“So, sweetheart,” SAID DR. SAMUELS, PEERING IN AVUNCULAR fashion at Carla over his bifocals and leaning back in the plush recliner behind his desk. “Tell me what’s bothering you.”
As he had made clear at the bookstore a month earlier, Dr. Samuels was not your conventional psychiatrist. He had no use for the medical mumbo-jumbo that many psychiatrists employ to give their work an aura of importance. He did not pretend to arcane knowledge or boast long years of esoteric training. Instead, he presented what he did in straightforward and pragmatic terms. “Life is mostly common sense,” he liked to say, “though sometimes you need a little help with the sense.”
Leonard Samuels had started his practice thirty-five years ago in Cherry Hill. He had come to this suburb of Philadelphia when it had only recently been settled by Jews eager to live outside the confines of the big city. Denied access to the venerable South Jersey towns of Moorestown and Haddonfield, this population had taken root in the intervening space, creating a sprawling suburb with a wide array of services tailored to their tastes and needs. As the residents liked to say, “We have no cherries and no hills, but we do have the best discount shopping in the Delaware Valley, a few good diners, and more synagogues than you can shake a stick at.”
Struggling with the pressures of upward mobility and assimilation, they also had a predictable cornucopia of neuroses. Leonard Samuels, therefore, had his work cut out for him.
Samuels liked to say that he had originally vacillated between a career in medicine and a career in the rabbinate. He had found the perfect compromise, he explained, in the practice of psychiatry, where he could solve problems and pontificate but did not have to answer to a higher authority.
He based his practice on the assumption that he could help solve his patients’ problems because he had similar ones himself. He too had grown up poor and been nagged by an ambitious mother to work hard at school. He too had resented the pressure and the constant criticism (the familiar refrain in response to the 98 percent on the test:“So where’s the other two points?”). But in retrospect, as he reminded his patients, who were in the throes of nagging their kids to death, his mother had been right and the pain he’d suffered had been all for the good. “Look at how well I turned out,” he would say, gesturing proudly to the wood-paneled office. “Sometimes it’s your duty to make your children miserable.”
Because Samuels believed his patients could profit from his own experience, he made no secret of his personal life. On the contrary, flying in the face of psychiatric convention, he flaunted it. One wall of his office was covered with photos of his children and grandchildren, with a section devoted entirely to pictures from their bar and bat mitzvahs. Another wall was decorated with his wife’s neo-Expressionist paintings. (“Had she started earlier, who knows?” he often mused. “She might have been another Picasso or Chagall.”) A third wall contained prized baseball memorabilia. Having grown up in Brooklyn, he had been an avid Dodgers fan as a child, and his subsequent devotion to the Mets was so strong that he was known to tell Yankees fans to go elsewhere. (Now living outside of Philadelphia, he made special allowance for the rubes who rooted for the Phillies.)
To have an established weekly appointment with Dr. Samuels
was highly prized among the cognoscenti of Cherry Hill. Just as area residents believed that an engagement ring should never be less than two carats (“It’s an investment!”), they likewise believed in maintaining a standing appointment with Dr. Samuels (“You never can tell when you might go off the deep end”). Even if the bar mitzvah was over and the problem with the daughter-in-law resolved, who knew when a crisis might hit or a child or husband might need to be set straight about something?
It occurred to Carla, seated in the armchair facing Dr. Samuels, that perhaps she didn’t have the right credentials to be his patient. She didn’t even own a mink coat.
“None of it seems that important,” she said hesitantly in response to his question about what was bothering her. “I’m probably making too big a deal of it.”
“If it bothers you, it’s important,” Samuels said encouragingly. “Just jump right in and get your feet wet!” Part of Samuels’s success was that he viewed a visit to him as a kind of recreational opportunity: “How often do you get to talk about yourself for an hour?” he liked to remind his patients. “Even your mother won’t listen to you for an hour—so take advantage and enjoy.”
“I guess I’m feeling overwhelmed,” began Carla, emboldened by Samuels’s encouraging tone. As she spoke, he motioned with his hand, as though directing a car to back up into a vacant space, and she proceeded more rapidly: “Jeffrey, my ten-year-old, has been showing signs of ADHD, and I’m not sure I want to put him on the medicine. It seems like a drastic step. And Stephanie—that’s my twelve-year-old—has a bat mitzvah coming up and is acting very oppositional. Not that she’s not generally oppositional, but lately it’s been more so. And Mark—that’s my husband—is having difficulties at work. He’s a physician, and the state of medicine being what it is—”
Samuels put up his hand, indicating that he’d heard enough (i.e., the car had made it into the space). It was his operative method to listen for a minute or two and give advice. Most of his
patients appreciated this: “Usually, they make you do all the work,” explained one devotee. “Samuels doesn’t waste your time. He gets the gist and tells you what to do.”
“Okay,” Samuels said now, “I think I’ve got the picture. You’ve got some stress. Stress is normal. The question is: Are you handling it well? And how much of the stress should really involve you? Let’s take a look: First, your son—I’d say, have him come see me. I’ll tell you if he needs to go on the medicine. If he does, it’s not the end of the world. It’ll make life a lot easier for you and he’ll be happier.
“Second, your daughter—she’s oppositional. Nothing new for a twelve-year-old; it comes with the territory. But you need to lay down certain rules. If she deviates, ground her. It’s amazing what grounding can do to get them into shape at that age.
“Third, your husband—that’s really a matter between himself and his profession. He’ll work it out. He’s a physician; you won’t starve. But I’ll also let you in on a secret: A little self-promotion won’t hurt. Look at me.” He pointed to his book prominently displayed on a side table, and to an array of articles with his byline that had been arranged on a bulletin board near the window.
Carla nodded. Dr. Samuels, she could see, had a way of sorting things out. She had sensed the value of self-promotion when she first saw Samuels at his bookstore appearance. Now it came home to her that her husband could do some of the same sort of thing—with her help. The idea of grounding Stephanie for bad behavior and of bringing Jeffrey in for a consultation also seemed like reasonable strategies. She felt better already.
“Is that all?” asked Samuels cheerfully, slapping his hands down on the desk as if to imply that this was small potatoes compared to what he normally saw—a reassuring response in itself.
“Well, there’s the issue of the bat mitzvah dress,” added Carla tentatively. She had wondered whether such a trivial point should be raised in a psychiatric session, but decided to plunge ahead.
“Not a trivial matter at all,” said Samuels, as though reading
her mind. “My suggestion is that you drop the young lady off at the mall once a week and let her look. As the affair gets closer, she’ll find something—otherwise, she can wear what’s in her closet. Let her know that for motivation. Just make clear that it’s not your responsibility to find the dress; it’s hers. And no need to travel too far. You tell her: Find it in the Cherry Hill or the King of Prussia Mall or go without.”
Carla nodded again. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of this herself. (“That’s the beauty of him,” her friend Jill Rosenberg had told her. “He’ll tell you everything you already know, but somehow you need to pay two hundred dollars an hour to really believe it.”)
“How’s your mood?” said Dr. Samuels, leaning forward to inspect Carla more closely over his bifocals. “You look okay to me.” (“He can spot depression a mile away,” Jill had said admiringly. “He had me on antidepressants almost before I came in the door.”)
“I’m not generally depressed. It’s just that lately, with the bat mitzvah and so forth, it sometimes seems like too much.”
“I’ll tell you something,” said Samuels, gesturing to the wall of bar mitzvah pictures in front of him. “I’ve been through it. I’ve seen my daughter go through it. This is a stressful time for any parent. A wonderful occasion, yes—I wouldn’t have it taken away—but not an easy one. Even Mother Teresa would be stressed—not that she had to host a bar mitzvah, but you catch my drift. You seem to be handling things fairly well. Just detach a little bit—recognize that everything will turn out, maybe not the way you want but good enough.
“Okay, let’s review,” said Samuels now, glancing down at his notes and proceeding briskly as he prepared to bring the session to a close: “Bring the boy in and we’ll have him taken care of. Don’t worry so much about your husband, except maybe to give a little push for some creative PR. And believe me, your daughter will find a bat mitzvah dress if she realizes that otherwise she has to wear some shmatta in her closet.”
This was the wrap-up that Dr. Samuels liked to give at the end of each session. “Never underestimate the need for repetition,” he often explained at the monthly workshops he held for therapists who wanted to follow in his footsteps: “Say it, then say it again. Even the bright ones have a hard time remembering.”
“Thank you,” said Carla, genuinely relieved to see her problems swept into a neat pile. “There is one more thing, though,” she faltered, wondering how to best relay the bizarre nature of this last issue. “It involves my mother.”
“Ah!” said Samuels, settling back. Obviously, the mother was the final piece in the puzzle. “Mothers generally pose a problem around the time of the bar mitzvah,” he observed.
“Well, it’s not really that,” said Carla carefully. “My mother was a bit depressed after Dad died, but her spirits improved when she moved in with us. She’s been a real help around the house and very easy to get along with—no trouble at all.”
“That’s a change of pace,” noted Samuels. In point of fact, he had never heard of such a thing before.
“Yes, she doesn’t butt in to our lives at all,” noted Carla. “But lately, she’s been behaving strangely. I suppose you could say she’s delusional. She actually thinks”—Carla paused to give her audience a moment to prepare for this—“she thinks she existed in another life as the girlfriend of William Shakespeare.”
Samuels cocked his head. “That is a new one,” he acknowledged.
“It’s particularly odd, since she presents the situation in a very matter-of-fact way,” continued Carla, her confidence growing as she felt she had interested Samuels in a novel situation. “She seems to believe that this was a past life that she is remembering. She says she knows that it’s unrelated to the life she’s living now.”
“Highly compartmentalized fantasizing,” murmured Samuels, stroking his chin. “Interesting.”
“Yes, and she seems surprisingly happy to remember this past life. It doesn’t distress her in any way. She’s full of anecdotes and
references—in fact, it’s amazing what she’s dredged up that I never dreamed she knew about that period.”
“And it disturbs you to see her so caught up in something that doesn’t involve you?” asked Samuels, peering over his bifocals and (Carla realized uneasily) echoing the thought Margot had caused her to entertain that afternoon.
“Well, yes, I feel upset. It’s as though she wants to create another life that has no connection to the life she’s living.”
“And why should she be so gung ho about the life she’s living?” (Jill had warned that Samuels could sometimes turn on you and side with the opposition—as when he had refused to condemn Josh’s unsupervised trip to the mall and had focused instead on what he called Jill’s “narcissistic overprotectiveness”). “Is there anything so exciting going on in her life right now?” repeated Samuels, peering sternly at Carla over his bifocals.
“No,” said Carla, reflectively, “but she has us—her children and grandchildren. We love her and want her to be part of our lives. And it’s upsetting to think that she’s lost contact with reality. Who knows where it might lead?”
Samuels seemed to consider this for a moment. “Well, I’d say you have two separate issues going on here,” he finally concluded. “One is that your mother may be delusional—certainly a point of concern, especially if it impedes her daily life. The other is your wanting her to make your life the centerpiece of her own. There, the problem lies with you. She has a right to be the center of her own life—and maybe this thing with Shakespeare is a way of allowing her to do that. I’d recommend having her go out more. Find a way for her to meet new people.”
“You’re saying my mother needs a social life?”
“And why not? Being a grandmother isn’t a full-time job. Why do you think Sylvia and I go down to Florida every January?”
“But her references are so bizarre,” protested Carla. “Her story about Shakespeare is so detailed. It’s—embarrassing to hear her go on about it.”
“What harm is it doing? If it’s not hurting her, ignore it. You might ask that she curtail some of the talk in public, out of courtesy to family and friends, but let her indulge in private with you. It probably serves a cathartic purpose. The creative impulse, you know, is wonderful thing.” He motioned to his wife’s paintings on the wall. “It continually takes new and unexpected forms.”
“So now you’re saying that my mother’s stories are some sort of artistic expression?”
“I wouldn’t presume to say anything,” said Samuels, sitting back in his chair and putting his hands up. (It was his philosophy never to push too hard. “I throw out some ideas,” he liked to explain to his therapy workshop students, “but I don’t bully. These people can tell bullying a mile away—most of them are experts at it—so they don’t respond well. I give my opinion, let them think it over, and usually, after they go home and have a good meal, they come around to agreeing.”) “I wouldn’t even discount the fact that she might be telling the truth,” he added mischievously. “Maybe she is the reincarnation of Shakespeare’s girlfriend.”
“Dr. Samuels!” Carla exclaimed, surprised at what she took to be his flip tone.
“If you like, you can bring her in,” he continued, unfazed by her exclamation. “We can book back-to-back with your son. I’d enjoy the opportunity. How often, after all, do I get to meet Shakespeare’s geliebta?”
“Dr. Samuels!” Carla exclaimed again.
But he responded seriously now: “In my profession, you don’t rule anything out. There are, you know, ‘more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.’”