My patient Brenda came to her session today with an agenda. Without even glancing at me, she entered my office, took her seat, opened her purse to remove her notes, and commenced to read aloud a prepared statement listing complaints about my behavior during our previous meeting.
“You said I was doing a poor job in our sessions and that your other patients came better prepared to talk about issues. And you implied you much preferred to work with your other patients. And you scolded me for not bringing in dreams or daydreams. And you sided with my last therapist and said that my refusal to open up had been responsible for the failure of all my previous therapies.”
During the previous hour, Brenda had sat silently, as she often did, and volunteered nothing, forcing me to work much too hard: I felt as if I were trying to pry open an oyster. This time, as she read her list of accusations, I became increasingly defensive. Dealing with anger is not my strong suit. My reflex inclination was to point out her distortions, but I held my tongue for a number of reasons. For one thing, this was a propitious start to a session—a hell of a lot better than last week! She was opening up, unharnessing the sorts of thoughts and feelings that had kept her so tightly bound. Moreover, even though she had distorted my words, I knew I had, indeed, thought some of the things she accused me of saying, and most likely these thoughts had colored my words in ways I had not recognized. “Brenda, I entirely understood your annoyance: I think you’re misquoting me a bit but you’re right on: I did feel frustrated and somewhat baffled last week.” I then asked, “If we have a similar session in the future what do you advise? What is the best question I could pose?”
“Why don’t you just ask me what happened during the last week that made me feel bad?” she replied.
I followed her suggestion and posed the question: “What happened to make you feel bad this last week?” It led to a productive discussion of disappointments and slights she had experienced the past few days. Toward the end of the hour, I circled back to the beginning and inquired how it felt for her to have been so angry with me. She wept as she expressed gratitude for my taking her seriously, for assuming responsibility for my role in it, and for hanging in there with her. I think we both felt we had entered a new phase of therapy.
The session left me thinking about anger as I rode my bike over the creek toward my home. Though I was satisfied with the way I had handled this incident, I know I have more personal work to do in that area, and I would have been far more uncomfortable had I not liked Brenda so much, and known how hard it was for her to criticize me. I had no doubt, also, that I would have felt far more threatened had my patient been an angry male. I’ve always been uneasy in confrontation, personally and professionally, and have carefully avoided any administrative position that might require it—for example, a chairmanship, committee head, or deanship. Only once, a few years after I had finished my residency, did I agree to be interviewed for a chairmanship—at my alma mater, Johns Hopkins. Fortunately—for me and for them—they selected another candidate for the position. I’ve always told myself that avoiding administrative positions was a wise move because my real strength lay in clinical research, practice, and writing, but I have to admit now that my fear of conflicts, and my general shyness, played a significant role in it.
My wife, knowing I prefer only small social events of four or, at the most, six people, finds it hilarious that I became an expert in group therapy. But, in fact, my experience in leading therapy groups turned out to be therapeutic, not only for my patients but for me as well: it greatly increased my comfort in group situations. And, for a long time, I have felt little anxiety in addressing large audiences. But then, such performances are always on my own terms: I want no part of a spontaneous confrontational public debate: I don’t think quickly in such situations. One of the advantages of old age is that audiences now treat me with great deference: it’s been years, decades, since a colleague or a questioner in the audience has verbally challenged me.
I halt my bike ride for ten minutes to watch the Gunn High School tennis team practice, thinking back to my days on the Roosevelt High School tennis team. I played number six on the six-player team, but was a much better player than Nelson at the number-five slot. Whenever we played one another, however, he intimidated me with his aggressiveness and cursing, and, even more, by his halting play at crucial points and standing still in silent prayer for a few moments. The coach was unsympathetic and told me to “grow up and handle it.”
I continue biking and think of the many attorneys and CEOs I’ve treated who thrive on conflict, and I marvel at their appetite for battle. I’ve never understood how they got to be that way, nor, of course, how I came to be so conflict-avoidant. I think of elementary school bullies who threatened to beat me up after school. I remember reading stories of kids whose fathers taught them how to box, and how I pined for such a father. I lived at a time when Jews never fought: they were the ones who got beaten up. Except for Billy Conn, the Jewish boxer—I lost a wad betting on him when he fought Joe Louis. And then found out, years later, that he wasn’t Jewish after all.
Self-defense was no minor issue during my first fourteen years. My neighborhood was unsafe, and even short trips from home felt perilous. Three times a week I went to the Sylvan cinema, just around the corner from the store. Since each show was a double feature, I saw six films a week, usually westerns or World War II flicks. My parents unhesitatingly allowed me to go because they figured I was safe in the theater. I imagine that as long as I was in the library, at the cinema, or reading upstairs, they must have been relieved: at least for those fifteen to twenty hours each week, I was out of danger.
But peril was always there. I was about eleven and working in the store one Saturday evening when my mother asked me to get her a coffee ice-cream cone from the drugstore four doors down the street. Immediately next door was a Chinese laundry, then there was a barbershop with yellowed pictures of various types of haircuts in the window, next a tiny, cluttered hardware store, and finally, the drugstore, which, in addition to a pharmacy, had a small eight-stooled lunch counter serving sandwiches and ice cream. I got the coffee ice-cream cone, paid my dime (single-scoop cones were a nickel, but my mother always liked a double-decker), and walked outside, where I was surrounded by four tough young white guys a year or two older than me. It was unusual and risky for groups of whites to hang out in our black neighborhood, and generally a sign of trouble.
“Oh, who’s that cone for?” snarled one, a boy with small, dull eyes, a tight face, a crew cut, and a red bandana tied around his neck.
“My mother,” I muttered, looking furtively around for some escape route.
“Your mommy? Well, why not have a taste yourself?” he said, as he grabbed my hand and shoved the cone into my face.
Just at that moment, a group of black kids, friends of mine, turned the corner and walked down the street. They saw what was happening and surrounded us. One of them, Leon, leaned in and said to me, “Hey Irv, don’t you go taking that shit off that jerk. You can handle him.” Then he whispered, “Use that uppercut I showed you.”
Just at that moment I heard heavy footsteps pounding and saw my father and William, his delivery man, running up the street. My father grabbed my hand and yanked me away, back into the safe harbor of Bloomingdale Market.
Of course, my father did the right thing. I would have done the same thing for my son. The last thing any father would want was for his son to be in the center of some interracial street fight. And yet I often look back upon his rescue with regret. I wish I had fought the guy and showed him my pathetic uppercut. I had never stood up to aggressors before, and here, surrounded by friends who would protect me, was the perfect opportunity. The boy was about my size, though a bit older, and I would have felt so much better about myself if I had traded punches with him. What’s the worst that could have happened? A bloody nose, a black eye—a small price to pay for once taking a stand and holding my ground.
I know that adult patterns of behavior are complex and never initiated by a single event, and yet, I persist in believing that my unease in dealing with open anger, my avoidance of confrontation, even heated debates, my reluctance to accept administrative positions entailing confrontation and dispute, all would have been different had my father and William not yanked me out of that fight one night so long ago. But I also understand that I grew up in an environment of fear: iron bars on the windows of the store, danger everywhere, and hovering over us all the story of the Jews of Europe hunted down and killed. Flight was the only strategy my father taught me.
As I describe this incident, another scene seeps into consciousness: My mother and I were going to the movies, and we entered the Sylvan just as the film was about to begin. She very rarely went to the movies with me, especially in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, but she adored Fred Astaire and often went to his films. I wasn’t happy about going with her because she had no manners, was often discourteous, and I never knew what was going to happen. I was embarrassed when any of my friends met her. In the cinema she spotted two seats in a center row and plunked herself down. A boy sitting next to one of the vacant seats said, “Hey, lady, I’m saving this seat.”
“Oy, the big shot. He’s saving a seat,” she answered in a loud voice to all those sitting nearby, whilst I tried to hide by pulling my shirt over my head and covering my face. Just then the boy’s companion arrived and the two of them, scowling and muttering, moved over to a side row. Shortly after the film started I snuck a look at them and the boy caught my eye, shook his fist at me, and mouthed, “I’ll get you later.”
And that was the boy who smashed my mother’s ice-cream cone into my face. Since he couldn’t get back at my mother, he must have remembered and lay in wait for a long time until he could catch me alone. What a double-decker pleasure for him to have learned the cone was meant for my mother—he got us both with a single stroke!
This all sounds plausible and makes for a satisfying narrative. How powerful is our drive to fill gestalts and to fashion neatly composed stories! But was it true? Seventy years later I have no hope of excavating the “real” facts, but perhaps the intensity of my feeling in those moments, the desire to fight and the paralysis, has bound them together somehow. True? Alas, I am now uncertain whether it was truly the same boy and whether the time sequence was correct: for all I know the cone-smashing may have preceded the movie incident.
As I get older it becomes ever more difficult to verify answers to such questions. I try to recapture parts of my own youth, but when I check with my sister and cousins and friends, I’m shocked at how differently we remember things. And in my daily work, as I help patients reconstruct their early lives, I grow increasingly convinced of the fragile and ever-shifting nature of reality. Memoirs, no doubt this one as well, are far more fictional than we like to think.