The week after I suggested that you were a little bit gay, you decided it was time for hypnosis.
I met you at a Venetian restaurant in Times Square. I had an unsettling doctor’s visit and took myself out to lunch. I did that in NYC when I felt scared and alone. I love a private ritual like that. I’m still paying off the debt from that particular ritual!
You were having lunch with your friend, another analyst. I could tell that you didn’t respect that he gave it up to become a life coach. I could find his business card right now or find him through Googling your name. Your comment under his obituary always comes up in the first few hits.
You didn’t remember it this way, but you approached me. Let’s be real.
“Oh, you seem to have it all figured out except for a romantic partner,” you said.
That didn’t resonate. I had long-term romantic relationships. Them not working out didn’t existentially plague me. I wasn’t as green as you seemed to be perceiving me.
You gave me your card. I didn’t ask for it. But I admit, I was very intrigued. By your bold mind games.
Six months later, things were getting more serious with a romantic partner. I wasn’t sure if I was projecting daddy issues or accurately perceiving something sinister beneath this guy’s charm. Spoiler alert: it was both. And more.
Thanks in large part to you, I understand projection differently now. My history shapes what I see, and another person’s behavior gives me something to see. Both can be happening. An old wound can be activated by a present injury. Recognizing my part in an encounter doesn’t make me responsible for theirs.
You were right about many things. I learned a lot from you. But overall, you were very wrong.
I emailed you asking if you did hypnosis. I could look that up right now. I mean, there are many emails. Funny, I’ve only ever looked up our final exchange. OK fine, I’ll do it…
Yikes. I was green! You siren!
Gmail search: Gene Guberman. Ah right, your friend’s name was Don.
Back to the guy I was dating. And your card from that day at the white-linened osteria looking useful.
You made me tell you what I could afford to pay. It was strange. The amount we determined was way below your normal rate. Gross.
I would walk from 82nd & Amsterdam Avenue to Central Park West and take the C train down to 4th Street.
I’d worry whether stopping for a coffee would interfere with the psychological state I brought into analysis. I was always really worried around you.
A local friend warned me about psychoanalysts a few months into my analysis with you. He suggested that many were hungry for power, even more so than your average person in the helping professions. I already knew it wasn’t a good situation when he told me this, but I assured him in that moment that it was all fine. I couldn’t admit it to myself. My roommate didn’t trust you either. My friends knew not to contradict what I was up to, not to get in the way of what I was presenting as another very powerful and special out of bounds experience.
It was 2018. The revelations about Weinstein were everywhere, and I was still coming to your office on 9th Street. I could recognize the abuse of power in those stories more readily than I could recognize it between us. Your authority complicated what I knew. I kept giving your interpretation more weight than my own perception.
Your approach was consistent with Freud’s oedipal back track. It was easier to believe little girls wanted their daddies than to believe that the fathers of bourgeois Vienna were doing what the hysterical women said they were doing. The cocaine-fueled theories attributed to Freud became the foundation of Western psychology and subsequently, the Western psychological complex. Once the theory explains the patient, it no longer has to explain the analyst.
Which brings me back to calling you a little gay. You wanted to reveal yourself to me as I was revealing myself to you. The exchange was so unequal! This deep old memory of interacting with the police officer on Coney Island. You wanted my analysis. I wasn’t lying on the couch in the beginning but I was that day, looking up at your Dali painting. Caligula. As in Roman Emperor Caligula, a famous megalomaniac. Another little nod to your fantasy of omnipotence perhaps? Or the imperial shadow of psychoanalysis, its claim to dominion over another person’s inner world…and its interpretation of resistance as justification for further rule.
I still think about the dancing baby GIF you sent me. Were you presenting yourself as innocent and in need of indulgence, asking for me to take care of you? In the context of the sexual charge you were trying to groom between us, that appeal to infantile innocence remains unsettling.
The first hypnosis went well. I’ve always been receptive to what life puts in front of me and go all in on what I sign up for. I go to a meditation retreat for a mental reset, and I get one. I take ayahuasca seeking insights for healing, and they come. I used to excessively credit the facilitator. Now I give myself more credit. I know how to take life. I always have. My family system is a hot mess, but my appreciation for it all has endured, even when helping professionals and amateur gurus tried to pawn off their own ambivalence toward life on me.
Mourning and melancholia, sure. But I’m here to live.
Three words came up in that first hypnosis:
Pleasure. Purpose. Power.
I felt a visceral and brain-melting surge of creativity from my unconscious void. Well, let’s say from my subconscious, since you weren’t that good at it and I never let you put me completely under.
You were jealous of that creativity. (Again, it’s in the emails.)
The fall after I left you and subsequently, my dad, my business became The Lost Wildness, which was the reclaimed intersection of a woman’s pleasure, purpose and power.
The first hypnosis gave me something. That was the problem. It made me trust hypnosis. And you.
While I was under hypnosis for the third time, you put your hand on my right knee and massaged my knee and then my calf and feet. And my shoulders, hands, and legs. Afterward, you went to wash your hands…for some time.
I didn’t report you. I saw a woman my age (and your twin daughters’ age) in the waiting room that last day. I don’t know her story. I wish her all the pleasure, purpose and power I wish for myself.
I tried to talk it through with you on the phone and you dissociated. Yikes. Pretty wild. And not in the lost wildness sort of way. Then came your disturbingly romantic email, full of blatant lies about my commitment to the process.
As I write this, Horace Silver’s Song for My Father from 1964 is on the cafe radio. My sense of smell feels suddenly kaleidoscopic, a convergence of scents as rich and radiant as the Vermont autumn unfolding in color around me. One scent opens into another, each carrying a place, a time, a feeling I hadn’t known was still within reach. Writing this is recollecting parts of myself. I feel the world reaching me before I have words for it. Before I can ask what it means. Before anyone else can tell me.