TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

CLIENT: My mother got on a train at eight thirty or so, going to Pittsburgh where apparently (inaudible at 00:00:18), and very few people are (inaudible at 00:00:23), find out how she is going to get to my sister’s.

Right, so. There was one detail of Tuesday’s story that possible, could put everything into a much larger frame, which was Hitler declared himself dictator of Germany two days after my grandmother’s great aunt, I guess, was presumably raped by her, assaulted by this butcher. So it’s like, you know, everything is going on in these years. [00:01:07]

I had an interesting couple of conversations with my mother before she left. It was a great visit, completely unexpectedly excellent visit. She was wonderful with Grayson, she was amazing with Grayson, and she said several times, “God, you know, I really wish I’d had, you know, been able to do this with you, just to give you my undivided attention.” You know, rather than fending off my dad’s wanderlust, this, that, and the other thing, and she’s really good at it, at least in her current state of maturation in life. Yeah, each, they made a very clear connection of talking to each other. [00:02:02]

Visibly, like you would, every, she would turn to talk to him and he would smile, and this morning I was holding him and he started vocalizing and I began heckling him. And we just had this four or five minute conversation that was incredible. It was really—

THERAPIST: Oh, that’s fantastic.

CLIENT: It was really wonderful, very, very moving. So her, she’s still distracted and, you know, the few moments of tension really had more to do with that than anything else, but yeah, no, it was nice. So anyway, she, I mean, I think I’m one to elicit some family narratives for all sorts of reasons, artwork as well as this other stuff. [00:03:00]

She didn’t tell us much about her family this time, I’ve heard some of that and that’s complex, but she was close to my grandmother and so she heard a lot from her. One thing she told us, one story she told, so basically my grandfather, so not going into the family that I spoke of which was my dad’s mom’s side. My grandfather’s family was, I think, going way back, I mean, they didn’t come from that far away, I mean I think they were, I looked up—

THERAPIST: I’m sorry, is this your dad’s dad, or—

CLIENT: My dad’s dad. So all my dad’s family, my mom’s family, they were all from like, they were all from (inaudible at 00:03:53), their own settlement. So it’s a seven-hour car ride to everybody’s house, all of the (inaudible at 00:04:01), all of the cities, you know, everything is in, you know, a radii, a circumference, rather, about seven hours by car. [00:04:10]

In, you know, given locomotion. The, my dad’s paternal family was pretty humble, I think, going way back. When they came to this country, you know, and I think they were educated. Almost everybody was literate. But, when they came to this country, the patriarch was a rag collector , if I remember correctly, and you know, he made enough at that to open a woolen wholesale business in the garment district. And when, you know, my grandfather came of age, my dad’s dad, there were decisions to be made about which of four children, two boys and two girls, would keep the shop going. [00:05:09]

You know, tend to the family business, and in the process, you know, pay for college, and you know, sort of get everybody started in the world. And I can’t remember, I think my grandfather was the oldest. It was either him or his brother Tim. But Tim, Nikki, Eloisa (sp), all just became these very larger than life characters. Tim, I think I’ve mentioned him before, he’s the father of the guy in New York He founded the, he wrote the, you know APA’s standards for professional certification in the fifties or something. So anybody who gets a PhD in psychology, you know, is ultimately, their curriculum is ultimately based on the Shakow (ph), doctrine, or whatever the fuck it was. [00:06:13]

And he was, I mean, he was, raised his oldest child in a Skinner box. You know, he was very, he was a very complicated character, and she did not do well in life. So, you know, they have their own family stuff, but the upshot was that my grandfather stayed in Long Island, you know, commuted by subway every day to his shop, where, you know, the garment district was, you know, just imagine this is probably the, I don’t think he did it before he got married, so he probably started it after he got married in thirty-nine. [00:06:57]

So like the forties, fifties, the garment district is like mob central, you know, he’s paying protection money. You know, he’s dealing with some pretty active and difficult and heavy shit, and I just realized in doing the, you know, following the genealogy of my mother’s family that the cousin Keryn, who basically, so when my grandfather died, there was no one to take over the store, so they liquidated. He was invested by my grandmother’s brother Keryn, Micah, and he lost it in some swindle. It was some very shady thing, and so this very, you know, prosperous wholesale business, and you know, old multigenerational wholesale business in the garment district, you know, I think, two-thirds of the value of it was a loss to some stock swindle, basically, which was, you know, he was the executor with, if I’m reading things right, from my mom, of the estate. [00:06:57]

My grandmother married my grandfather, so, you know, Barbara, who’s the granddaughter of this famous rabbi married him in thirty-nine. They went on vacation to, on honeymoon, rather and while they were there, my cousin, my great aunt Eloisa who was a thespian, and she had come back, actually from Jordan, where she’d settled after leaving where she was a dramatist, you know, like a producer. I think she wrote plays, or staged them, or something. She was the head of the Jordanian Children’s Theater in the early days of the state. [00:09:03]

So, you know, the Jewish community’s children’s theater, which I think, was probably pretty good. She ran it. And according to my mother’s story, and she garbles some things, but this sounds very plausible, she had been called back to take care of their father, so my great great grandfather, I guess, the guy who founded the woolens business, come to think of it, because she was the only unmarried sibling, at this point, my grandfather just having married. So she called him, while he was on his honeymoon with my grandmother, and said, “You have to come back. I can’t do this anymore.” And he said, “Okay.” [00:10:01]

And he came back to take care of business. And, as my mother tells the story, he did that over and over again, all the fucking time. You know, it was like his job was to take care of business, just to do the prosaic thing. Not what he wanted to do, not always intellectually interesting, et cetera, and just take care of business, and apparently my grandmother never let this go. I mean, you know, in this particular event was much talked about in my mother’s presence, and I’m assuming that, you know, from a relatively early age, in my uncle and father’s presence. And basically, you know, she’s always say, you know, “Benedict keeps getting screwed,” you know. What the fuck? Why is he elected to do all the dirty work of the family while, you know, Nikki goes off under mysterious circumstances during the war to airlift dollars over, you know, occupied Poland for the giant distribution committee. [00:11:11]

While Eloisa goes off to, you know, do all of these things and do plays and be a thespian, and Tim, you know, all of these people make tons of money. No, excuse me, Tim made tons of money, Nikki became a very successful sort of social work administrator, you know, in the very early days in these institutions of the New Deal and it’s successors. Eloisa was Eloisa, and Benedict, you know, stayed and continued going to the same synagogue and you know, and they lived in the same apartment the whole time. [00:12:01]

So she was very resentful, and she was resentful about being a housewife and quitting her job teaching, which apparently she loved. And she had all the, God knows how to unravel the complexities of the story of Tuesday, you know, which there are presumably many. But the upshot in my sort of piecing together of my mother’s story is that you know, my father had this very zero sum understanding of the relationship between great livelihood and being a mensch, or mensch isn’t the right word, because he wouldn’t have accepted that. But, you know, he would have said being a mensch is doing great things in the world, and you know, pursuing social change and revolution, et cetera. But you know, a zero sum game, I guess between taking care of business and doing great work. [00:13:03]

And you know, in my mother’s telling, very clearly on this particular visit, in which she kept on saying, “You’re such a wonderful father.” She would keep, she kept on making (inaudible at 00:13:17) comparisons between, you know, which are undoubtedly true, and which are very, you know, scrupulous about trying to, you know, create these distinctions between the way that I behave with Grayson, with the household. You know, I take out the garbage, he never took out the garbage. You know, I take care of the baby, he never took care of the baby. I wake up in the middle of the night, you know, I’m attentive to all of these things that he was, you know, completely out to lunch for, absent for, you know, in collective meetings for, et cetera. [00:13:58]

And among the other things that she, so at a certain point, a couple of days ago, yesterday, I can’t remember, she came up to me and Jennie (sp) had been, she’d been expressing what I understood as resentment, and I said, you know, what are you resentful about? And she wouldn’t tell me, I don’t know, but apparently she talked to my mother. And I’m sure she talked to my mother because she felt like it was hard to talk to me. Or something, but just under the assumption that I would talk to my mother. And I did talk to my mother, and my mother was, you know, characteristically at once happy to be in such a discussion and anxious about it, but she did it. And she did it very well, and what she did was she sort of tacked between, you know, just sort of communicating to me that Jennie’s (sp) really feeling very stressed out about finances and about, you know, the fear that I just will not pursue remunerative work. [00:15:07]

Ever. My mother didn’t put it like that, but Jennie (sp) and I talked about this in the past, so I knew how to translate. You know, and just saying that she felt scared that her conversations with Jennie (sp) suggested that Jennie (sp) felt scared. And she kind of left it at that. She was pretty good about not going too far with that. But she also told me stories about how my father, among other things, like there was a detail of the sequence of our many moods that I have kind of garbled. That when, I’ll just, so we move from San Diego after my dad gets blackballed in the seventies because he, you know, testified in a characteristically confident way in a hearing on whether San Diego was going to invest in this nuclear power scheme. [00:16:15]

It later defaulted, but the utilities companies were naturally angry and made it impossible for him to get private contracting on the west coast. So he had to apply for academic jobs, after he had already turned down like Oxford and what have you to join the collective, to start the collective, his collective enterprise. So he had to apply for like second and third tier academic jobs, and he got an academic job. So we move, after all of these moves, my mother finally kind of felt settled in San Diego. We moved to Providence, or to Falmouth, excuse me. My dad has, you know, my mother is basically a housewife at this point, teaching piano.

THERAPIST: And you’re about how old?

CLIENT: I’m about, I’ve five to ten. He has an affair with a graduate student who is part of this sort of radical revolutionary cell, as they thought of themselves, in the industrialized western Connecticut. [00:17:15]

Ultimately, it became untenable for her, she decided, and so she fled to the west coast, to Napa, and then to San Diego. My dad convinced her to take him back, they move back together, he convinced her not to live in San Diego, but in this, you know, very rural hard to get to area, and we’re all commuting in to San Diego.

THERAPIST: This is where you’re going like an hour to school.

CLIENT: An hour and a half to school. Then, I guess, finances were so bad that he had to either put up, no basically, the school told him either put up or shut up. You know, if you want to keep tenure, then you’ll come back and teach, so they moved back to Hamden. So this is where the story picks up, and this is where I garbled an important clock element. [00:18:01]

And that is, that—

THERAPIST: I’m sorry to keep asking, you’re about how old in Hamden?

CLIENT: Hamden, I’m first two years of high school, so fourteen, fifteen. And I was really unhappy. And apparently, it was really tough, this is what I heard this visit. It was really tough for my dad in, at Simmons. And he didn’t want to stay, so two years after we get there, he’s like, “I’m going to die if I don’t get back to San Diego.” He was having all these subtle symptoms that he later ascribed to, you know, (inaudible at 00:18:37), which is not completely inconceivable since, you know, it is a very slow-developing cancer. But anyway, he’s clearly stressed out and he was sad that his friends had graduated or left or decided to, or I mean, realize. This is like 1987, so Communism is just completely disintegrating, so you know, that’s part of the story, I suppose, too. [00:19:02]

And he’s like, “If I don’t get back to the west coast to Oregon, I’m going to die.” So my mom again reluctantly go along. It wasn’t that she was insisting that they move back, she actually had, as she described it, kind of that she had some professional stability, but my really not liking it there was, she said, the crowning argument that made her go along with it. So I was kind of brought into her marriage, only not exactly in the way that I had thought.

Anyway, but this kind of thing was a constant refrain with him. You know, that “I just can’t be happy. I’m going to die, I’m going to commit suicide, I am” or he would just be so, you know, unhappy that she went along with things, and that’s never the way that she has told me the story, but she told it this time and it really threw me for a loop because you know, in all of our conversations in which Jennie (sp) had said, “Whatever will make you happy, I just can’t stand to see you so unhappy.” You know, I never did it like this. [00:20:13]

I never did, and I never would, and I’m not my father, and so on. But it was enough of a resonance there that it just, I was just totally, I was, it really hit me in the gut. So, you know, Jennie (sp) and I had a lot of, I guess I’m not at some level, because this has to end sometime. You know, I have to, I have to get over this at some point. It’s not good for me. It wasn’t good for my dad, and it’s not good for me to have this, you know, this internal conflict that, you know, it’s mine. It was me who was standing in the hallway of the library kind of in gripped by this weird dichotomous state of being. [00:21:08]

But, you know, at some point, that’s why I’m here, and if this doesn’t do it, I don’t know. So Jennie’s (sp) need I think was very persuasive, and framing Jennie’s (sp) need in this way was very evocative. It was hard. It’s been, it was a hard twenty-four hours. We had kind of a sweet conversation yesterday, and this morning I was feeling very kind of upset and agitated, and had a couple of interactions about it, but I can’t stay home forever. I mean, it’s just not viable on any number of levels. And Jennie (sp), you know, she wants me to be happy, but it is going to, it is going to create very, you know, I don’t want the kind of dynamic between us. [00:22:11]

You know, even if she were to do that, which she’s not my mother, I’m not my father.

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: We don’t interact that way, that’s the last thing that I would want to be in, and, you know, the outcome, if she were to be her and I were to be me and still behave in this way, or recapitulate these kinds of interactive patterns would be that we wouldn’t work. That’s clear, you know?

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: It just wouldn’t work, so I have to. Somehow that means I have to apply things. Somehow that means I have to get over whatever the aversion, you know, that was represented by that vignette. [00:23:10]

I have to get over it. Because this thing with Grayson and this thing with Jennie (sp) is really beautiful. It’s very, it’s really sweet. So anyway, I don’t think we need to express some of the about—

THERAPIST: Are you scared?

CLIENT: Am I scared? I’m scared about, I’m oddly not scared about doing it, I’m scared about, it’s like what’s scary to me is the abstract elements of it, and not the concrete ones. Somehow I was saying that it’s a weird, you know, dichotomous state of being, but, you know, when I’m in this very heavily symbolized, you know, realm where family just kind of recapitulates itself, you know, ad infinitum, and something that happens in 1933 is, you know, causally implicated in everything. [00:24:18]

Then it’s scary. When I think about looking for a job, somehow it’s not. It’s like the inhibition in the abstract, I have to confess, the inhibition. But, you know, we’re going up to Connecticut through Monday, I’ll be back Monday night, to visit Jennie’s (sp) parents, and I set up this visit specifically to talk to her stepfather, who, you know, was a moderately successful, you know, corporate low-level executive. [00:24:56]

And, you know, they’re not, they live a pretty modest middle-class lifestyle, but he’s plugged in, and he can certainly give me advice, you know, about what I would do if I were to pursue that. So, I don’t know. I mean, I feel like I have contacts that I can ask for advice. I don’t know how many of them will still be willing to like set stuff up for me, and I don’t think I want it at this point, the way that I have been doing, just kind of getting whatever jobs I can through the network. You know, I feel some confidence about my abilities to navigate this now, maybe. I know for certain that it will not be as easy as it feels as I consider it, but I don’t feel scared about that. But I do feel scared in that symbolic space. That’s when I feel scared. Does that makes sense? And, you know, I mean, I think with, using a more clinical lens, you know, we have made pretty clear associations between that kind of cognition and real clear obvious symptoms of anxiety. [00:26:19]

So there’s some association between that kind of thought pattern in my, you know, mental cosmos and where you have these symbolic relationships that are very, very abstract and very, very powerful and just feeling bad, feeling paralyzed, feeling kind of under this lens. So I guess that makes sense from that perspective, too, that it would be scary when I’m kind of in that space. [00:27:02]

One, to finish, I don’t want to interrupt your train of thought, but one of the reasons that whatever I end up doing, I really want to build in the capacity to finish some manuscript, which I can distribute in (inaudible at 00:27:20) to you know, my intimate friends, I don’t really care. You know, partly because it’s, you know, it’s like taking this symbolic set, this style of thinking, and making something constructive out of it. I mean, even the plot, as I sketched it out is, you know, it’s a murder mystery, but you know, the thing ultimately it turned out to be a suicide, and you know, as I was thinking about the meaning of the plot for me, what, the person, the character that commits suicide is really what I’m trying to dispense with. [00:28:06]

You know, that character is the person who thinks in this way. You know, it’s as if somehow thinking of this as a creative exercise makes it easier to take advantage of the upside of that, you know, capacity for symbolization. Just writing it down, and you know, putting it in words, and saving the file, and doing whatever with it, whatever turns out to be appropriate, that seems pretty important to me somehow. That kind of closure. So that will be a challenge. [00:28:58]

(Long pause) I think Tolkien did something similar at the end of Lord of the Rings, by the way. Frodo is what he was getting rid of. Sam was what he kept, or wanted to keep. (pause) [00:30:10]

(Long pause continues) [00:31:01]

(Long pause continues)

THERAPIST: Okay, so I think that for one thing, this makes it clearer to me anyway, although it may have already been somewhat clear to you, the relation between the moment in the library on the stairs, and the thought about our work together as well in that you’re worried that sort of the work that really matters to you, in a way, is going to get taken away. [00:32:17]

What I have in mind is your sort of literally work in the symbolic realm now with the writing, or I think, like kind of trying to find yourself in that same realm.

CLIENT: I don’t know, except to say that I almost said, you know, that I almost made that connection explicitly as I was talking at the very end of the last discourse, so we’re thinking along the same wavelength.

THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:33:03]

CLIENT: Yeah, no, I didn’t understand what you were saying. The zero sum game between our discussions and writing it down on the page, is that what you were?

THERAPIST: Something like that. I mean, there seems to be a zero, how about this?

CLIENT: I think not at all. I mean, I see them as completely complementary, very consciously and explicitly so. I, you know, like I say, I guess we’re making, you know, they’re making transcripts of these sessions, which are scooping my work to some degree, but live long and prosper. I don’t know. I mean, I’m excited to explore these things, I’m exploring them for, you know, narrative purposes, because I’ve always known that I would want it. [00:34:03]

I mean, Jennie (sp) had suggested, and I have long thought that I wanted a kind of biographical narrative strand, and as I investigate them, I, you know, bring up material that is clearly obviously useful in our discussions and evocative for me, and helpful, I think, it’s been extremely helpful.

THERAPIST: No, that all makes sense.

CLIENT: I don’t see as a tension even between them, I see them completely complementary to me.

THERAPIST: Right. In that way I, that completely makes sense to me, and I follow and so forth. But still—

CLIENT: Do you mean that if we succeed and I am employed again, that I won’t have time to write? [00:34:57]

THERAPIST: Maybe, or that it feels like whatever somehow the way that that matters to you, or something like that, as long as you get taken away. I guess here’s how it seems to line out. I was thinking in terms of kind of like the zero sum metaphor as well.

CLIENT: Right.

THERAPIST: Which it seems to me like kind of another angle on, or provides another angle on your worry about kind of being used in the work environment.

CLIENT: Yes, and that has been very, you know, consciously part of my reflection on this. I think this is a crucial point for me, and a real revelation for me, and, you know, it comes out of that story about the honeymoon. You know, the zero sum is bullshit.

THERAPIST: Yes, it is.

CLIENT: You know, this construction that either you have, you know, great work or you have, you know, just bullshit, shitty work. [00:36:05]

That you do for other people and they exploit you on. It’s not true. And the proof that in my father’s family, it was not true, and the conclusions that he drew from them are completely unnecessary is that my grandfather did not have to say yes. My grandmother shouldn’t be mad at Eloisa. She should be mad at my grandfather. What kind of an asshole comes back? I mean, you know, my grandfather was a wonderful man and just a very generous soul, but he just completely knuckled under. It was ridiculous. You don’t do that. And you know, it’s, this story is made much more, like the previous story on Tuesday, is made much more complex by, you know, the politics of gender in, you know, the late thirties, the 1930s.

THERAPIST: Yeah, sure. [00:37:01]

CLIENT: You know, my, at some level, I’m sympathetic to being resentful at, you know, having to be the caretaker, you know, despite doing completely different things at the time, because one is an unmarried woman. And that’s bullshit, right? And yet, basically what she was saying was, “You’re not married yet,” or something to that effect, you know. The fact that it was my grandmother’s honeymoon could not have been an unimportant in that transaction, and the basically the conclusion that she drew from it, you just, you don’t, you only have one choice. Either to do it all, or just to do this, have this very small uneventful, uninteresting life. Is not, it’s not true, and it’s certainly not true in my relationship, my relationships in my home. I’ve succeeded in creating, you know, a life with somebody that doesn’t require that. [00:38:06]

You know, it requires some sacrifice.

THERAPIST: Yeah, absolutely.

CLIENT: And it’s going to require some sacrifice of me, and one of the things I’m going to have to sacrifice, you know, is my comfort, I think, for the next couple of months in terms of doing things that are difficult to me, but I don’t see as a zero sum game and I kind of reject it, and I think it’s in some ways a wonderful moment that would have been completely impossible if my mother weren’t living with us for a month. A wonderful moment when I can kind of see that clearly.

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: And it has bearing on this relationship.

THERAPIST: Yeah, I’m trying to figure out how it fits, because I guess when you have these moments of sort of concern or one of the, one type of moment of worry or concern you had about things between you and I is that, you know, and you have some sort of, clearly a fantasy hypothetical, like I’m using you. [00:39:22]

You know, that this is for sort of my financial gain, and you come in and talk. You don’t necessarily get any better, and it works for me. And, you know, and it usually comes out like when you come in with something to say, and you say it, and get to a certain point, and you look at me, and you know, “What do you say, Marshall?” “Well, I don’t know yet.” And, you know, that’s when the fantasy strikes you, and yes, I know that if you step back from that a little bit—

CLIENT: I think you’re usually the one who articulates this fantasy and not me, so—

THERAPIST: You’ve agreed with it on occasion.

CLIENT: I have. There’s something there, but I just want to specify that this is a, it’s a construct. It’s not like the way that I interact in the world. [00:40:09]

THERAPIST: I think it has the same kind of currency, in a way, as what you’re talking about a couple minutes ago when you say, “Look, I reject this hypothesis, or this view of the world, that you get either one or the other. Of course that’s bullshit,” which I think you know full well to be true, but you have often acted otherwise. There’s some kind of—

CLIENT: Well, it’s a little more—

THERAPIST: Yeah, probably.

CLIENT: It’s a little more complicated than that, and again, I come back to this moment like this fateful moment in many peoples’ lives, as it turned out, when my grandfather had a choice.

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: And he didn’t manage his relationships well. And if you lock yourself into relationships where these are the terms, then it becomes much easier the next time. And I think it probably did. [00:41:06]

So it wasn’t that it was a zero sum game, you know, between him, you know, taking over the family business and just being a total, you know, being a person in the world. He chose in a way that made it much harder for him to be a person in the world, and much harder to fend off his, you know, his siblings, the next time and the time after that and the time after that. And so, by making certain choices and establishing relationships in certain ways, you know, the zero sum aspect of them can be less or more, you know, more dominant. And it is true that I have managed many relationships in my life in ways the emphasize the zero sum nature of their interests and mine. That, I really do think, is true. [00:42:00]

And I think that there are, it is reasonable, given that tendency, you know, which is a product of admittedly faulty worldview, in some ways. I think given that fact, being wary of it in this important relationship is reasonable.

THERAPIST: Absolutely. And I mean, I would say I guess in my mind, precisely one of the ways this relationship can be useful is to look at how those things come up, and sort of being able to connect them with the assumptions, for example, or the fantasies, you could say, you have about relationships. Then you can step back and say, “What the fuck? It’s not that way.”

CLIENT: Yes, but until you have a good one, you just keep doing this over. I mean, there are just so many relationships that I think back of, particularly in my professional life where this really became the, it became the dynamic. [00:43:07]

And it’s almost impossible to break out of it, for I mean, in those relationships. Or it just became very hard to, or I became so, I just, you know, everything became a nail, I guess. You know, it was hard to see them in any other terms. And differentiating those is quite difficult.

THERAPIST: Right.

CLIENT: But there are both, you know, both kind of analytical lenses can be productively used, both the lens in which that’s really the way the relationship is in reality and the way in which that’s the way that I see things because I’m so sensitized to this kind of way of interacting. I think we’re up, so—

THERAPIST: Yeah, we should stop.

CLIENT: Yeah, I see that. But we’ll pick it up on Tuesday.

THERAPIST: Sounds good.

CLIENT: All right, Marshall.

THERAPIST: Take care.

CLIENT: You too. Have a safe drive.

THERAPIST: Thank you, you too. Have a good trip.

CLIENT: Thank you, thank you.

END TRANSCRIPT