The Red Couch

Washington DC, late 1980s – mid 1990s.

My psychoanalyst’s red couch sagged in the middle, weighted down with the sorrows of countless patients. He always put a fresh paper napkin on the head pillow in order to absorb the falling tears. Indeed, my most rhyming evocation of analysis is that of tears in my ears. Try crying while laying flat and staring straight at the ceiling. Two streams of hot liquid start rolling down the sides of your head and, like lava flows, come to rest inside your eardrums. When the ears overflow, the tears continue their path down your neck and on to the napkins. Those napkins were witnesses to a lifetime of tears I had never shed.  

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In my late thirties I began psychoanalysis with Gene Gordon, who was then one of the deans of the Freudian school in DC. I knew that the only way to stop my unending heartbreaks and failures at love was to do some serious digging. None of my previous short therapies had taken me deep enough and I was now determined to go as far down as necessary. I knew of my denial and of how long my hurt had lain dormant and neglected. After anxious love attachments that I bungled or fled, Diana, Monica, and my failed marriage to Laurie—all in a hopeless search for my lost Mom—I came in from the cold and landed on Gene’s red couch. I started with a mixture of skepticism and anxiety. There has always been a lot of public naysaying about Freud’s theories. I was skeptical of Freudian techniques as a healing process and also anxious as to whether they would help me.

Yet I was there ten years—probably the best investment in time and money I have ever made. Freudian analysis is long and drawn-out. I lay on the couch four times a week for forty-eight weeks per year (shrinks take off August). That’s about two thousand sessions, at fifty minutes each. Try free-associating while staring at the ceiling. In my case, I was staring at a small skylight, which showed crisscrossing telephone cables. In the fall, looking up, I could see an occasional squirrel on the cables, doing a quick dash across the skylight to the tree I knew to be near. At the other end of that pillow with the tear-absorbing napkins, the red couch had become worn from generations of shoes. Gene, not particularly extravagant with his money, never once reupholstered the couch while I was there. As time moved on, the rip in the fabric got more pronounced. It was a reverse metaphor for the wounds that I was trying to heal at the other end.

True free-association is not easy. Self-censoring intrudes and you try to control what you say. And when you do succeed in suppressing the control, the process feels dizzying. If managed by a good psychoanalyst, however, it is not as random and baffling as it feels. A good shrink—even though he sits behind you unseen—can allay your anxiety and make you feel safe. Gene was quite good at it.

At the outset, I told Gene that Dr. Friedman in Albany had helped me overcome my guilt over Dad’s death. And since I had no major issues with Mom I did not quite know what we would talk about. Gene, in a style to which I would soon grow accustomed, let my statement linger in silence. After a while I heard him ask quietly, from behind, “Well, why are you here if there’s nothing to discuss?”

Not only was it disconcerting to hear him yet not see him, but his question stumped me. I replied to his disembodied voice, venturing, “Perhaps because of my disastrous love life . . . ?”

Gene remained mystifyingly silent. Is he there? I thought. Has he fallen asleep? “OK,” he finally replied, “we could start with that.”

My daily sessions took me, one tale at a time, from the present to the distant past. I started with frozen and simple images of my parents: Mom was an angel and Dad an ogre. My decade on the couch scrambled both images. Many events came back in a different light, challenged in their original innocence by Gene’s questions and observations. Mom’s perky image became murkier, and Dad’s dark one became lighter. My thawed parents emerged more rounded, no longer the flat characters of my juvenile memories.

The overwhelming—yet bottled-up—tragedy of Mom’s loss had fogged up the far side of my earliest childhood. Before the curtain fell on her life, she had cocooned me in a bright and warm embrace. There were the Viennese waltzes, the dancing on her toes, my magic birthday parties, and all those pastries. That was the happy Mom, forever singing and laughing and loving me. She was the good Mom who took care of me the year when I broke my wrist, shuttling with me from doctor to doctor until I was properly repaired. The one who held me when I cracked my nose during a recess at school. The one who organized vaccination parties for me and my friends during the polio epidemic of 1956 when I was seven years old. 

Yet not long after I started analysis, darker colors emerged. And they were not as celestial as I had kept them since the final curtain. Many memories came back; some good, others less so. I started recognizing two sides of my mother. Death’s curtain had hidden the less angelic one, but it slowly emerged on the couch.  The messages from the other Mom were—to me, then a very young boy—confusing. When, one day in front of a mirror, I was imitating and dreaming of becoming a great musical conductor, she warned me that I would have to learn all the instruments one by one, and pretty much quashed that idea. She was always talking about my going to America. Yet when I brought home excellent grades from my elementary school’s English teachers, she cautioned that I shouldn’t dream of leaving any time soon, since I had to stay and take care of her in her old age. That was the ailing Mom who could not be disturbed when she was recovering from the breathing troubles. Those troubles meant that she was oftentimes unavailable.

Perhaps one of the most revealing reinterpretations of an old memory was that of an incident that happened when I was eight or so. I started telling it and, by the questions Gene asked, I could tell that it had caught his attention. And when he paid attention, I paid attention.

Mom had just returned from shopping and was lying in bed, recovering from the breathing troubles, her lips blue. “Schorschi,” she called me, with effort. “Could you please bring me my pills?”

I knew what pills she meant. The little green ones. She took one every time she was short of breath, which was often, or if her left arm ached. After she had popped one into her mouth, she asked, “ . . . and could you cover my legs with that blanket, bitte? I am cold.”

I did so, as much to help her, as to allay my fears. Maybe the blanket could cure her from whatever was wrong. “Come here, I want to thank you,” she added.  I walked up to her, and she hugged me and planted a kiss on my cheek.

“Sit down, I want to tell you a story,” she said. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment and continued. “I was over forty years old when I got pregnant with you. I was not sure if I should have a child. You know, I was not that young anymore and I had a heart condition.” She sighed, remaining silent for a while, perhaps second guessing her sudden frankness. Her breathing was getting easier, not as labored. She put her hand on my arm. “I was afraid that maybe there would be . . . complications.

“Your Dad, and several of your Aunties told me that they would take care of you and of me if something happened. And the cardiologist, Doctor Chans, said to me,” she frowned, pursed her lips and imitated the doctor’s deep voice, “‘Nothing will happen, señora. I will make sure of that. Don’t you worry, no se preocupe, and let me handle everything.’ He was an important doctor, you know, and I trusted him.”

Maybe the blanket was working because she was now animated. “And you see, Schorschi, nothing happened, Gott sei dank!” Her face lit up when she said this.

“Doctor Chans also said to me,” and she again frowned and deepened her voice, “‘Señora Riqui, you will see, you will have a son . . . I know.’” I laughed, all ears now. “I don’t know how he knew that I would have a son,” she said, smiling and switched back to the doctor’s professorial voice, “‘ . . . and someday this son will take care of you, when you are sick and when you grow old.’”

After a moment of silence, Mom looked into my eyes and added, “And that is the story, Schorschi. What the doctor predicted happened today, much sooner than I thought.” I beamed. “Come here,” she added, pulled me in, and hugged me tightly for a while. I let myself get lost in her love. That day, I was not just Mom’s beloved little boy, but from then on I would also be the strong man who would take care of her forever.

The tale of that bedroom scene and how she loved me for taking care of her had remained a cherished—and innocent—memory. Yet its deeper impact had escaped me until, after hearing me out, Gene asked, slowly, “Your Mom’s fear was understandable, no?”

“Yes,” I replied, “she knew that she was ill and was afraid of dying . . .“

And then it hit me. She had considered aborting me, I thought. “I don’t think that they had planned to have me. . .” I said. “Mom was forty-one with a heart condition and Dad was fifty-six . . . They were quite old to have a newborn . . . . They must have been worried. . . I can imagine their concerns of what a child might do to their lives.”

As he often did, Gene let my comment linger. “But” he added after some silence, “don’t you think that they must also have been joyful at becoming parents? . . . Something they may not have thought was possible anymore?”

“Yes,” I mumbled, still overwhelmed by the realization that I may have been an accident.

Yet for the first time, I empathized with Mom; I could feel her concerns. I saw her as one grownup sees another grownup. I understood that she was a human being who, the best she could, played with the cards that she had been dealt. That was a big breakthrough. I recognized that day that Mom’s embraces came along with implicit tasks, which, to a small boy, felt like mandates. And they could be suffocating: I needed to stay close and not become too ambitious with my wishes. She was fragile and I had to take care of her.

Of course, we all know how that turned out. Mom died too soon and I had failed to take care of her. On that cold Friday morning when I was eleven, she left me with no warning. My guilt at having failed to save her, at suddenly feeling relieved of my impossible responsibilities, overpowered my grief. On the couch, I became enraged with her for dying while I was so unprepared. And after the rage came a deep sadness, borne from long-delayed mourning. Session after session I cried inconsolably, with plenty of tears in my ears.   

It was no great insight to understand that I had spent much of my love life looking for Mom, for the love and attachment that I had lost when she died. But what emerged was more subtle. I had been attracted to very particular kinds of ersatz Moms. I was drawn to women whom I could help and protect. I would protect Diana from the coming Argentine troubles; I would help Monica heal her emotional wounds; I would heal Laurie of the hurts she carried. I was reenacting my internal mandates to take care of them, hoping this time to get it right. But it was a fool’s errand. I was carrying my own emotional baggage and was in no shape to help anyone.

***

It never occurred to me to take a photo of Gene’s red couch. Being a Freudian, he would have probably spent several sessions asking why, and how come, and what did it mean that I wanted a photo. So, the next best thing I have is a picture of the real thing, Freud’s own, which sits in the Freud Museum in London.