TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:
CLIENT: So I guess I had wanted to kind of get your thoughts on where we ended up on Thursday. I mean, I guess I had some ideas, but I’m not quite sure how to reality check or whether they were useful or not—I mean, whether you thought it was a useful direction. I don’t know, I don’t know what to make of it honestly. Jennie…
THERAPIST: Remind me a little bit where (crosstalk).
CLIENT: Yes, sorry. It’s a challenge, I’m sure. (Pause) (Exhaling) [0:00:57] So I had had a thought, and I can’t quite reconstruct exactly what it was in response to. But my recollection is that it was something that came in the usual way, out of nowhere, or out of my ass, or wherever such things come from. If the gut brain is really a phenomenon, then perhaps it does come out of my ass. That one of the things that has been recurring and really difficult was the weird way in which, when I’m in whatever we’re characterizing as this state, I’m processing anger. And the thought that I had had was that there was something very infantile about it in fact, that these recurring—I was having these recurring analogies when kind of thinking about it in the psychotherapeutic context to actual infants that I know, the most recent one being my son. [0:02:09]
And (exhaling) what I think you had had a more—I mean, my sense was, my intuition was that you had had a more moderate construction, whereas my kind of hypothetical flight of fancy or fantasy was that there really was something—I don’t even know if these things function in this way. But the fantasy was that there’s something unintegrated, permitting me to deal with things that are pissing me off. I think what you had said was that it didn’t seem that, although I was angry at Jennie and that we were having a very clear conflict, that I was entering this very fucked up land. [0:02:57] And I think what I may have been feeling was that I was also entering this very fucked up land and that somehow the two—the fucked up land and the not so fucked up land were places that I was inhabiting simultaneously. And then this seems very curious and baroque. (Chuckling)
And I guess my very lay analysis was that maybe there’s something there. Maybe there’s something that we were missing. And I think as I was leaving I said something like, well, assume for the sake of argument that this is a reasonable hypothetical model. What the fuck do you do? I mean, preverbal—if Grayson were to have problems processing anger, how would you (pause)—I don’t remember any of it. I don’t really have access to it. it doesn’t exist in –now as I was leaving I was thinking to myself, oh, it’s probably fortunate that Marshall has this particular academic interest or maybe even clinical interest in babies. [0:04:08] But at any rate I didn’t really—it seemed a little bit daunting to me. And I think I said something like that. I said as I was leaving, well, there are things we can do. And that was where we left it.
THERAPIST: Right. So…
CLIENT: But I wanted your take. I mean, above all I kind of wanted to get a sense from you of what sounds plausible to you about this train of thought, and what seems like something that (crosstalk). Or useful maybe is a better criterion. (Pause) [0:04:58]
THERAPIST: More or less infantile stuff sort of (pause) generally has a lot of relevance for this kind of clinical work. And the way sort of the model or a model essentially for how it emerges and is addressed is that it usually emerges sort of unconsciously and behaviorally in sort of actions or interactions. [0:05:54] And so I mean, we’ve seen aspects of it for example in here. Like when you used to come in here at times, which—I mean, there must be some way in which you still [come here this way] (ph). But it’s more subtle. I don’t feel like I have, for one, picked up on it (ph) as well. But when you used to come in in a sort of clearer Jeffreyish kind of state, and your sort of affect and mien were different, and…
CLIENT: Can you describe them, because I obviously don’t see them.
THERAPIST: Sure. When we’d talk about it some, you’d seem more shut down, more disconnected from what we had talked about or been talking about the previous week and forever, more wary, shading into a little more paranoid about my motives and where I was coming from. [0:06:57] And you sort of express these things or expressed things that looked like that to me and then that we would talk about through sort of your body language to some extent.
CLIENT: Which was…?
THERAPIST: Let’s see. You’d seem sort of—you’d look more sort of reserved, maybe in your head, maybe kind of tense. The memory stuff was just [kind of evident] (ph).
CLIENT: Right, no, that’d be—[I haven’t done that in a while] (ph).
THERAPIST: And—as was kind of the wariness of my motives, I guess, both in sort of directly questioning them in the sort of (pause)—I mean, I’m wrong all the time. And it’s not a big deal to disagree with things that I’m saying. [0:07:57] But there was—we both I think sort of noticed a kind of wrestling-like quality, where you seemed to sort of, for some reason at times, be doing it for the sake of doing it, as opposed to just because I happen to be wrong, which also happens. It’s a little bit of that. Those are—I mean (crosstalk).
CLIENT: Okay.
THERAPIST: And so what happened is we would talk about it. And that’s sort of how that stuff gets integrated, is through the kind of back and forth of acting it out or interactively acting it out and talking about it, and then being able to really get your hands on it.
CLIENT: So this was not—this is fine. This is not what I kind of understood from you on Thursday. [0:09:01] (Pause)
THERAPIST: I’m not…
CLIENT: I mean, I guess my heuristic in this interaction is much more of the murder mystery than yours, I suspect. I remember in our interaction, the course of our interaction, at one point I said, something happens. Something happened that we hadn’t figured out. That was an important element in our discussion. And [you’re just like] (ph), we don’t have a handle on this. We don’t know exactly what’s going on. And I’m like, well, this is kind of what I was thinking might be going on based on what seems to be happening. And so I guess when we had this exchange about what you do when trying to figure something like this out, my assumption, my heuristic was there’s something to figure out. [0:10:04] There’s some way possibly of just ascertaining what the fuck is going on, with the premise that it’s something that happened before I had achieved even childhood consciousness. Now (pause)—I don’t know.
THERAPIST: I mean, I guess I’d say, that sounds very plausible to me. There are…
CLIENT: (Chuckling) Because lots was happening.
THERAPIST: Absolutely, lots was happening, and…
CLIENT: I mean, it was just total chaos. So it’s likely that something got fucked up.
THERAPIST: Absolutely, and it’s not—it seems completely plausible to me that—well, I’m actually more confident than that. [0:10:59] I’m entirely sure there are things from very early, and maybe (crosstalk).
CLIENT: Yeah, but this specific thing. So we’ve—I feel very good about the specificity that we’ve put to the dilemma and the kind of causal chain here between emotional processing of a certain kind, of certain kinds of emotions, of strong, difficult emotions and certain avoidant behaviors that have really become deeply problematic in my life. And that makes a lot of sense to me. To me at least the model of—it makes sense, given that personality is a construct and that it’s difficult in the best of times to integrate all the different ways in which one might respond to a feeling, it makes sense to me that sort of—there’s a systematic duality of the way that I process these things, one of which is relatively competent and adult, and the other which is infantile and doesn’t really do the job. [0:12:11] That makes sense to me. The idea that—which I’m inferring a lot, I’m sure, that I took from your exchange with me last week, that in order to figure out how to kind of integrate this, we need to have a better idea of exactly what’s going on, and (ph) made sense to me rightly or wrongly, and prompting (ph) my sort of certainty, anxiety that one just might not be able to figure out what happened given the amount of water that’s passed under the bridge. (Crosstalk) that’s kind of where I am. [0:12:55]
THERAPIST: Right (crosstalk). The best guide to history is enactment in the current day. And it’s usually better than…
CLIENT: Recollection.
THERAPIST: Recollection, exactly.
CLIENT: That makes sense to me. I just—on my end it’s more like, okay, well, what now? How now brown cow?
THERAPIST: How now brown cow, yeah.
CLIENT: And I don’t mean to abdicate responsibility or anything. I just—I’m genuinely—this all seems plausible. I’m persuaded. I feel collaboration between us. I just don’t know what it will do.
THERAPIST: (Crosstalk) You have a very strong sense that there’s something there.
CLIENT: I do, I do have a strong sense. And that’s strong—rightly or wrongly, my strong sense is very important to me. It’s something that I have clung to in the face of many people who would have preferred that I just give it up. [0:13:55] So it is a fact.
THERAPIST: What else comes to mind about it?
CLIENT: What else comes to mind about it?
THERAPIST: That strong sense.
CLIENT: Yeah. (Pause) (Exhaling) This is not—this is a little tangential, but I—there are two kind of relatively early (pause) stock-takings that I remember. One of them was an essay that I mentioned, I think, before—right after we moved that I wrote for a fifth grade assignment about writing my autobiography. [0:14:55] And it was just very clinical. It was this adult consciousness that had ended by saying, I felt very upset, I didn’t know how to describe it, footnote three or something. And the teacher had written in red ink, this sounds like there’s a lot of understated feeling here. And it was just so dramatically disconnected from the way in which one might probably want to process strong emotions, including anger. So that’s one referent.
Then another that occurred—this has been on my mind I guess since I found it while going through a box before my mother sold our family house in 2006 or 2007 or something. The other episode I think I’ve also mentioned. [0:15:58] But it just occurred to me in this context. I was four, and I think—I was four, and my parents left me alone for the weekend with a very good family friend. And they came back, and I was furious, and I wouldn’t talk to them. And at a certain point, I went up to my mother I guess. And I said, even though I’m mad at you my love doesn’t go away, and—which is a very cute, kind of classic thing I imagined for a four-year-old to do.
THERAPIST: That was how you put it?
CLIENT: That was exactly—I mean, that’s the way I’ve been quoted for the last 30 some odd years. So that is the way it’s entered into the family lore. Whether it’s been edited since, I can’t tell you. But at any rate, assuming that it’s more or less accurate, it also in some sense has a similar quality. [0:16:57] You have this kind of nonverbal, avoidant, infantile expression of anger. And then you have this other one. And this other very hyper—I would—I don’t know if that’s hyper-mature for four. Maybe this is what four-year-olds do. Maybe that’s age-appropriate. But it’s…
THERAPIST: Yeah, but it’s the way you said it. The way you put it’s pretty precocious.
CLIENT: Yeah, I mean—and they just seem to coincide without overlapping or coincide without mixing. That was the thought that I had when thinking about our exchange on Thursday. With regard to the specific question (pause), what I remember is feeling a lot of guilt and shame over not being able to do things like clean my room, like do first or second grade homework. [0:18:08] First grade was fine. I think it really started becoming difficult in second grade. I think it was…
THERAPIST: You wouldn’t do your homework?
CLIENT: I had real difficulty. And there were—they’d started—I’d found my report cards from that year. So I could look at them, I guess, and see—I mean, the evaluations were always very glowing because, I mean, they saw that I was pretty bright. But there were these things. There was one teacher that I just didn’t—I don’t know, I just didn’t—there was a problem of rapport. And I would never do her homework. And she always took it as a problem, but as a kind of interpersonal thing, I guess, whether I was being defiant or rebellious or whatever. [0:18:59] But as I think about it, it was that it was a language class. And a language class requires certain kinds of regular work that’s not immediately remunerative. And it occurs to me that it might have just been difficult for me to focus. I might have had some kind of difficulty engaging with it, given the amount of interference that there was in our daily life.
And by this time—I think by second grade, I’m pretty sure, my parents’ marriage had gotten very tense, because I think—we arrived when I was kindergarten. And the first two years were okay. And then my father, he had an affair, he became very, I think, distant from the family, doing this kind of grandiose revolution-building as he imagined it, etcetera. [0:20:07] (Pause) So I think in terms of the moments when this sense of there being something askew that I wanted to address but couldn’t, and these interactions with people who assumed that all I had to do was stop being defiant or stop being a pain in the ass, my first recollections of them are with regard to my room on the one hand and with regard to class, with this class in particular being (crosstalk).
THERAPIST: Could you do schoolwork in school more easily than at home, do you know? [0:21:01]
CLIENT: Possibly, very possibly. I mean, then we get into complexity and what their pedagogical approach was and whether they emphasized homework. And that I don’t know. That I don’t know. I mean, it wasn’t…
THERAPIST: There was no obvious thing.
CLIENT: I was (pause)—yeah, I don’t know. I mean, there may have been an obvious thing, but I don’t remember it. It’s a long time. But I mean, I guess what feels relevant to me is not so much that this is a comprehensive sample but rather that these are just the ones that come to mind for whatever reason. [0:21:56] (Pause) It was taught by the grandmother of my friend, the language class.
THERAPIST: What language was this?
CLIENT: Latin, which I never learned until I was an adult. (Pause) And I think—I mean, just free associating here, I think that she was unlike most—it was this ridiculous religious school. And I think she was unlike most of the teachers in that my very vague childhood recollection, which is likely to have been wrong, but was that she was a highly educated Russian immigrant. [0:22:55] She was probably in her 60s or maybe even late 60s. And for her, teaching Latin was—she was probably…
THERAPIST: Way overqualified.
CLIENT: Way overqualified, yeah. I mean, maybe she was doing it for fun. Who knows what her motivations were? But my—again, based on my gut brain so to speak, that would be…
THERAPIST: You felt at the time (crosstalk).
CLIENT: I felt at the time that she was kind of short. She was not welcoming. She was tough. She wasn’t charmed (ph), that’s for sure. (Pause) [0:24:00] [0:24:56]
THERAPIST: Well, one thing that [comes to mind to me] (ph) in the feel of these, I guess, associations, is it was kind of on you to figure these things out. (Pause) The adults feel a bit—I’m not saying this is necessarily true in reality, but in this recollectionative (sp) moment, they feel distant really. You’re the one who recognizes it that you’re angry, but your love for her isn’t any less. And now it’s not even clear to me whether when you said that you were talking to her or sort of figuring something out yourself or what. [0:25:52] But I understand it’s become part of the family lore. But at least the way you describe it (pause), you were struggling with something. And…
CLIENT: Abandonment.
THERAPIST: Yeah, yes (chuckling). Yeah, right. (Pause) Yeah, with the two teachers, they didn’t really seem to be helping you with the aspect of this thing that you were struggling with. (Pause)
CLIENT: I mean, I think the teacher for whom I did the essay was, I’m guessing—my recollection of her, which is much more recent obviously, was that she really made a significant effort to kind of connect, and relatively successful one, if I’m… [0:27:07]
THERAPIST: And what did she write in? You said she wrote in red pen.
CLIENT: She wrote—I could bring it in. I have it. But it says something like—I mean, it was a very weird essay in the sense that it was so distant. And at the end she said, well these—something like, this sounds very difficult. I can see in your writing much understated feeling. It was sweet. I was actually moved in reading. Some of the comments were grammatical. There were all sorts of comments on it. But it was very empathetic. And who knows? [0:27:55] As an elementary school teacher in 19—or whatever it was, 1981, 1982, you saw children of divorce, and you probably were given some kind of training in how to deal with kids who were going through something like that. So I’m not shocked that she was empathetic. But she was.
And I don’t—there’s nothing associated with my recollection to suggest that I felt bad about having—about the interaction. The earlier interaction was—what recollection I have left, which is very wispy, is—we never really reconciled, this old lady and I. And if you’re teaching eight-year-olds you should probably be a little more empathetic (chuckling). [0:28:58] But whatever. I mean, but that’s—yeah. My recollection is that one teacher engaged, and the other didn’t so much. And this happened again in high school actually, that I had a very extended and ultimately unresolved conflict with a teacher. I was kicked out of…
THERAPIST: [With math] (ph)?
CLIENT: Of math (pause) for sleeping. And I was sleeping because we lived in this crazy place where…
THERAPIST: Is this with the really long commute?
CLIENT: Yeah, I mean, an hour and forty-five minute commute. And I don’t know. That was just stupid. He was just an asshole. But it had a profound impact on my life, the fact that I never really finished calculus. I never took any math in college.
THERAPIST: (Crosstalk)
CLIENT: (inaudible at 0:29:52) all the quantitative disciplines were basically closed to me (pause), without significant remedial work. [0:30:03] (Pause) It’s a lot to synthesize. I haven’t quite finished that process after 42 years. So I’m empathetic to the challenge. (Pause) [0:31:00]
THERAPIST: Yeah, I guess a more typical reaction for a four-year-old would have been something like—maybe to be withdrawn or to shut down or to get angry or to be excited at first but then kind of get angry or just sort of fall apart? [0:31:59]
CLIENT: There’s a meta-conscious there that’s interesting.
THERAPIST: Yeah, to be overcome (pause), which I wonder if you didn’t feel it was so safe to be. I don’t know. (Pause)
CLIENT: Thinking about it just as—pretending to be an outsider, it’s not like a preferred response for a four-year-old. The four-year-old would probably prefer to respond directly. It takes an enormous amount of effort to engage in that level of kind of conscious self-analysis or quasi-conscious self-analysis. [0:33:01] So if I had my druthers at that particular moment I probably would have preferred to melt down. I mean, it’s just easier. (Pause) So clearly there was some significant incentive motivating that degree of self-control and self-reflection.
THERAPIST: Yeah, because I guess you were really upset.
CLIENT: Clearly. (Pause)
THERAPIST: In what way…?
CLIENT: I’m probably not going to be able to answer your question.
THERAPIST: How does it get talked about as part of the family lore?
CLIENT: (Exhaling) In a complimentary way. You were such a (pause) cute, thoughtful kid. I mean, I think my mother—I don’t remember my father talking about it, although I’m sure that he did. [0:34:01] Lots of people talk about it. But my mother, certainly after I hauled her into family therapy a couple of years ago, she has talked about it with a sense of self-recrimination. Like, oh, we were—I don’t think recrimination for leaving me alone. A four-year-old can be left with a close friend for overnight. But just that (pause) they left me so often, particularly in my second year, particularly in my second year when she handed me, reluctantly, for some months over to collective childcare staffed by totally random people, some of whom are now schizophrenic in Alaska. [0:35:01] (Pause)
It was interesting actually. My father-in-law and Jennie’s step-mother, my mother-in-law effectively, are here as I said last week. And she’s a kibbutznik. And she was raised, I guess, when they still did this thing that my father replicated. And apparently there were several child abuse scandals. I mean, as you would expect. It’s like, people are completely untrained, and you just kind of throw a whole bunch of kids at them.
THERAPIST: Right, very little oversight.
CLIENT: This is—yeah, no, I mean, this is a bigger story, I guess, in a sense. We’re probably coming close to the end of the hour. [0:35:57]
THERAPIST: We’ve got about five minutes. Yeah, who knows? Maybe that made it (pause) more difficult for you to handle their leaving when you were four.
CLIENT: I imagine. I mean, literally I imagine that I had—if only because my mother was so upset about it. In other words, if only because my mother felt so conflicted about it, I imagine that the leave-takings—something that has a very faint echo in my discomfort with our handoffs at 4:30. When does 4:30 come? Is the handoff going to be—am I going to handle it the right way? [0:37:06] I imagine that is a kind of faint residue of this more primal uncertainty. And how much of it was real trauma, and how much of it again is just kind of my mother’s reflected anxiety about it? It’s kind of unknowable, I guess.
THERAPIST: [That’s an interesting phrase to use] (ph), the handoff.
CLIENT: Why?
THERAPIST: I mean, I guess I think of a handoff as coming from—originally from football, where one person hands the ball off to another person who runs around with it. Or in the context of little kids where… [0:37:59]
CLIENT: Handshake. Maybe it was just a solecism.
THERAPIST: With little kids people use it a lot. A handoff is when you’ve been with Grayson all day, Jennie comes home. You hand off and go off and do something else.
CLIENT: You hand off a kid (crosstalk), yeah. So it’s funny to use in this context. It’s probably just a kind of—not quite a metathesis but a cognitive (pause) infiltration of the handshake concept with the handoff concept. But maybe there’s something. You’re into psychoanalysis.
THERAPIST: (Chuckling)
CLIENT: So tell me. Do the analysis. What does it mean to you? I know, it’s what it means to me that is more significant. Tell me what you…
THERAPIST: We can both try to figure that out. [0:38:57] (Pause) What it made me think of was as though you are a little kid, which is related to what you were just saying about the echoes and that I am handing you off to someone else. I am saying goodbye and handing you off to (crosstalk).
CLIENT: Yeah, I don’t know, maybe. (Pause) I mean, the transition that I’m most aware of or at least most (exhaling) absorbed by at the moment is this—often a sense that is disconcerting to me in the context of what we hope to be doing. [0:40:06] This is a respite from the burden of trying to figure out how to untangle this behavioral pattern from my vocation and my household and my need to contribute to it and everything else. So as if our conversation were somehow in a protected space in which I don’t, contrary to every other moment of my waking life and probably quite some of my sleeping life—just don’t have to worry about it, not because we’re not talking about it or thinking about it, although we did not today, I know, but because something is not in play that is in play. [0:41:04] Something that is burdensome, something that is troubling, something that confers shame or what have you is not in play as it is in these other places. So maybe that would be the place to start with on Thursday. What—assuming this the control, what are we controlling for?
THERAPIST: Well, we should stop.
CLIENT: Okay, so I’ll see you at 1:00 (crosstalk). Take care.
THERAPIST: You too.
END TRANSCRIPT
