“I hate and have always hated the word therapist. I detest the idea that my work, if it is work at all, is therapeutic work, that I am a member of what some of my colleagues call— without irony— the helping professions. My pride has sought always to refresh itself in the bracing chill of Freud’s most merciless formulations, his statement that a cure only is a renewed acquaintance with everyday misery,” his designation of psychoanalytic work as a “school of suffering.” I reject the claim that psychotherapeutic treatment promises peace of mind, or comfort with oneself, however much these may be the happy by- products of the treatment— the accessory consolations, if you will. Rather than seeking to enhance self- esteem or contentment, the work strives for the opposite, to strip away all illusions of self- sufficiency or autonomy. At its most successful, this school of suffering is a curriculum in awe. The true object of this awe is the sheer, impossible fact of being here at all— to have precipitated like a sudden dew from lightless and dimensionless nothing. That is the horizon of the treatment, the recognition that we appear from nowhere under inscrutable stars, at a place and time we did not choose, driven by desires we do not choose, toward a death we do not choose, a death that chose us for its own even in our mother’s womb. Maybe this is only madness to you. Why shouldn’t it be?”
“As a younger man, I burned with enthusiasm for my work: I was to be a warrior, the champion of reviled or exiled passions. I would assail the forces marshaled to enslave these passions, the tyrannies imposed in the name of factitious moralities, the sadistic compulsions disguised as highest law. I would be, in my silent, expensive way, the apostle of a thrilling freedom. When did it abandon me, that faith? How often have I heard it repeated, nearly verbatim, that commonplace of every educated, sophisticated patient: I don’t believe in judgment, in divine judgment; I don’t believe that someone is sitting up in the sky frowning down at me. In the past I would have thought: Yes, you do— and that is your problem. In the fullness of time I would assist them in shaking free of this secret conviction. Now, though, my calling has deserted me. The premise wasn’t wrong: most patients suffer more than they know from obscure inner persecutions. What I did not realize, however, was how deeply I myself believed in such a judgment, how along with my patients I embraced with inalienable fidelity that very conviction. This conviction did not presume a personified judge— bearded, severe, enthroned. It presumed instead a law, inhuman, abstract, and implacable, the law to which we owed our lives, the law to which we owed our reckoning. Failure, worth, crisis, potential, fulfillment. Every patient returns to these words again and again. They are the words from which my profession is made, and each of these words presumes a judgment, a mark attained or missed. No one enters my office who does not believe in his very marrow that judgment, some judgment, is absolute and fixed. The person I am meant to be: that mythical creature, that being whom each patient longs and dreads to become, is itself a judgment, a standard one does not devise but to which one must account. What or who set the standard? What or who measured the body for its soul? What or who meant them to be the people they were meant to be? I am certain: belief in judgment is not what my patients reject or grow out of. The belief in judgment is what they cling to. Beneath their affections and afflictions, judgment is their one true love.”
“I would return to my world, to my own city and my work. I would go back to being a doctor, an expensive New York doctor, the doctor into which I had been so expensively made. Wasn’t that what New York meant, expense? When I returned, everything would be expensive. Rent for my private office would be expensive. My hourly rate would be high. And however dizzying, the fee for my patients was only the beginning of the cost, the analytic undertaking promising neither comfort nor relief. It is instead a severe curriculum, Freud’s school of suffering: the universal conviction of shame, the pain of disclosure and of the resistance to disclosure, the awful vertigo of free association, the torment of encountering one’s hungers, hatreds, lusts, avowing them, claiming them as one’s own. I would become, anew, the minister of that suffering. In my costliness I would be a temple prostitute set apart and ceremonially dressed (in cardigan, gray flannels, polished cap- toe oxfords). My patients would pay me, not for something that they received from me, but instead for me to neutralize the account of whatever they had inserted or discharged into my person.”
“If I have seen further than those before me, it is because I did not engage in the frauds.”
“Thus each step in sorcery is also a step in slavery; and that any man should put such power in the hands of another, no matter for what hope of gain, is one of the mysteries of perverse psychology.”
“Be still as a rock and you will see which way the tide flows.”
“If you are squinting and you have sand between your toes, it s probably gonna be a good day!”