally stunted concept of love--that's "transference." And in turn, she fashioned me into a Pygmalion to fill up the holes in her emotional life--that's "counter- transference." We were actually doing the meat-and-potatoes work of therapy. If she had been a seasoned pro, she would have used the tricks of her trade to make me conscious of why I was trying to obsessively seduce her, and to deconstruct her own intense response. As it was, we transgressed rules, and repeated psychology's historic mistake. Our relationship was a disaster, despite some strobe-like glimpses of sweetness. We were together for five years; we even bought a house (another mistake). I loved her; I miss her cooking.
That whole experience made me cynical, but not about the importance of therapy. Therapists who are talented and smart can really help people. Even bumbling therapists are sometimes effective. What I'm cynical about is the power and authority we blindly bestow on therapists and psychologists. After my therapist and I broke up, I went on a months-long quest: interviewing people who had traumatic experiences with therapists; interviewing therapists about their practices; and sifting through files of complaints about doctors and counselors at the Department of Health in Olympia. Initially, I was looking for vindication; I ended up with lots of questions, and few conclusions.
I picked up The Impossibility of Sex by Susie Orbach, subtitled "Stories of the Intimate Relationship Between Therapist and Patient," hoping to find illuminating descents into therapists' emotional underground. I wanted the type of stories, stripped of their theoretical skins, that professionals reveal to each other in academic journals, and maybe an honest examination of the limitations of the therapeutic process. That's not what I got.
Orbach is a British therapist with highbrow affiliations, who has written a few other books, including Fat Is a Feminist Issue. In her new book, she wants to explore "What really does go on within the sacrosanct space of the therapist's office?" Her attempt fails. Orbach never risks laying bare the therapist's office: making it less holy, more human.
What Orbach delivers are six clipped case studies that are fairly compelling, but superficial. There's the Vampire Casanova who causes the therapist's "vagina to twitch," and Orbach describes him with romance-novel glibness: "Adam was a fornicator, a lover, a stud." He conquers women but can't hold an erection. Orbach reveals an attraction to the man, but steers clear of the ambiguous areas where client and therapists' psyches touch shadows.
To her credit, Orbach does a great job breaking down the theoretical history of psychology into snack-size bites, which she sets off in italics. We learn intimately about a therapist's reasoning process, but not much about what's beneath a therapist's surface feelings.
For example, when Orbach muses about her attraction to Adam, she wonders, "Did I need him to confirm some aspect of my desirability?" Right there is when you want Orbach to dig in, to talk about how she hates her hips, or feels lonely when her partner leaves the Playboy Channel on while they're making love; something uncomfortable, mundane, real. But Orbach protects the mystical garment of the therapist's authority, and therefore her book is ultimately annoying.
I couldn't respect Orbach as an authority. I'm jaded from my own intimacy with my therapist: We wrestled for power, deconstructed our masks of patient and expert, mother and daughter, john and hooker, you name it. There were subtle gestures. Messy transformations. Orbach keeps it too light. She concedes one failure--a young woman who ends therapy abruptly; and even though Orbach could redeem herself by 'fessing up to something petty like jealousy, she politely sidesteps, and starts the next chapter.
The last chapter is the book's crowning source of frustration. That's where you find out The Impossibility of Sex is part fiction. Orbach made up the clients and their neuroses--even the therapist was an invented character. That said, it seems like a greater crime that Orbach refused to take emotional risks, when she had complete license to do so.
I've heard much juicier stories from my ex-lover/therapist. She would ask me for advice about clients, the ones who puzzled or troubled her. It was an ironic, seductive double-bind to be confided in about strangers' secrets, by a confidante whose scars and blind spots became gradually, grudgingly familiar to me. I knew the tangle of understories--when my lover struggled to stay awake, who she lied to, who she judged, which clients repulsed her, and why. I knew who brought up the specter of her mother.
