The Parable of the Seawall – Essaysis a collection of writings by Matt. Some essays were written very recently, others many years ago.Inthe course of organizing the themes within the book, questions came to my mind. The interview is a clarification of his thoughts and ideas. This is the final installment in a three part series. –Jane
JF: George Bernard Shaw said, “patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.” Could the same also be true of one’s religion or ethnicity? In one of George Carlin’s comedy routines he pointed out the ridiculousness of the slogan – “Proud to be Irish.” The slogan implies that being Irish is some sort of accomplishment. I could well argue that pride in being an American is not so different from pride in being Jewish. Neither is an accomplishment. One’s nationality, religion, race, ethnicity, height, IQ, etc is dependent on genetic probabilities and circumstances. Beyond what we do with the circumstances we are born into, what is to be proud of?
The anthropologist Ashley Montagu long ago suggested, given the hard evidence we have, that it would be preferable – and much more accurate — to say that human beings are one race and all the other sub-divisions are merely ethnic groups of one kind or another. But we are not up to that as yet.
To the point, I agree! But we humans are slovenly creatures in our thinking and in our responses. I am conditioned byJudaism, but what this particular conditioning has given me is the remarkable aspect of questioning, challenging what I read, to act upon unjust measures, to resist, to question authority – think of the prophet Nathan castigating David about what he had done to Uriah, all part of Jewish conditioning. So, I agree and ask for a dispensation on that. Americans do things that appall but I haven’t forgotten those GIs in World War II with their open smiles, Hershey bars and sticks of gum for the children.
Jews have been hunted for 2000 years because of anti-Semitic traditions directly flowing from Christianity as if we were a different “race” (Montagu). Often I think of myself as prey!I think you can cut me some slack if I take pride in what we have accomplished and what we have endured. In an admittedly chauvinistic history of Jews, in which he wrote that the history of the world is the history of the Jew, Max Dimont once saidthat if you look over recorded history you see the impact of certain great minds (all Jews)onmankind, to wit: Jesus…Moses…Spinoza…Einstein…Marx…Freud… You have to explain how such a small group, what Arnold Toynbee, “historian,” called a “fossil,” had such an enormous impact on the minds of men. Imagine what other great minds died during the Holocaust!
So, I agree, but with this tradition behind me, I cannot give it completely up, “Lord, whatfools these mortals be!”
JF:I have observed the insights you have with respect to our relationship, myself and you, as well as the world at large and what you are sharing in this interview. You practiced as a therapist for over two decades. Personally, can you share what psychotherapy has accomplished with you?
The initial response is I can do all that if you have a week to spare. The question, of course, not only makes me think at once but gets at some core issues within myself. So what I can share here, being as open as I can, reserving a measure of privacy, for my life is not an open book to anyone except you and here I draw lines as well, for I subscribe to the belief that we need to be our own best confidant. I am a private person and in this polluted culture this is very critical as I see it.
When I entered treatment with what later proved an incompetent therapist, I was in the midst of a surly divorce and a disastrous affair as it later proved to be. I came to treatment as a croaking frog, unaware, bereft of self-insight, non-reflective, lost, depressed, childish, angry and raging. Add a few more dour adjectives and that was the kettle of fish. I could not present to the shrink what it was I was suffering from. In short, I presented to her a child-man, a product of very poor parenting. How best can I say it, as I look back now? I was the end product of decades of rearing that did not leave a psychological deposit within myself. I simply had no ideawho I was or any sense of the history of my family or the patterns of the parenting I had lived with. I was numb, a psychological and emotional dolt. Consequently all decisions that flowed from that were not rational, immature and off the map. I acted not from within a core self; I acted, acted out, acted in, completely bamboozled by the very same events I set into motion.
Having said all this, allow me to cinematically cut to another image. Years later when I had become a therapist, I volunteered to be interviewed by a very wellknown psychiatrist, Robert Langs, who had a cork-lined office in Lenox Hillhospital in Manhattan. He interviewed me for about three hours.The book he wrote from all his interviews was called Madness and Cure, his thesis being that often clients are manipulated if not abused and destroyed by therapists, well-intended or not. It was my misfortune that I had a terrible therapist but in the condition I was at the time I had no idea of her expertise or lack thereof. In short, if you are hanging off the roof of a burning building, you don’t ask your rescuer if he is Jewish?
One salient example speaks volumes. I was broke, child support and alimony crippling me as well as the therapist’s fee. She offered me a way out. Telling me she was a doctoral student and that with her heavy client load she had a measure of difficulty in writing all her papers, she asked if I would write two papers for her and that she would reduce or absolve some of the debt. So, in effect, she was colluding with me. She broke every rule I hold dear as a therapist. I argue now that she was not only inept but a damaged human being and a damaging therapist. I believe she withheld what she did with me from her supervisor. You betcha!
The two papers were philosophical.I went at them furiously; you can imagine the intent – free of debt for a while and the unconscious one of pleasing my shrink. Clearly she submitted these papers under her name. Time went by and I became curious. I finally asked her what grades she got. She told me that they were two A’s. It took me some time to realize that I could do what she was doing, that I could do post-graduate work in a doctoral program in psychology. Serendipitously, my ghosting her papers had a salutary impact upon me. I, too, could be a shrink and I went out and did that.
I did not realize at the time I had willingly submitted myself to be used, to be colluded with, although in her eyes she was helping me out, a benumbing rationalization on her part. So, as Langs showed me, she was, in effect, burying me, my own treatment shunted aside for her gain. If you get his book, I am “Mr.Edwards.”
Clearly when I came to practice I avoided all these negative experienceswith my clients; I’ve made mistakes but I don’t collude, use the client for my own personal ends and other miscreants deeds this incompetent tried out on me unknowingly. Langs felt that I was that kind of client who fought back unconsciously at this rape and attempted to cure the shrink. A remarkable thesis then, but commonplace now, for sure.
I need to get to the heart of all this. Therapy became an amalgam for me, composed of working on myself, of seeing to use Krishnamurti’s terms, of working from within to outside, of perceiving,observing, of saying less but hearing with the third ear, as Reik termed it. At a jury duty request I recall an attorney who clearly did not like the response he saw on my face and confronted me about that. I told him that it was my face and I was glad that he could see my dislike upon it, for I had spent thousands of dollars for my feelings to finally appear on my countenance. The jurors roared and he was squelched. Therapy can help do that for you.
The critical issue here is that who I am I can see much better now but that does not mean, reader, that who I am has changed. I have attained a measure of awareness, but that is all. Think of the analogy of the salad dressing cruet we buy in a supermarket, the one that gives you spices in a separate packet to add to the olive oil. And so we do so. What we observe is a layer of olive oil now beneath a layer of spices. Still no dressing until we vigorously shake the cruet and all evidence of the spices disappear into the solution. For me treatment is like that; we learn to integrate ourselves but we do not add nor detract from the original self-substances.
As a therapist I helped the Other discover his compass, to label and demark his points of direction. He was not to be my disciple; it was his task at the end to be free of me, as all disciples suck – think of Jesus’s happy dozen, what a fucked up crew. I got a compass and I sailed with it, my compass rose. I think that is sufficient to help anyone to become aware.
Now I occasionally shake the cruet. That is enough for one lifetime. If you want proof of what the compass and my use of it has accomplished, you are reading it now.
JF:Psychotherapy played a significant role in your life. You were in therapy yourself, and later became a therapist. Given the unprofessional behavior of the therapist you endured, why did psychotherapy still appeal to you?
The practitioner was insidiously destructive and ineffectual, but the process intrigued me and worked for me regardless of her harmful interventions. The bottom line was that I had a paid friend, as they say, and the attention paid offered me much, tainted that it was. I was very needy at the time and it took another therapist to correct my thinking of what I had received, an emotional corrective, is the psych-speak for that. When Langs interviewed me it was several years after I had been in treatment and the revelations he provided disturbed me. In fact, I began to somatize and after a visit to my physician who could find no reason for my stomach pains asked me if I was under stress and gave me Librax. I put two and two together, for what occurred was that I took what Langs had interpreted to my gut, her malignancy. I felt validated.
On the surface I felt that psychotherapy had provided me with a way to and a way out, with a way in as well. It did make me aware – remember I was a willing and intelligent client willing to grow and learn and be helped with an inept therapist. As Langs suggested in his book and what I later learned as a therapist, I supervised her. A sharp therapist is always attuned to how his client offers supervision. Schizophrenics are not to be humored for they can read you in minutes, sense insincerity, pity and whatever is inappropriate in the client-therapist relationship.When I brought Rochelle to see Natalie, my therapist, to share my happiness with her Langs wrote, in effect, that I was telling my therapist that here is Rochelle, a healthy and effective woman, one who does not collude, and you are the ill one here in this relationship. I will accept this interpretation until the day I die, it rings so true.
Psychotherapy did not have to contaminate. It offered me tremendous insight because I owned it. I began to become more open and true, to experience myself authentically and most of all, which I still do at moments, not lie to myself, for if I do that I am lost. A therapist, a decent or good one, has to be alert, always, to deceiving himself. I like the self-imposed restrictions therapists need in the impossible profession if they are to be good at their work. I like the high standards. As my mentor said to me once, we take to it very well because it is Talmudic. All therapy is a DNA chain of questions. So, Sol, what’s nu with you?…Abe, what’s nu with you? In that is everything.
JF:What is the connection between psychotherapy and writing?
That is an immense question. I’ll just free associate which I often do when I go about writing, hint, hint. The capacity to be open, to allow thoughts, ideas, feelings to infiltrate your mind without raising defenses, calling the mind police, shutting down the base of behaviors, I feel, is the aorta of all my writing, the major arterial passageway. I do not fear my id, that seething cauldron, to use the old term. In fact, I like to huddle close to its sulphurous contents. I could not write about Gunther, that vile, vicious and demented Nazi in The i Tetralogy or compose Nazi “poetry” for that novel if I feared to approach Satan.
All my writing, I think, is a call to a powerfully intense need to be personally free, to lose stricture and restrictions upon myself, for I was a very controlled child (see The Parable of the Sea Wall). I was shut down! I was closed down! Arms, legs cut off, cock thrown away – I was a stump of residual feelings and hurts. I am lucky I survived. All my life has been to express the unheard scream. Consequently, other than techniques, psychotherapy and writing are a self-contained double helix, forever doing a genetic dance within myself.
JF:What would you like to write that you haven’t written yet?
A novel about transcendence. A spiritual work of a kind. Wouldn’t that be loverly?I have this transcendent urge-shit in me.
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