Michael D. telephoned me to arrange an appointment. ‘I was in analysis with Dr H.,’ he said.
It’s the policy of my professional society that each member designates another psychoanalyst to wind up his or her practice – look after patients and carefully dispose of any confidential notes or correspondence – in the event of the analyst’s sudden death. I’d agreed to look after Dr H.’s affairs, but when his death came it wasn’t unexpected. He’d known he was dying of lung cancer and, in the months before he died, he wound up his practice himself. A few weeks before his death, he told me, ‘My patients are settled, you shouldn’t be hearing from any of them.’ So when Michael D. rang me, almost two years later, I was somewhat surprised.
We agreed on a time to meet. I was just about to put down the receiver when he said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘There’s no reason you should remember me.’ He told me that we had met before, almost twenty years ago; he was twenty-seven then. ‘You didn’t have a vacancy, you referred me to Dr H.’
As he spoke, I began to recall our meeting. We met for a consultation, just before his wedding day. I couldn’t remember his face but I had a picture of him in jeans, T-shirt and tennis shoes, and that there was something self-conscious, boyish about him. What I did remember was the way he entered my room, holding a single sheet of lined paper. As he sat down he said, ‘I’ve made a couple of notes.’ The sheet appeared to have been folded and refolded.
From time to time, he consulted the paper, on which he’d listed questions for me – ‘Should I let her keep the engagement ring?’ ‘Do I tell my best friends that I’m having doubts about my sexuality?’ ‘I have to give the guests some explanation, I don’t want to lie – what do I say to people?’ ‘Do I have to telephone everyone myself or can Mum and Dad do it for me?’
Thinking back, I couldn’t remember how I’d handled these questions. I did tell him that I thought he was very anxious, and that having those questions written out helped him to feel less confused, safer. Over the two hours we talked, he never let go of the paper.
Gradually, my experience of the paper changed. Perhaps it was the fact of him clutching it so tightly, but it felt less and less like a wall between us and more like a worn teddy bear that must be carried everywhere. At the end of the consultation, as he was putting his coat on, I heard myself ask him – like a father making sure his toddler has not left behind some beloved toy – if he’d remembered his piece of paper.
‘Yes, I do remember you now,’ I said. I told him I looked forward to seeing him again. We said goodbye and hung up.
After fetching Michael’s assessment notes, I sat down at my desk and began to read. The pages more or less confirmed what I remembered.
Two days before coming to see me, he’d called off his wedding. Everything had happened suddenly. The previous weekend he and his fiancée, Claire, had attended a friend’s wedding. Driving back to London, he became convinced that at some point, after having children, he would wake up and discover that he was gay. As Claire napped in the passenger seat, he found himself silently repeating, ‘I’m not gay, I’m not gay, I’m not gay.’ After a sleepless night, he told Claire he couldn’t marry her, he didn’t know who he was or what he wanted, maybe he was gay.
I asked him why he thought he was gay; was he having sex with a man? No, he replied. Did he fantasise about having sex with men? No, he said. Had he ever had sex with a man or ever had sexual fantasies about men? No, again. When I asked about his fiancée, he told me that he had been with Claire for three years and they’d moved in together recently. Yes, they did have sex regularly, four or five times a week. ‘Do you find yourself thinking about men while you have sex with Claire?’ I asked. No, he answered.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand. Why do you think you’re gay?’
‘So you don’t think I’m gay?’ he asked.
‘I’m trying to understand why you think you’re gay.’
‘I worry that I’ll discover I’m gay – after I’ve had children. It’s a huge responsibility having children.’
‘Are you worried that you may have sexual feelings towards your children?’ I asked.
‘No, not at all,’ he replied.
From my notes it was clear we’d gone round and round like this for some time. Michael seemed to have some deep anxiety about himself, something he was convinced had to do with his sexuality, but I couldn’t get a clear sense of what it was that worried him. He told me that he was a late starter, that Claire was his first and only girlfriend. At one point he told me that he found her passion embarrassing, but he couldn’t explain further. And while everything Michael told me seemed to have some possible significance, I couldn’t understand what he meant when he said that he was worried about his sexuality.
In my notes I recorded the thought that he seemed unable to bear the loss that marriage entails. I meant by this not only the loss of being a child, but also the loss of certain avenues that had been open to him but would now close. I was also struck by his immaturity; he was positively adolescent in his lack of empathy. He didn’t seem to have much sense of the pain that he had caused his fiancée. From his description of events, it was clear she was in a state of shock.
He told me that his parents and friends all thought that Claire was a wonderful girl – intelligent and warm. He agreed. They were convinced he would lose her if he didn’t propose. He found himself telling her that he wanted children and marriage, he had proposed, and they had found a home and were planning their wedding. He’d done these things because he thought this was what he should do, what he should want to do, but here he was, several weeks before his wedding – feeling that he couldn’t go forward.
I wanted to think that it took courage to call off the wedding, but his stopping seemed almost as unthinking as his going forward. And the business about his sexuality wasn’t quite right either – I suspected that it was the only excuse he believed would be accepted by those around him.
It was clear he was desperate to stop the wedding, but he couldn’t say why and I couldn’t figure out why. In my notes I concluded that he was breaking down into depression and needed to be helped immediately. He needed an experienced therapist who could help him get a better sense of the cause of his depression, and get a clearer picture of his underlying worries.
There was one further point in my notes, and this may have been the reason why I didn’t recognise his voice on the telephone – I felt that I hadn’t made good contact with him.
During a consultation, I have to gather information – the patient’s life story, the history of his problem – but the most important thing is that the patient should leave our first meeting feeling heard. At the end of this meeting, he should feel that what he came to say, needed to say, has been said, listened to and thought about. In almost all consultations there is a moment when things click, when both people feel there has been an understanding. When that happens, and it can occur at almost any point in the meeting, patient and analyst have a sense that the consultation is over, the thing that was needed has been done – but that hadn’t happened with Michael.
I’d had a number of thoughts and I’d put them to him, but in the end I was left feeling that nothing really seemed to make an impact. When it was time to say goodbye, I felt vaguely defeated. I comforted myself with the thought that Michael was not so interested in being heard as in getting something from me – he wanted to end his engagement and he seemed to want my permission. I felt he wanted me to say something to take back to his fiancée and parents, a sick note, excusing him from the wedding, for ever.
The only other document in the file was a photocopy of my letter, describing the consultation and referring Michael to Dr H. ‘Who knows?’ I had written. ‘Perhaps he just needs to meet the right person.’
Sitting at my desk, closing the file, I wondered – what had become of Michael during the intervening years? Was he now married with children? And what had stopped him from marrying Claire? I returned the file to the cabinet and closed my office for the night.
A few days later, as planned, Michael arrived for his appointment. He took off his suit jacket and sat down in the chair. As he looked around the room, I caught myself looking at his left hand to see if he was wearing a wedding ring. He wasn’t. ‘We both have a few more white hairs,’ he said to me.
We were silent for a moment. ‘How can I help?’ I asked.
He sat still and then said, ‘One of the things that Dr H. and I figured out was that psychoanalysis can’t really help me. To be honest, my analysis with Dr H. was a bit of a failure – but that failure was worth something in itself.’
I told him I wasn’t sure I understood what he meant.
For a moment he seemed lost in contemplation of something visible only to him and then he said, ‘Do you know the story of Kafka and Felice Bauer? For five years, Kafka was intensely involved with Bauer, sometimes sending her several letters a day. She lived in Berlin, he lived in Prague – not a great distance even then, but during the five years they were engaged, they met only ten times, often for no more than an hour or two.’ If you read Kafka’s letters, Michael said, it’s clear that he was usually distraught – anxious about where Felice was going, who she was seeing, what she was eating or wearing. Kafka wanted instant replies to his letters, and he was furious when he didn’t get them. He proposed twice and broke it off twice – the wedding never took place. Michael said that for Kafka, separation from Bauer was unbearable. ‘The only thing more disturbing was her presence.
‘Kafka got into that sort of relationship over and over again,’ he told me. ‘Nowadays, we’d say he was schizoid or suffered some mild form of Asperger’s, but those words give no sense of the central thing. The person he most avoided was the person upon whom he was the most dependent – the person he most wanted.
‘That’s my story – with Claire, with Dr H. As time went on, the more I depended on Dr H., the more I felt I needed his help, the more I found myself skipping sessions and wanting to end the analysis altogether.’
He told me that when he started with Dr H. he was depressed – ashamed of the way he had called off the wedding, embarrassed by the things he had told people. He gave up his research fellowship in maths and got a job in banking, doing computer modelling. After about six months, he had found a new flat, and started to enjoy his job – ‘I felt a bit better. Because therapy had gone so well at first, it took some time before either of us realised some obvious things: like my need to control the distance between us. Normally, people get closer and closer over time. I can’t do this. My trust doesn’t seem to deepen – not much anyway.’
The situation became clear following another break-up with a girlfriend. He’d been in a relationship with a woman who lived in New York. Most of the relationship was over the phone. Each weekday, when she came home from work, and just before he went to bed, Michael rang her. They saw each other once every three months. ‘She thought we should see more of each other – I thought so too. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen? But I just couldn’t do it – we talked about my fear of intimacy, my fear of commitment, my fear of becoming a father. When she offered to move here, I freaked out – it was like it had been with Claire. I just couldn’t do it, and we broke up.
‘I think that Dr H. found it hard to believe that I was genuinely happier on my own – I found it hard to see at first. Like him, I believed that I had some sort of psychological block preventing me from wanting intimacy,’ he said.
I asked him if he and Dr H. had come to any conclusions about why he felt this way.
‘I could tell you a lot of different things, but the fact is, when I’m in a couple, I feel I’m disappearing, dying – losing my mind.’
As he spoke, I felt increasingly uncomfortable. I recognised that my inkling during our original consultation – that he wanted a sick note, excusing him from the wedding, for ever – was correct, but I had brushed it aside with my quip to Dr H., ‘Perhaps he just needs to meet the right person.’
Almost as if he were reading my mind Michael said, ‘A lot of people, especially psychoanalysts, assume that happiness can only be found in a couple – but not all of us are made for relationships.’
‘You feel I misjudged you, got it wrong in our first consultation?’ I asked.
‘You were trying to figure out what went wrong between me and Claire. I came away thinking that you were perplexed, but well-meaning. Most people think I’m shy, that I’m anxious or have low self-esteem. You didn’t think that, but you did think that therapy would help me get into a relationship – and that was wrong.’
He leaned forward. ‘Don’t feel bad, it’s a mistake everyone makes and I still sometimes make about myself. But the thing is, the minute I feel I’ve found the right distance, the rules change, and it feels the other person is too close.
‘Love can’t change what’s wrong with me,’ Michael said, ‘because love feels threatening. It’s the thing that made me break down before my wedding. Being loved is the problem, because love is a demand – when you’re loved, someone wants more of you.’
‘This is the thing you think I didn’t see – that psychoanalysts don’t see.’
‘Yes, but it took me a long time to see what’s right for me too – who I am – and accept it.’
I heard the voices of passers-by on the pavement outside my window. ‘I’m not sure I understand what you want from me,’ I said. ‘How can I help?’
‘I miss Dr H.,’ he replied. ‘I miss our conversations. He helped me to find the words to describe this – and telling it to you now makes me feel better, less lonely. I can’t do intimacy, but I can feel lonely. I’d like to come and see you when I need to.’
I waited to hear if there was something more Michael wanted to say.
‘Can I do that?’ he asked. ‘Would that be OK?’
And that is what we arranged.