A Shining Affliction Read online

  3

  At the end of the first week, I drive to supervision in the hazy heat of the late afternoon, alert and prickly with anticipation, an odd contrast of feelings and weather. Crossing to the revolving doors of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, I pass a man pushing a broom who looks up, but not at me. I follow his eyes to the other side of the parking lot where a teenage girl with short red hair clings to her father’s arm, pulling him back toward a car. Grimly, he pulls her in the opposite direction. I am enchanted by her refusal to go into the building, to see a doctor here—but the strength of her misery and the embarrassment of her father’s predicament make me hurry along, well ahead of them.

  I push through the doors, carrying a briefcase of the tapes and notes from my initial sessions with each of the children I have seen this week. I sit in the private waiting room just outside the office of Dr. Rachael Sachs, an eighty-four-year-old pioneer in the psychoanalytic treatment of children. A consultant at Glenwood, she has already agreed to supervise my work. There, in this tiny space, I find a pile of children’s books and outdated magazines, with a painting of a Renaissance angel in one of them. It is uncannily quiet. I sit for several moments before I notice a buzzer with a little note typed beneath it that reads, “Please ring when you arrive for your appointment.” I have arrived for an appointment, but I am not a patient. No, I am not. Should I ring or not? I decide to ring. I press the buzzer and hear nothing, and no one comes to answer. Should I ring again? I think not.

  Three blocks from this building, in my neighborhood library, I discovered Freud at thirteen. The dense language of psychoanalysis confused me initially, but, not one to be put off, I discovered a way out of my confusion after reading Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, in which Danny, a boy of fourteen, reads Freud. I read Freud as Danny did. I lined up a series of books on a library table: an English translation of Freud, Webster’s English Dictionary, a German dictionary, a psychiatric dictionary, and my notebook, in which I assembled a glossary of terms and kept a running log of my questions and observations. After several months I began to know my way around in Freud’s cases. I can still see myself pushing back my braids as I hovered over “Dora”—then flying to the other end of the table to look up tussis nervosa in my psychiatric dictionary—while all about me old men sat reading books and newspapers calmly. In this way, I began to explore a new landscape: the geography of psychic life. And from there I moved on to the library at this Psychoanalytic Institute as an undergraduate, using a professor’s library card to get in. I read Jung and Erikson and Winnicott and other psychoanalysts. It was the thrill of entering another language, another country, that held me dancing at my library table Saturday mornings during all the years of my adolescence and early twenties. Now, as a graduate student, I feel as though I have cracked the code, I know the woros, I discern the meanings behind the words—this I believe. I have graduated from a library table of Freud’s densely written early cases to my own cases and my own words.

  Words are angels, messengers—but suddenly, in this airless room, I have no words, no message, nothing to bring here.

  A man pushes his broom, a sweep of sound—a look, unspoken, toward a girl clinging to her father’s arm—she skids along the pavement, dragging her feet—and I rush ahead of my own fear of seeing patients. The sky above us is an unbroken white-blue, the blue of impenetrable secrets. The terror of what I am doing suddenly takes my breath away, empties my mind of all words, while the angel in the magazine stares back at me, implacable.

  Promptly at 3:00 Rachael Sachs opens the door and invites me into her office. With gray-white hair, she is stooped but tall; she walks with a cane, leaning on the desk corner as she returns to her chair. She wears a blue dress with a tie around the middle, but has no waist to speak of: every contour has grown soft, padded into one bundle. As she settles herself behind her desk, I take the only chair in front of it. She leans down and opens a bottom drawer and takes out a box of hard candy.

  “Here, Annie, have a piece of candy. I get sleepy by midafternoon,” she says, taking a piece for herself. I feel suddenly like a child in a doctor’s office. Then she pulls out a pair of bedroom slippers from another drawer and puts them on, making me more at ease, strangely. Finally she sits back and looks at me, a long look. I know this look —it is the look my mother gave me when she discerned my intentions and feelings before I knew them myself. I want to squirm. Reserve, shyness, good sense perhaps, something in me I can’t name, holds back the words I have rehearsed.

  “Tell me about this week with the children,” she begins, rescuing me from wordlessness.

  I haul out my tapes and notes. “You have begun to write about the children already,” Rachael notices. “No,” she says as I hand her my notes. “Read them aloud to me; let’s hear them.”

  I begin by reading the summary of my first session with Ben, taken from my tape recording and my thoughts in the playroom when I was reading his file. My voice quivers a little as I read. Rachael nods. “Go on, read me everything you have.” I read about the other three children I have begun to see. When I finally look up again, she nods and smiles.

  “I feel that I have a lot to learn from you” is her startling comment. I must have looked startled too, because she suddenly becomes intent, serious. “Trust yourself a little, trust this beginning,” she says. These words, from a woman who has been treating children all her life, are a huge relief to me.

  I ask if she still sees children, looking over her orderly office (no toys in sight) and at the inevitable couch. “Yes,” she says, “but not young children. I can’t pull them out from under the couch or lift them up anymore.” She is acknowledging the limitations of her age to me, but also telling me that she once had easy physical contact with the young children she treated.

  Looking back at the pages in my lap, I ask her what she thinks of the children I have just presented to her. She tells me her impressions, and I notice that they all take the form of various meanings of the children’s play.

  “But you have been with these children. What do you think, Annie?” I have already read my notes, so this question catches me off guard.

  “I’m not sure I understand your question.”

  She smiles. “I mean, what do you think of my thoughts about them?”

  “Mmmm ... very psychoanalytic.” I laugh.

  I know I am going to enjoy her because she is laughing with me now. I tell her I was an English major. I have read much of psychoanalysis, I go on, but I think in plays, stories, sometimes in poetry: more about the details of human experience, less in symbols, abstract meanings, changing structures. They are all familiar to me, but I don’t feel I will ever have her authority, her ease of interpretation. Much of the time, I don’t know how I know what I know. And most of my ideas about the children are different from hers, I explain, in case she didn’t notice. Again she smiles, as if to herself. Again that long look—this time a look of pleasure. I have the distinct sense that she is seeing something about me I do not yet know myself.

  Rachael does not challenge or contradict me. She sets the tone for all our work together in this moment of respect for our different questions and interpretations of my work. Gradually, over a period of months, I will learn a way of thinking: a psychoanalytic way of thinking grounded in practice, a way to decipher the meanings of children’s play and their responses to me—but I will also retain my way of proposing alternative and even contradictory explanations. This experience with Rachael makes me permanently wary of interpretations presented as if they were facts.

  I come each week with my own agenda of what I want to present to her, but I never know where this will lead us. I learn that Rachael has some problems with memory and often forgets the details of my cases, so I begin a habit of describing a pattern of play that extends over time, not realizing at first that this will be useful to me, as well as a help to her memory. We meet often at the Psychoanalytic Institute, and sometimes on Saturday mornings in the sunny kitchen of her apartme
nt.

  At the close of our first meeting, I ask her about a schedule for our meetings, and about her fee for supervision. She tells me she could arrange to meet with me twice weekly and that there will be no fee. I feel embarrassed. I don’t have much money to offer for her services, but I do wish to pay her. She interrupts my protest. “I told you that I have a lot to learn from you,” she says again. “I’ll tell you what. You write down everything that you are thinking about these children, make it a practice you never shirk, and then bring it to me and we’ll talk about it. You write what you really think, and I’ll listen, all right?”

  If she felt she could not learn something from me, would she have charged me? If you take something away from a relationship for yourself, should you not charge? That would put most supervisors out of business! I am living on a tight budget and feel grateful for her offer, but I want to ask her these things. But our time is up, and remembering what W. H. Auden once wrote about his muse—“It is she into whose eyes we look for recognition when we have been found out”—words which might well apply to a psychoanalytic supervisor, I decide not to press her.

  And, for a long time, I do write exactly what I think about my own work. Until it begins to touch my own life too closely.

  4

  Ben walks rapidly down the hall ahead of me, his dark head bobbing up and down with the stiffness of his gait, then turns to walk backwards, regarding me warily. “Would you like to unlock the door?” I ask, offering him my keys. He takes them, unlocks the door and walks inside the playroom. He does not speak. He goes to the blackboard and erases the scribbles another child has made, picks up two puppets, then a ball of clay, examining and discarding each toy. He kneels on the floor and throws the puppets behind him, saying, “We need this one, and this one, and this.” He leaves them strewn on the floor and pulls a game off the toy shelves, the game of Sorry.

  “I know this game,” he says.

  “You know that game and you will play it,” I state back simply.

  He sets up the red and blue players on the game board. I wonder to myself if he knows the rules.

  He does not invite me to play, but plays the game aloud. He picks up the top card. “Five,” he reads, and moves his blue player in five leaps around the board and into “home.” “I am the blue and I am going to win.” Then he picks another card, a nine, and moves the red player exactly nine spaces, counting each one aloud. “Three,” and the blue player makes three huge leaps into “home.” Within eight moves he has “won” the game.

  “I won!” he announces to me.

  “You made up your own rules so your player would win the game,” I clarify.

  He looks at me, studying me, then bends and picks up a puppet and throws it into the corner by the sink, and looks at me to see my response.

  “You can play by your own rules here,” I say, wondering if he thought my comment was an admonition. Then he picks up the puppets one by one and throws them forcefully into the corner, and turns again to look for my reaction.

  Is he trying to provoke me? Showing me his anger for my comment? Trying to find my rules and limits? I don’t know, but I feel it is important for me not to enter into a power struggle. I want him to experience his own control and lack of control and his own feelings.

  “You wanted to throw all those puppets, and you did!” I say.

  I hear screaming in the hall and fast footsteps and then a child’s body thuds abruptly against the closed door. Ben startles, and looks directly at me for the first time.

  “What’s that?” he says.

  “That is a little boy who is hurting a lot and he ran into our door.”

  Ben raises his index finger and absently touches his lower lip, which I see for the first time is cut and slightly swollen. “How did you hurt your lip?” I ask. He looks surprised.

  “I hit it,” he says.

  “How did you hit it, Ben?”

  He stands for a moment, his blue eyes unfocused, as if in a trance, then walks over to the paints.

  I sit back, literally sitting on my hands to stop myself from interfering with his attempt to set up the paints. He unscrews paint lids, spilling, pours water, spilling, and dribbles color from the brush as he begins to paint.

  “There is an apron in the drawer to keep it off your shirt,” I tell him. Ben reaches in for the apron, using it only to wipe his hands. He makes several swift strokes with the blue paint, then paints a red splotch over the blue.

  I lean over to look and ask, “What is that, Ben?”

  “A bird that’s got his tail caught on fire.” He blots it out in black paint, as if to erase it, and says, “Don’t distract me.”

  “You would like me to be quiet?”

  “You’re distracting me.”

  And I was! I sit back in silence as he covers the page with black paint. I wonder how he’s come to know a word like distract in his five short years. He looks up at me.

  “Can I put the clay on the paper and cut through it?”

  I rephrase it: “You would like to see how that works?”

  He nods and goes to get the clay from the lowest toy shelf, then simply sits on the floor, facing away from me toward the shelves. Very still. He twists around and gives me a single clear bark. At a loss, I inquire back, “Woof?” He gives a small, whimpering series of barks. “The puppy dog is sad?” I guess. He growls and barks loudly. “And the puppy is mad now.” He barks more loudly and howls and I see his first smile, showing his straight baby teeth. His eyes do not smile.

  He whimpers again, then begins to convey a stuffed bear to the corner by picking it up between his teeth and crawling there on all fours. He crawls back to the toy shelves and sorts through a box of small plastic toys, removing six marbles and putting them on the floor next to the chair where I sit. He bends over and puts a marble in his mouth, then nudges my hand with his nose. I open it and he spits the small wet marble carefully into my hand. In this manner he “gives” me all six marbles. Then he barks for them and I give them back. He repeats the entire process again, then leans up against my leg as he fingers the other toys in the box. He crawls over to the sink and raises himself up, climbing into the chair in front of it, and barks. He looks at the paper towels within his reach, and then at me.

  “Oh,” I say, “the puppy dog wants me to give him towels to wipe the paint off, hmm?”

  I give him several wet towels and he wipes his hands. It is time to leave. We both know this. I don’t need to say it. In silence I accompany him down the hall to rejoin his class.

  Ben has made eloquent statements about himself in play today. First he tries to show me that he has complete control over his invisible game partner, and that he cannot bear to lose. When I see this and comment, “You made up your own rules so your player would win the game,” Ben makes an attempt for control again by trying to provoke a reaction from me by throwing the puppets. Or perhaps he is simply frustrated with me. Or he may be showing me his anger at my comment.

  But I have observed him in his classroom, in the hall, in the cafeteria, trying to provoke a reaction from others in exactly this way, so this seems to me an explanation worth trusting for a bit. He would walk up to an older boy and kick out, or deliberately knock over his milk, or shout into an adult’s shocked face, “Shut up, fuckface!” and nearly always get the same reliable response: someone else would take charge of him, at times physically restraining him as he struggles, biting, banging his head, seemingly impervious to pain. In this “out of control” state, Ben uncannily holds a great deal of power. His attempts to control through lack of control ironically mean that he has to sacrifice the experience of himself—just Ben—and that he cannot freely choose to be himself with other children and with adults.

  I want to show Ben that he can have an effect on me, that he can choose to be himself with me, and make things happen between us. Insofar as possible, I want to follow his wants and needs, and not impose restrictions unless he begins to hurt himself or me physically. Behind t
he overt need to control, Ben is asking a haunting question, one seldom heard by adults: “Can I test the width and breadth of who I am, in my anger, my messiness, my babyishness and in my real competence, and will you let me be?” My efforts to read his behavior and let him be, with his reminder, “Don’t distract me,” pays off in the first physical and emotional contact between us. While Ben is testing my ability to interpret his feelings in his barking, he is also making use of the information I give back to him. Through this process of hearing his feelings named aloud for him, he is able to make himself vulnerable in his gift of six marbles, spat so carefully into my waiting hand, and to lean against me in relief as if to say: “This is who I am when I’m being me.”

  As I play with Ben, I listen “with a third ear,” I listen for what’s under the surface of his words and play. This depends upon paying attention to both Ben and myself. I notice and take in his words, the pitch and tone of his voice, his gestures, his movements toward and away from me. I attend to my feelings, and especially to those moments just before and just after I respond to him. In the absence of Ben’s response to what I say or do I cannot know if I have heard him. But fortunately he is quite clear. When he is painting and I keep talking to him, for example, he says, “You are distracting me!” In his puppy dog play, he barks and growls, and I guess, “The puppy dog is mad?” This isn’t a difficult interpretation, but I watch Ben for his response, and he affirms it, barking and growling louder, then rewarding me with his first smile. Within this circle of attention we surprise one another, and then Ben leans up against my leg and gives me his gift of six wet marbles.

  This “clinical” listening I am learning also carries particular risks. Were I to listen to Ben as if I already knew the meaning “behind” his words and actions, looking to find some validation of a scheme I have already become invested in, I would no longer hear him. I would shut him out of the present, and nothing could get through to me then. If I claimed that kind of authority with any consistency, how could he correct me? On the other hand, I cannot abandon the meanings I bring to Ben’s play. After all, I spend a great deal of my time, in supervision, thinking about the meanings of his play; it’s part of my training to learn how to think symbolically about the ways children play. This training is a foundation for what I do when I am with Ben. But my training isn’t the only source of my knowledge.