Chapter Eight

Eissler was... (and remains) one of the grand old men of contemporary psychoanalysis. He is tall, gaunt, and unmistakably European. He speaks with an accent whose dominant tone of Viennese asperity is incongruously coupled with and... rendered all but pointless by an underlying, insistent, almost pathological kindheartedness. There is a class of people, however, to whom this kindheartedness does not extend. These are the enemies of Sigmund Freud.
—Janet Malcolm

he most interesting character in my life in the fall of 1956 was my new therapist, Kurt Eissler. At least he was the biggest influence in Liebe and Arbeit, as Freud says. Eissler lived at 300 Central Park West, right across the park from me. At our first meeting to see if we could work together, I noticed that his waiting room was filled with reproductions of famous statues. Nefertiti's head and a beautiful bronze cat were my favorites. The apartment looked right, even smelled right, fresh flowers tempering the musty smells of papers and books.

Eissler was Bornstein's friend as well as Muriel's; they had all been in Vienna together. He had a golden cocker spaniel that looked exactly like Bornstein's -the dogs were from the same litter. When I told him how upset I had been about Bornstein's birthmark, he smiled. "The children often say she looks like a witch." He spoke, like her, with a heavy German accent, enunciating carefully as if he had difficulty getting his tongue around the English sounds. He was black-haired and handsome in an intellectual way. There was a suggestion of puritanism about him -in his earnestness and his steel- rimmed glasses-but there was also a sensuality. The bottom part of his face with its very full lips seemed to express a different personality from the intellectual top half. He was already a well-known analyst and Freud's fervent champion. As founder of the Freud Archives, he had boxes full of historic documents and records on his top shelves. I didn't know anything about the struggles within and around the movement, but it was impossible not to sense his commitment. If Freud was King Arthur, Eissler was Launcelot, a quixotic but fiercely loyal defender of the faith.

When some years later a sociologist named Paul Roazen wrote a book blaming Freud for the death of one of his disciples, Victor Tausk, Eissler dashed off an entire book defending the master. Still later, there was the notorious conflict between Eissler and Jeffrey Masson, a brilliant young analyst he'd befriended. Eissler had proposed Masson as his successor as head of the archives, but when Masson criticized Freud for abandoning his seduction theory, Eissler fired him. Masson - out of a prestigious job and incensed at the censorship- sued Eissler. In 1983, Janet Malcolm's series of New Yorker articles, "Trouble in the Archives," made Masson seem opportunistic and Eissler inflexible and gullible. Though I'd finished therapy with Eissler years earlier and was aware of some of his shortcomings by then, I was sorry for him.

Eissler may have been orthodox and inflexible (as Janet Malcolm and Jeffrey Masson suggest), but I was drawn in by his kindness. We decided right away that I would start with three times a week and that I would lie on the couch. When my brother started his analysis at Harvard, he told me his analyst said the treatment would take at least seven years, but I don't recall Eissler telling me anything like that. It strikes me now that he didn't really consider it an analysis, but more a palliative therapy to keep me going until I was well enough to leave home. The main things he concentrated on in the sessions were my fights with my mother, which he insisted I had to stop before we could get anywhere, and my sex life. Being an orthodox Freudian he tried hard to connect my high degree of anxiety with conflict over sex. He thought my perpetual sore throats (and hypochondria), for example, were a result of having oral sex. Like Freud, he probably considered oral sex a deviation from the goal of mature genitality. At any rate, Eissler pictured my throat as reacting like a Victorian maiden, blushing red in outrage at the noxious sperm.

I liked Eissler much better than I had Bornstein and didn't find my free associations blocked by obsessive thoughts. It was fun to talk to him about sex and see how intent he got, but nonetheless I remember holding back when I got to specific sexual thoughts about him. Once, for example, when I was having trouble studying because of some construction going on outside my apartment, he offered me some earplugs, standing up and walking around to me on the couch. His fly was about level with my face and I remember associating the round wax earplugs with the view of his testicles I'd see if I unzipped it. I would have died rather than say this to him. But I can see now that holding back meant I never really analyzed my feelings for him. And I don't think he analyzed his for me. It was a bit odd for an orthodox analyst to be offering his patient earplugs or books or any of the other little things he gave me.

Unlike Bornstein, who hadn't mentioned dreams, Eissler encouraged me to bring mine in regularly. I'd read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and kept waiting for an orderly progression of associations leading to understanding of some conflict or problem, but I was always disappointed. Eissler was too. "Your dreams seem like little short stories," he complained, "not dreams at all." In other words, he couldn't make anything of them.

Meanwhile, I lived at home and commuted to Morningside Heights every day by bus. Barnard was a relief from the pressures of Swarthmore. I had the probably unfair impression that many of the nice Jewish girls at my new school sat around knitting and waiting for a husband.

Luckily, Judy Johnson had transferred from Radcliffe the same year (her husband, Jimmy, was working in the city) and we picked up where we left off. I switched from philosophy to English and joined the Barnard magazine. Our year was a particularly good one for writers. In addition to Judy, who was still some years away from winning the Yale Younger Poets prize, we had Norma Klein and Tobi Bernstein, Janet Burroway, Rosellen (Posie) Brown, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. Norma and Tobi both became writers of children's books. Norma's most popular was probably Mom, the Wolf Man and Me. Tobi wrote books about her passion, ballet. Janet, Rosellen, and Lynne became distinguished writers of literary fiction.

Though I liked the others, Judy was still my closest literary friend. We took several courses together. My impulses were still to-ward romanticism, but the Romantic poets were taught by a spinsterish, older woman named Eleanor who managed to drain all the excitement out of them. Judy sat in the back writing poetry while I fantasized about whether Byron really had incest with his sister. After that, Judy persuaded me to take Mr. Robertson's Shakespeare. I got the highest mark in the class simply because of my good short-term memory. We were supposed to identify lines from the plays and I was the only one who remembered that "Anon, anon, Francis" was a remark to a servant in Henry V. Clearly Barnard was going to be easy. And with David off at Yale, I was able to concentrate. My grades shot up from low Bs to As. I made the dean's list. I also found my first real mentor, Rosalie Colie, a brilliant woman, small and sharp with dark flashing eyes, who taught the metaphysical poets and Milton. She had been a roommate of my fa-ther's secretary Ann Dix, knew all about our family tragedies, and had an inclination to be kind to me. She encouraged my fascination with the way the metaphysical poets connected body and spirit. I developed a passion for Donne's poems addressed to God. Lines like "breake, blowe, burn and make me new" made me feel the possibility of transformation. Unfortunately, I had no God to "batter my heart" into the proper condition. I had only Dr. Eissler.

In my sessions, I recounted my almost daily fights with Mother.

"You must try to stop acting out," he told me. "How can all this make you feel better?"

It didn't. It was terrible. In a foggy way I felt that though the fights seemed to be my fault they weren't entirely. They were part of my history with her. Now, I think that Mother's earlier rages and coldness had built up a reservoir of anger and fear that made me provoke her. In a way, it meant that I was orchestrating her moods, and therefore was no longer at their mercy. It was like setting off a display of fireworks. But by her anxious hovering and intrusions, she provoked me in ways I wasn't aware of (and Eissler didn't explore). She liked to have me weak and dependent -if I'd been a star, it would have threatened her. Often by talking about the achievements of other people's children, for example, she subtly undercut what little confidence I had. Feeling hurt but not understanding why, I would react by quarreling over achievement as a value.

None of this was clear to me then. All I knew was that when she came into the room and asked me how I felt, or how I'd slept or what I was doing, a dark sullen mood settled over my heart. Even if I'd been humming to myself the moment before she came, the song dried up and I had to complain about something. "My bones ache," I would say with grim satisfaction. "I think I have a fever. I'll flunk for sure." My complaints were like a fist hitting her again and again, but I didn't feel too bad about it because they hit me too. Eissler's telling me to stop didn't help at all.

Curious about how therapy was supposed to work, I got Eissler's book The Psychiatrist and the Dying Patient out of the library and devoured it in one sitting. It was an astonishing book in which, very like a priest, he tried to help his dying charges to a new stage of awareness. There was a woman whose controlling husband insisted she dress like a doll and who, at the point she decided she was ready to live her own life, got cancer. With Eissler's help, she went on to live as fully as she could in the short time remaining. Another, younger woman, a mother and a doctor, had to cope not only with premature death and sorrow over leaving her children but with anger at her internist for misdiagnosing her.

What was instructive about their stories for me was how these women dealt with suffering and imminent death. They didn't go crazy and rave like Mother; they actually used their pain to grow. The young doctor not only forgave her internist but found a loving nanny for her children, someone they could get accustomed to be-fore their mother died. I was awed by her integrity and strength.

"I don't see how that woman could think so much about her children when she was dying," I told Eissler. I couldn't even concentrate when my throat hurt.

"We know your mother wasn't a good model for you in this," he said, clicking his tongue disapprovingly, "giving all her energies to her art when you were small."

If Mother had been a man, Eissler would have endorsed her passion for her art, but she was a woman. He had clear ideas about how women should feel and behave, and Mother didn't fit them. For one thing, women should care first about their children. For another thing, there could be no feminine genius. Later, I found out that Mother thought she was cursed by being a genius trapped in the body of a woman. Eissler, though he worshipped genius with the same fervor as he worshipped Freud, felt it could only come in male containers. At the most, a woman could hope to be the wife of a great man.

He spent a good deal of our time gently probing to see if I had the capacity to be the wife of a genius. He would tell me what Mrs. Tolstoy had to put up with -with her more than ten pregnancies and her husband's turn to religion-and wonder if I had that kind of endurance.

Eissler himself was working on Shakespeare, the greatest genius of them all, and had chosen the Bard's most enigmatic work, Hamlet, to illuminate. Not only had Hamlet been one of psychoanalysis's urtexts, illustrating Oedipal conflicts, but the question of Hamlet's madness or sanity was one that had baffled critics for centuries. Eissler projected a huge work, using all that had been said and thought before, that would finally get to the bottom of Hamlet's character.

When I told him about a paper I was writing on the paradox of reason-in-madness in King Lear, it was so near his own subject that Eissler couldn't resist giving me his opinions, not only about Lear's regressed state but about his daughter Cordelia. Eissler was impressed by Cordelia's honesty. I was annoyed by her misleading bluntness. I think she's rather perverse, I said, why can't she reassure the old man? Because this is about reality, he said, not reassurance. This led us to a discussion of the roles of children and parents and what happens when the roles are reversed and a parent gives up power prematurely. I suppose it was as good a way as any of getting at my issues, but I also think I was a good sounding board for his ideas. After that, I regularly told him about my paper -which ended up being cited by my mentor, Miss Colie, in her book on paradox- while Eissler, for his part, would come into my sessions full of excitement about indications in Hamlet's soliloquies of his growing maturity. I was flattered. He seemed to be taking me seriously.

But I was also confused. Was I supposed to develop my mind, or train myself to be a sort of high-grade domestic as the wife of a genius? Trying to figure it out, I wrote a story called, "The Garden and the Sea." Its heroine was a young painter of sexualized Lawrentian flowers who couldn't cope with either the demands of life or love and drowned herself by walking into the sea. Reading it now, I see the story was about the dangers of identifying with my mother.

"I don't want you to send this out," Mother said, when I gave her the story to read. "It will lead to talk."

"But lots of people kill themselves," I said ingenuously, "like Virginia Woolf. Besides, my heroine has a boyfriend just like David. If anything, people will think it's about me." David and I were in the process of breaking up. Every time I went up to Yale to visit him, we fought.

"I'm sorry," Mother said darkly. We were sitting together on my bed. "But you just can't do it. Put it on the shelf and work on something else."

I could have sent the story out and not told her about it, but I wanted her to like it, to tell me it was okay to write anything I pleased.

One day soon after I showed Mother my story, I found her lying across her bed crying. When I touched her shoulder and asked her what was the matter, she turned away from me, pressing her face into the tufted white spread. Finally, she sat up and let me get her a glass of water. "My brother died," she said when she'd taken a sip. The flap of her dress jacket was turned back and the crimson silk inside made me think of blood.

"What?" I stammered, "What brother? You don't have a brother."

"Yes, I do," she said, not looking at me. "Your Uncle James. He was in an institution. I didn't want to disturb you." It all tumbled out through her tears. As a young man, he'd been a brilliant mathematician, then inexplicably gone crazy. She was still in awe of his phenomenal mind.

Not "disturb" me to find out I had a mad, brilliant, thoroughly dead uncle? It was almost funny. I felt like a small pond the cows had walked through.

No wonder she'd never shown me any photo albums, no pictures from her childhood. I made her give me Grandma's photo album - the one, ironically, Grandma had assembled for Jimmy as a child. I wanted to see what my mother's hidden brother looked like, but I also wanted to check to make sure no one else was missing. A set of Siamese twins? An elephant-headed boy?

I went through the book slowly. There was Jimmy as a baby in what looked like a christening dress, beautifully embroidered with lace, held by his great-grandfather Meyers.

The next pictures showed Jimmy as a one-year-old, still in a dress, this time with a silk bow in the center, a beautiful baby with intense dark eyes, one fist clenched, looking slightly startled. A few pages further, Jimmy, around ten, dressed in dark wool knickers and a long jacket with a white shirt and tie, sat on one arm of his father's chair looking rather sadly at a book Grandpa was reading. My mother -ravishing with her dark hair topped by a huge bow and a low-belted dress like Dorothy in Oz- had her arm possessively around her father's neck and was staring passionately into his face. There were a few more shots of Jimmy. Then, after one last photo of him at camp as a young adolescent, he vanished.

"He pulled me around by the hair when I was a child," Mother said, when I asked her what Jimmy was like. "My mother always thought it was funny, but he was hurting me."

“I'm sorry," I said, picturing her with her eyes screwed up, her scalp burning as Jimmy tugged. I asked Mother when Jimmy went crazy. Not until his late twenties, she told me. When he was a child he had been considered a genius -this she told me with a grimace, half pride, half rivalrous fury. He had gotten a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT. She had tried to find him help, but it was no good; nothing worked. I tried to hold her hand; she was sitting on her bed with her books next to her and the little bell she used for calling Weasal, but she pulled away. "Never mind, darling," she said. But her voice sounded helpless, and all the images she gave me were already lying inside me like some huge, indigestible meal.

Much later, in California, after I became friends with my poet cousin George Oppen and his wife, Mary, I asked them if they remembered this mysterious uncle. Mary knew Jimmy in New York, she said. He fell in love with a friend of hers in the Village. He brought her odd gifts: a cord of firewood, a canary. And, she added, he liked to fly kites -in the winter, over the snow. I looked at the photos again. Jimmy's eyes seemed heavy-lidded, his mouth turned down at the corners while my mother's gaze was alternately fierce, sullen, or passionately demanding. But there wasn't enough to go on. If I wanted to know more about him, I would have to invent it.

Secrets necessitate other secrets until a whole separate life is going on, on the other side of a curtain. After my mother died in 1984, my brother got a phone call from a woman who said she was Uncle James's daughter. I met Cecilia at Mother's retrospective show in Albany. She was a pleasant woman with dark hair and eyes who looked a little like me. A. social worker. Married to a Greek named Soulis. She had one child, a son named James.

She asked shyly if I had any pictures of her father. He divorced her mother when Cecilia was very small, and she wanted to know what he looked like. Incredible as it seemed, my mother had been in contact with Cecilia and not only had never told us about her but had kept her from seeing Grandma.

"She told me Agnes has enough grandchildren," Cecilia said sadly.

"Why?" I asked my brother after the show.

"Mother thought they weren't classy enough," my brother said, only half joking.

When I told Eissler about Jimmy, he was curiously silent. He wouldn't tell me what he thought about the possibility that I had inherited some genetic instability, resorting to the classic "What do you think?" whenever I brought it up. My conclusion was that there was in fact some inherited weakness in the basic fabric that predisposed us to crazing -like badly fired ceramic pots. I comforted myself with the bromides Dr. Kris fed Mother: that Mother was not as sick as her brother, that my brother, Chris, and I were healthier still, and that since the generations were improving, there was a good chance that our children, if we had them, would be only mildly neu-rotic.

Despite his patriarchal ideas, Eissler encouraged my writing, just as he encouraged me when I took acting senior year with Mildred Dunnock and thought briefly of a career on the stage. He introduced me to an editor named Seymour Copstein, who sent my suicide story to a friend of his who was the editor of Playboy -but it was definitely not Playboy material and nothing came of it. I kept seeing Seymour, though, because he helped me structure my college papers.

Then, one day, he showed me his fussily decorated bedroom, explaining that his wife was "a Victorian lady," and asked if I knew how he felt about me. "Like a father?" I said, hopefully. I was always looking for fathers. He grabbed me and started to kiss me. I pulled away and ran out the door.

Eissler was unsympathetic. He said that I was quite unconscious of the provocative things I did, that I was probably leaning on the table in an enticing way. Besides, he said, there was no way that he, Eissler, could have foreseen this. Even Freud, he told me shrugging his shoulders, wasn't a menschenkenner -a judge of men.

Now I can clearly see how archaic, patriarchal and, above all, unrealistic Eissler's views were. Psychoanalysis may have worked well as a method of analyzing texts, but it wasn't doing its job as therapy. We spent fruitless hours trying to discover why David and I fought, for instance. Eissler didn't have a clue and neither did I. Once he speculated that I pictured myself wafting over a field of penises picking the most appealing. If anything, this was his fantasy, not mine, and it certainly had nothing to do with the problems I was having in relating to another human being.

In a sequel to the suicide story, I wrote about me and David fighting in bed. It was called "Not to Me" and was about how trouble starts when something is very important to one person and a different thing is equally important to the other. A therapist who worked more with relationships than drives would have noticed this in the story and talked to me about it. Would have noted, among other things, how my mother wasn't a very good model for communication skills and I had a lot to learn.

Eissler, though he felt strongly about things like my taking a bath every day -when I told him I didn't, he couldn't suppress his shock that I wasn't even cleansing my private parts- couldn't give me any useful pointers about how you talk things over with someone. Perhaps he couldn't. Besides admitting to bad judgment about people, he was exceedingly shy and awkward. (Much later, I heard from a psychologist friend who knew Eissler that he came from a family that was almost as troubled as mine.) Eissler also didn't like the story. In my sessions, he began to suggest that being an academic instead of a fiction writer would provide more play for my ambitions.

Although I was still determined to be a writer, I was fascinated by Eissler's method of reading literature and was also beginning to read in psychoanalytic terms. By the time I was a senior at Barnard, I had the feeling that the standard New Critical approach wasn't getting at the heart of things. I thought I could get to a deeper truth by analyzing the emotional meanings. Eissler became a mentor, as we took turns in my hours talking about Yeats's imagery and Hamlet's increasing insight.

It was satisfyingly soothing to analyze texts. It was much easier to track images through texts and find patterns than it was to find meaning in my own puzzling life. Yeats's haunting images distracted me from my ongoing fights with Mother and, since I had finally given David back his ring, my lack of a man. Why did Yeats talk about blood on the ancestral stair, I asked in papers coyly titled "Functions of Imagery 1," "2," and "3." Why did his moon shining down aloof and unperturbable give me shivers up the spine? What were his secrets?

"Yeats has snakes whispering things," I told Eissler excitedly while lying on his nubbly couch, "probably something incestuous." was all he said, but I could sense him leaning forward with a satisfied expression.

I applied to graduate school only because Miss Colie recommended me for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Because of my upbringing, I didn't think of graduate school as a path to a future profession; I simply wanted an excuse to keep on probing writers' secrets.

"If I go to Columbia, I'm going to write about madness in Yeats," I told Eissler. "Madness, dreaming, and the fool." I identified with Yeats's fool in his cock-eyed cap and bells: inept, awk-ward, even crazy, but miraculously able to say wise things.

In June of 1958, I graduated from Barnard and, though I hadn't gotten the fellowship, in the fall I started at Columbia. Since I was single now, Eissler thought it would be good for me to learn to masturbate to orgasm. Freud himself thought that clitoral orgasms were something that had to be given up in favor of the truly mature vaginal orgasm, and his disciple Princess Bonaparte went so far as to consider a clitoridectomy. On the other hand, a failure to orgasm led to the damming up of sexual energy, which, according to orthodox theory, increased anxiety and was itself a sign of illness.

Eissler, like Freud, was fascinated by female orgasms, though he probably knew just as little about them. He later wrote an article distinguishing between an aggressive female orgasm characterized by a sharp peak and screams -which he interpreted as a sort of battle cry- and a more male-friendly orgasm characterized by a gentle, wave like sensation. In any case, not being able to have an orgasm meant you might be caught back in some regressive place where you were fixated on your mouth, say, and spent your free time smoking cigars instead of having good healthy sex. As early as the 1930s a committed Freudian like Helene Deutsch timidly pointed out that many highly functioning wives and mothers were not orgasmic. But the fact, discovered by Phyllis Greenacre, that even psychotics on back wards can have multiple orgasms hadn't yet seriously disturbed analysis's cheerful equation of genital proficiency and mental health.

I was doing pretty well at my masturbation practice when I met a very nice boy named Bruce, a lanky blond who loved Mozart. I wasn't attracted to him in particular, but I was intrigued by a friend he kept talking about, a man named Randy Irons, who, he swore, was a genius and had worked with Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

When I met Randy, I was impressed. Though he was heavyset and had a thick, almost bullish, head, he exuded energy -even his walk was a series of impatient springs forward and his brown eyes had a hypnotic quality. He brought along his girlfriend, Barbara, who was obviously deeply in love with him, but after a few days he called to say they were finished, and we started going out together.

Eissler was almost as excited as I was -a real genius was attracted to me. Eissler saw his main mission as getting me healthy enough to marry. That way I would get the baby that would compensate me for being born without a penis. It was almost too much to hope for that I would find a genius who would compensate me for not being one myself.

After a few dates, Randy took me to meet his friend Lenny Kriegal, a married graduate student at the City College of New York who'd had polio as a child and was just beginning to write his autobiographical stories. Lenny, like Bruce, was convinced of Randy's genius and told me about the advanced courses in physics Randy had taken at Columbia and how he'd bowled over his professors.

After some weeks, Randy invited me to his house and played Beethoven for me. He'd studied piano with Horowitz, he said. But he'd been in a terrible accident and hurt his hands. Now he could only play so-so. I thought his playing was terrific, but after he finished he put on a record of his playing before the "accident" that was even better.

In order to be equal to such a superman, I offered myself to him immediately. To my surprise, sex wasn't so good. Ordinarily that would have bothered Eissler. But he had a theory that fulfilled sexuality and genius were incompatible. During one of my sessions, he told me about a man who came to him with an impotency problem. Eissler thought the man was a Renaissance genius (just as Randy seemed to be) and was afraid if he tampered with his inhibited sexuality he might destroy his genius. Being a therapist, he went ahead: the man's impotence was cured, but he lost his genius.

Pretty soon, Randy began to ask me to lend him money. First just small amounts, then more. He was also clearly still seeing his old girlfriend. He would excuse himself from the table when we were having dinner at a restaurant and call her up.

"Don't worry, baby," I'd hear him saying. "I love you." When we were apart for a few days, he wrote me long flowery letters addressed to "Dearest, passionate truth." It didn't look good.

"A genius isn't bound by the same distinctions as other people," Eissler told me when I complained about Randy's untrustworthy behavior. "Goethe slept with a dagger under his pillow for weeks when he was writing The Sorrows of Young Werther. In someone else, that would have been a serious sign of psychosis. In him it was only what he had to do to imagine Werther's character."

Eissler finally got worried when Randy, instead of sending me one of his letters, read it to me over the phone. I never figured out why this was any worse than anything else Randy did, but somehow it convinced Eissler that the man wasn't sincere. He got me to persuade Randy to go to an analyst for an evaluation. The doctor told Eissler that Randy was not analyzable; he would just use insight to manipulate people. Years later, Lenny Kriegal, by then a professor at the City College of New York, wrote about a brilliant impostor who managed to deceive everyone he came in contact with. Of course it was Randy.

As recent books like Lying on the Couch have pointed out, analysis is particularly vulnerable to people who lie. All an analyst has to go on is what you choose to say. If you want to play tricks, nothing could be easier.

In a more general way, Eissler couldn't see what was right in front of his face. This was partly because of his temperament -repressed and shy- and the retrograde nature of 1950s culture, but Eissler's skewed vision was also the fault of psychoanalytic theories about women (and drives) and genius. I didn't need to learn to masturbate and find a genius who would give me a baby/penis, I needed some help in getting free of my mother and negotiating everyday life as an independent woman.

© Brenda Webster