Letter to Psychologist: Lisa Osborne, Ph.D. (1998-1999) 9/23/98

September 23, 1998
3801 Connecticut Avenue, NW
#136
Washington, DC 20008-4530

Lisa Osborne
Community Mental Health Center
North Annex
Washington, DC 20007

Dear Ms. Osborne:

The enclosed computer disc contains an updated version of the autobiographical creative piece, an earlier version of which I have already provided to you. In its latest revision the document contains references to the 19th-century writer, Emile Zola, a key figure in the Dreyfus case. (See file name "BIO-9" at page 18; and "BIO-10" at pages 1, 2, and 11.)

The latest updates are significant with regard to the operation of the repetition compulsion in my mental life. Evidence relating to the operation of the repetition compulsion would tend to show, I think, that my life difficulties are not the product of a lack of ego structure, but rather the product of my attempt to master childhood experiences that I experienced as overwhelming. The evidence also tends to highlight my opportunistic use of a hostile environment to further the operation of the repetition compulsion.

I offer the following chronology:

1. October 1991: My employment with the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld is terminated. All of my job evaluations are above-average or outstanding. My personnel file does not contain a record of any reprimands, or disciplinary action.

2. May 1993: I provide to my treating psychiatrist at the George Washington University Medical Center the first version of what would evolve into my autobiographical writing. The writing contains references to the so-called Dreyfus Affair, which concerned the arrest and conviction of a member of the French General Staff, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, on the charge of selling French military secrets to the German government. Dreyfus was, in fact, innocent. In order to justify the conviction, members of the General Staff later fabricated evidence to show that Dreyfus was guilty.

3. July 1, 1993: I speak with a coworker on the telephone (Patricia A. McNeil) who tells me certain details of my job termination about which I had not previously known. McNeil told me that in the period after the job termination, after I had left the building, my supervisor gathered her employees together to advise that she feared that I might return to the firm to kill her, and that she therefore was arranging to have the lock to the office suite changed. My supervisor's defamatory statements about my potential for violence were not elicited by my own bad acts. (See paragraph 1, above).

4. In January 1994 I begin to write to various federal authorities about my job termination. In the fall of 1994, I begin to use the information McNeil provided to me (in July 1993), relating to the fears of employees at Akin Gump that I was homicidal, in an attempt to provoke federal law enforcement to investigate my job termination. The content of several of the letters provoke criminal investigation of me, instead. Federal law enforcement refuses to investigate my job termination itself.

5. September 1998: The autobiographical writing in its present revision contains references to Emile Zola. Oddly enough, the latest updates have an uncanny fit with the earliest version of the writing, which I first prepared in May 1993, before I had known about my supervisor's defamatory statements about me and before I ever contemplated writing any letters to federal law enforcement.

My act of writing letters to federal agencies, letters which suggest that I am violent and which therefore place me at risk of criminal investigation, is intended as a collateral attack on my job termination by Akin Gump. My actions parallel the action of the French novelist Emile Zola in writing a letter to the President of France aimed at reopening the Dreyfus case.

Zola hoped that his act of writing a libelous letter to the President would in all likelihood result in his criminal prosecution, which would provide Zola a legal forum to introduce evidence that would clear Dreyfus. Zola was in fact prosecuted, but the court refused to allow Zola to introduce any evidence relating to Dreyfus--that is, the court refused to allow Zola to use his own trial on the charge of criminal libel as a means of attacking the prior conviction of Dreyfus. See Shirer, W.L. The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 at 59-60 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969).

In effect, in my relations with my former employer I am Dreyfus--an innocent party who has been wrongly defamed. In my relations with federal law enforcement I am Zola--an outraged party who places himself at risk of criminal prosecution as a collateral attack on a prior wrong. I believe this material provides important insight into the following operative issues in my personality: guilt, ego differentiation (superego development), my attempts at mastery through repetition, and my opportunistic use of a hostile environment to gratify my unconscious needs.

Of further interest is the role of the repetition compulsion in Zola's own personality. Although it was not until the late 1890's that Zola got involved in the Dreyfus case, his previously written novels center on the issues of social injustice and reform. In the novel The Debacle, written in 1871 (years before the Dreyfus Affair), there is an uncanny foreshadowing of the Dreyfus prosecution: "Oh, how heartbreaking it was, the most guilty ones escaping punishment and flaunting their impunity in broad daylight while the innocent rotted in the ground." Zola, E., The Debacle, Tancock, L.W., trans., at 502 (1871; reprint New York: Penguin Books, 1972). The evidence suggests that Zola himself used the Dreyfus case opportunistically to further his own unconscious needs.

Incidentally, the Dreyfus case was the subject of a movie made in the 1930's titled The Life of Emile Zola; it is available at many video stores. One of my letters expressly quotes a line from the movie. A letter dated June 30, 1997 that I wrote to Governor Tom Kean of New Jersey (attached) contains the line "I was later secretly certified insane. . . ." I intentionally borrowed that line from the movie. In a courtroom scene depicting the trial of Zola, one of Zola's lawyers asks a member of the French General Staff: "Isn't it true that you had a perfectly sane intelligence officer certified insane when he threatened to expose you?" (That line in my letter to Governor Kean was intended as a secret expression of irony).

Sincerely,

Gary Freedman