The Wish to See & the Wish Not to See
Oedipus put out his own eyes, remember. The wish to see is countered by an equally powerful wish not to see.
JOHN RITCHIE PURNELL
“You look sad today, Steve.”
I bristled.
“I can see it in your eyes.”
Oh, for Christ’s sake, I thought. This guy can read me like a book.
John and I were meeting for coffee at a café around the corner from the church. He was sitting across from me at a small table, leaning in close.
I slid my chair back and changed the subject.
Okay, yes, I was sad, for Christ’s sake. Okay, yes. Okay, of course, he was right. But, in truth, I wasn’t even aware of the sadness when I went into the café. It was just the water in which I swam in those months after Uncle Bill died. But now that John had reflected it back, I paid closer attention for a moment. Yes, there it was. The heaviness around my eyes. The dull ache, and the leaden feeling in my gut.
Shit. On that particular morning, I wanted the grief to be over. I was a healthy twenty-nine-year-old, not some sad old man. This wasn’t right.
John Purnell had a particular sensitivity to sorrow, so naturally he could read sorrow in a friend’s face. But unlike me, John seemed to have no shame about his sorrow. This amazed me. The guy had no fight with it. He talked about his own sadness right out loud—talked about his sorrow in not having a partner in life, in not having someone to love every day. (He once wrote to me—in a letter that I still keep on my desk—that he longed more than anything else, to be “in daily nearness to love.”) He talked about his sorrow at not having children. Heirs. Grandchildren. Sometimes I felt embarrassed for him—being so open about his sadness. Wasn’t he at all embarrassed?
John had shared with me that sometimes his sorrow slid into real depression. I remember his describing one such depression that had gone on for months—and I always recall the dramatic way in which it had lifted. Actually, the Pope had lifted it.
I was fascinated with the story, because it gave me an insight into the depths of John’s faith. Pope John Paul II was visiting Boston, and had stood up on the Boston Common to say his grand papal mass for the throngs. John was standing nearby, deep in prayer and apparently in a kind of trance, when the Pope declared (“as if,” said John, “directly to me”), “The Pope loves you.” John described being lifted up on a wave of well-being. “The Pope loves you.” In that instant, John said, he felt entirely at peace. His depression lifted. He had had a healing. I was skeptical of miracle cures, and I didn’t really believe in the Pope. But still.
On this morning, though, the grief stuff was just pissing me off. “John, can’t we talk about something happy?”
“No,” John shook his head, “that doesn’t work.” He seemed very sure about this. “I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you have to feel it. You have to be with it.”
Be with it?
Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. In my family of origin, sorrow—of which there was so very much—was anathema. It was seen as shameful, something to be hidden. You must put on a good face. How often had my mother said to me in a singsong voice that even now I wince to remember, “You’ve got to ac-centuate the positive. E-liminate the negative. Latch on to the affirmative. Don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.”
Damn. Could she have really said that without irony? This teaching was not my mother’s finest hour. Because: What about my gut-wrenching sadness? What about hers? What to do about our pain? Hide it? But hide it where? Even as a boy, when I read the newspaper, I read the obituaries first—and with a great deal of fascination. What about that? Did she ever notice?
Strangely, at that very post–Uncle Bill, grief-stained moment in my life, in addition to John, I was being exposed to another great man who was telling me to “be with” my sorrow. Jeesh.
Elvin Semrad was a training psychiatrist at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the president of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. He was a giant in the world of psychiatry, and one of the most important teachers of his era. He was a mentor to a whole generation of brilliant psychotherapists—a gaggle of therapists who had recently become my own mentors. (I was in graduate school then at Boston College, and doing my internship at Cambridge City Hospital, a Harvard teaching hospital where Semrad’s influence was enormous, and where he was a constant presence through his many students.)
Semrad believed strongly that most of us flounder upon the shoals of grief more than any other emotion, and that we therefore never really learn how to grieve our many inevitable—and necessary—losses. This is a problem, he said, because it makes it impossible for us to move on from our lost love objects. He often said: “When people are having trouble loving currently, it’s because they have an old love that they’ve never given up.” I had no idea, at the time, how pertinent that was to my own situation.
“Sorrow is the vitamin of growth,” said Semrad once in a training session. What? He persisted: “People grow only around sadness. It’s strange who arranged it that way, but that’s the way it seems to be.”
Semrad was particularly insistent on this point, as all of his students would readily agree. “You have to feel the sadness in your body,” he said over and over again to his trainees. “Your mind won’t help you at all with this. It’s gonna feel like it’ll devour you. But it won’t.”
As John (at church) and Semrad (at school) mirrored this view back to me, I began, for the first time, to actually become aware of and to feel this new creature called sorrow. Not just my grief around Bill, mind you, and not just sadness. But sorrow. Deeper. More penetrating. Subtler.
As I got “permission” to feel my sorrow—even to ennoble it—its colors began to appear in my consciousness. I felt places inside myself that had evidently been in cold storage for years. The process was all-consuming for an entire year of my life. I was often exhausted. Sometimes sick. Usually regressed. (“It’s gonna feel like it’ll devour you. But it won’t.”) No, this was definitely about way more than Uncle Bill. But what? Was I clinically depressed? Had I been depressed all along? Throughout my entire life, perhaps? Where was the Pope?
At some point during this year, it happened that I was doing a short internship at a Catholic hospital. I would spend hours in the chapel praying (and sometimes falling asleep) instead of seeing patients on the wards, which is what I was supposed to be doing. Once, one of the nuns found me (why do I even now feel shame admitting this?) crying in front of a statue of Mary. She talked with me kindly, though I was afraid she might turn me in to the easily flustered, well-intentioned Miss Harmon, my department head.
Sister Benedicta did not turn me in. Instead, we struck up a friendship. “I love to cry in front of the Lord,” the seventy-nine-year-old nun said to me, reassuringly. “It will be our secret.” Well, okay. I was in.
Sister Benedicta taught me how to pray in front of the Divine Mother—how to pray the Catholic rosary beads (to which she introduced me) with a kind of rhythmic saying of the phrases. “Don’t worry if you don’t believe all of them. Just say them.” As it happened, of course, I didn’t believe any of them. But it was comforting to say them, especially with her. She and I met in secret over the coming months to say the rosary together. I never told anyone at all about this, not even David.
Strangely, those tears shed with Sister Benedicta also felt sweet somehow. I felt washed clean, as people will so often say after a good cry. I felt something else, too. I felt, well, real. So very real.
Everything becomes more real when you cry. Have you noticed this? I found that connecting with my sadness was a way to touch those loved ones I’d already lost: Bill, Grandma, a raft of great-grandmothers and -aunts and -uncles. The grief was in a funny way the most real thing I had left of them. I touched them through the grief, the sorrow, the broken heart. Remember Dr. Buie’s second self-maintenance function: feel the realness of experience. Well, I felt most real, in those days, when I was just outright bawling.
In the first year of my friendship with John, I began to intuit that there was some big chunk of my story locked away from even my own mind, some narrative that would explain why grief had overtaken my life. I would reach for it in prayer, in quiet moments, or in jogs along the ocean near our home—and almost feel it. I would get hints of this locked-away remembrance in dreams. But it stayed just out of reach.
I had a recurring dream about David’s and my dog, our beautiful-but-always-frightened Shetland sheepdog named Frisbie (named Frisbie after my Grandfather, Oliver Frisbie Crothers). In this dream, Frisbie was locked away in the attic. I had forgotten him, and I had forgotten to give him water. I regularly awoke with a start from this dream—terrified, shaking.
What did it mean? Well, the “Frisbie” in the dream was obviously me. (I had already learned this much about dreams in graduate school, for God’s sake.) “Reexperience the dream as if you were Frisbie,” I knew my instructor would say. “What is it like from his point of view?” That little exercise absolutely blew me up. I adored Frisbie. How could I abandon him to the attic? And leave him without water?
The explanation slowly dawned: There was some part of myself locked away. Hidden. Forgotten. Exiled, and left to die of thirst.
I had a recurring dream, too, of being in the cavernous basement of our triple-decker house in Dorchester and finding there a secret, closed door. A locked door. A door I couldn’t get through. I knew (as one knows these things in dreams) that there were vast rooms on the other side of that door, rooms that I had not explored. What was in these rooms? The door itself was huge. I can see it even now in my mind’s eye: It was a whitewashed, antique, pre-Revolutionary door, like one I had seen in a museum.
So what did this mean? I was living in only half of my house? Why? Who had the key to the door? What was in the other half?
I went to John with this dream one Saturday morning.
“Yes. You locked yourself out of that part of your house,” said John.
He reminded me of Freud’s principal insight: the wish to see is countered by an equal and opposite wish not to see. “Oedipus put out his own eyes, remember,” John reminded me. “You locked yourself out.”
We are now at a tricky part in the journey of psychological maturation. Indeed, it is so tricky that many people never make it through this phase. Many never even begin it. Carl Jung called it “the Night Sea Journey.” The Night Sea Journey: daring to go down into the dark basement, to search for and find the key to that mysterious door, to enter the ancient abandoned rooms.
There is, said Dr. Jung, only one way to accomplish the Night Sea Journey. There is only one slim chance to get through that door. One must have a guide to make it successfully through this dark territory, this cavernous and endless underground. One must have a guide and a companion: A wise man. A shaman. A wise woman. An elder. Perhaps a Divine guide, even: Krishna, Christ, Mohammed, Moses. One must have a trusted friend who is closer than close.
And then, Jung gives us the kicker: that friend is, in fact, the very door.
Christ himself said it: “You must go by way of the narrow door.” And then he followed it up with the shocker: “I am the door,” he said. What did he mean? How can a person be a door?
Just this. The only way into these rooms is through a particular kind of relationship, a new kind of relationship that has at its core a powerful new quality: a mutual and intense interest in truth, in seeing clearly, in seeing how things really are.
An interest in truth! Semrad said it best: “Any patient who is not interested in the truth—and I mean vitally interested—will never recover. This patient I cannot help.”
Where will we find this new kind of friend? This Seer? Where will we find a truth teller who cares enough to be the very door, and to take the journey with us?
This is a mystery. All I know is that this friend seems to arrive when we need him. John had arrived just in the nick of time. John the mirror. John the guide. Lewis to my Clark. And we had a long trek ahead of us, with that mysterious locked door beckoning in the distance.
And so we return to the idea of mirroring.
Consider this: There are parts of our physical bodies that we will never see directly no matter how long we live. No matter how we try, for example, we cannot directly see the small of our back. Indeed, throughout a long life we will never see this and other parts of our very own bodies. Or, that is to say, we will never see them without the help of a mirror.
Just as there are parts of our bodies that we cannot see without a mirror, likewise, there are parts of our psyche, our self, that we will never see directly—that, indeed, like the small of our back, we will never see without a mirror.
And what kind of mirror is it that can reflect back to us our own hidden psyche? Only one kind. A human mirror.
Every now and then in the course of life—but not often—a friend steps forward who is capable of being a powerful mirror. John was such a mirror for me. He and the church community at All Saints—together—provided me with the richest mirroring environment I had yet experienced in my young life. And, as it happened, it was an environment that highly valued the truth. It even said so at the front of the church: Seek ye the truth and the truth itself shall set you free. Yes, it’s a fact: Not all churches value the truth. Not even most, perhaps. But this one did.
Seek ye the truth.
It may set you free.