After living in the clouds with When Nietzsche Wept, I was tugged back to earth by my textbook The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, which was squealing for attention. Now ten years old, it needed an update and a facelift if it was to continue competing with other textbooks. For the next year and a half I felt yoked to the plough as I spent day after day in the medical school library at Stanford reviewing the group research of the past decade, adding relevant new research, and, the most painful part, shaving off older material.
All the while, in the back of my mind, another novel was percolating. On my bicycle rides and during quiet moments before falling asleep, I experimented with plotlines and characters, and I soon began working on a tale I would title Lying on the Couch. I was amused by the double entendre: my book would deal with a lot of lying and a lot of psychotherapy on the couch.
Having completed my apprenticeship as a novelist, I discarded my training wheels and no longer fretted with fitting the characters and events into a certain historically accurate time and place. On this new project I was going to have the pleasure of composing an entirely fictional plotline peopled only by made-up characters, and unless the world is loonier than I imagined, this was going to be fiction that could never have happened. Yet underlying the surreal events of a comic novel, I intended to explore serious and substantial questions. Should we, as the early psychoanalysts insisted, withhold our real selves and offer only interpretations and a blank screen? Or should we instead be open and genuine and disclose our own feelings and experiences to our patients? And if so, what pitfalls might lie in store?
I have written much in the professional psychiatric literature about the overarching importance of the therapy relationship. The mutative force in therapy is not intellectual insight, not interpretation, not catharsis, but is, instead, a deep, authentic meeting between two people. Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking has also gradually arrived at the conclusion that interpretation is not enough. As I write these words, one of the most widely cited psychoanalytic articles in recent years is titled “Non-Interpretive Mechanisms in Psychoanalytic Therapy: The ‘Something More’ Than Interpretation.” That “something more,” referred to as “now moments” or “moments of meeting,” is not too different from what is presented in the article my fictional character Ernest is attempting to write in Lying on the Couch, titled “On In-Betweenness: The Case for Authenticity in Psychotherapy.”
In my own practice I strive continuously for an authentic meeting with my patients, both in group and individual therapy. I tend to be active, personally engaged, and often focus on the here-and-now: rarely does a session pass without my inquiring about our relationship. But how much of his/her own self should the therapist reveal? The vital issue of therapist transparency, hotly debated in the field, is analyzed, dissected, and stretched to its limits in this comic novel.
I have just reread Lying on the Couch for the first time in years and am struck by many things I had long forgotten. First, though the plot is entirely fictional, it contains a great many real events from my life. This is not rare: I once heard Saul Bellow say, “When a novelist is born the family is doomed.” It is well-known that the characters of Bellow’s early life populate the pages of his fiction. I’ve followed suit. About a year prior to writing this novel, a friend of a friend attempted to swindle me by selling me shares of a company that, as I learned later, did not exist. My wife and I gave him $50,000 to invest. Though we soon received very official-appearing certificates of deposit from a Swiss bank, still there was something about him that aroused my suspicion. I took the certificates to a US branch of the Swiss bank and learned that the signatures were forged. Then I called the FBI and informed the swindler that I had done so. Just before my meeting with the FBI, he appeared at my door with $50,000 in cash. This event and this swindler were the inspiration for Peter Macondo in my novel, a con man who preys on therapists.
But it was not just the con man: a great many other acquaintances, events, and parts of myself found their way into the novel. Details of my poker game are there (including caricatures of myself and other players). Because of my poor vision, I’ve stopped playing poker, but to this day when I have lunch with my old poker chums, they refer to one another by the names I had given them in the novel. Also, there is a patient (heavily disguised) who was particularly seductive to me in real life, as well as a sophisticated but arrogant psychiatrist who once supervised me. I also included a friend from my Hopkins days, Saul, who is Paul in the novel. Much of the furniture and art is real, including a glass sculpture Saul made and dedicated to me of a man looking over the edge of a bowl, titled “Sisyphus Enjoying the View.” The list is very long: pet peeves, books, clothes, gestures, my earliest memories, my parents’ history as immigrants, my games of chess and pinochle with my father and uncles—they’re all scattered throughout the novel, including my attempt to kick the grocery-store sawdust from my shoes. I tell a story about the father of a character named Marshal Streider, who is the owner of a small grocery store on Fifth and R Streets in Washington, DC. When a customer enters his store asking for a pair of work gloves, he says they are in the back storeroom, but then he goes out the back door and gallops down the block to the market to buy a pair of gloves for ten cents, and sells them to the customer for thirteen cents. That is a true story told to me by my father, who had owned a store at that address just before I was born.
The detailed account of an analyst being banished from the psychoanalytic institute was loosely based on Masud Khan’s ejection from the British Psychoanalytic Society in 1988. Charles Rycroft, my British analyst, witnessed the event and described it to me in detail. Even the “Smokey the Bear” dream is my own, from the night after Rollo May died. Many of the characters’ names had personal meaning for me—for example, the protagonist’s name, Ernest Lash. While writing about Ernest, who was indeed very earnest, and his seductive patient, I often thought of Odysseus, who had himself lashed to the mast of his ship to escape the lusty calls of the sirens—hence, “Ernest Lash.” Another character, a figure in my fictional psychoanalytic institute, is Terry Fuller, a name I derived from a former student, Fuller Torrey, who became an eminent figure in psychiatry. Marshal Streider, patterned after one of my Johns Hopkins supervisors, strides firmly and staunchly upholds the law (except for one egregious lapse of judgment).
Though I personally champion the idea of therapist genuineness, I decided to present an enormous challenge to Ernest Lash. For reasons explained in the novel, Ernest boldly undertakes an experiment: he will be entirely transparent with the next new patient entering his door. Alas, by sheer novelistic coincidence, Ernest’s next new patient, an attorney, has her own hidden agenda: she, unbeknownst to him, is the revenge-seeking wife of one of Ernest’s patients, and believes that Ernest has persuaded her husband to divorce her. To retaliate, she is planning to seduce and, thereby, ruin him. I’ve never had so much fun writing as when I embarked on this tale about a therapist committed to authenticity encountering a patient committed to entrapment. And writing one of the subplots was even more fun, when I described how the novel’s version of the British Psychoanalytic Society drums out an offending analyst for heretical interpretations and elects to send out a public recall notice—like those sent by automobile manufacturers—to all his patients who had been treated with damaging interpretations.
Several filmmakers have wanted to turn Lying on the Couch into a film. Harold Ramis, the late actor and film director of Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters, and Analyze This, bought the film option, and we had a good deal of contact with one another when he was filming Bedazzled, shot on the streets of San Francisco. Alas, Bedazzled failed at the box office and the film studio refused to finance Lying on the Couch until he first made a surefire big profit movie, Analyze That—a sequel to his highly successful Analyze This. Unfortunately, Analyze That also bombed. Although Harold Ramis continued to purchase film options on the book for several years, he was never able to obtain sufficient financing for the project. I liked Harold Ramis very much and was saddened by the news of his death in 2014.
Another near-life film experience occurred with Wayne Wang, the director of such fine movies as The Joy Luck Club, Smoke, and Maid in Manhattan. He, too, bought the option, but was also unable to find financial backing. Later he made a film called Last Holiday about a woman (Queen Latifah) with a fatal illness and asked me to lead a two-day T-group with the cast in New Orleans to sensitize them to the issues around dealing with a fatal illness. I had a lark working with Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, and Timothy Hutton, all of whom I found refreshingly open, well-informed, serious about their work, and interested in my observations.
Finally, Ted Griffin, a talented screenwriter (Ocean’s Eleven, Matchstick Men), entered the scene, and he has had the film rights for the past several years. Having written a screenplay, he approached actor Anthony Hopkins—one of my screen idols, with whom I enjoyed conversing by phone. Alas, nothing has yet materialized. Moreover, there’s a part of me dreading a film version, which might ignore the serious messages of the novel and focus excessively, perhaps exclusively, on the conning and sexual parts. I now feel a bit embarrassed by the protagonist’s erotic exuberance. My wife, always my first reader, wrote in caps on the last page of the manuscript: “ISN’T THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU WANT TO TELL AMERICA ABOUT YOUR SEXUAL FANTASIES?”