Schizoid Personality Disorder: Between Two Worlds--The Encapsulated Self

Between Two Worlds:
The Encapsulated Self

Marye O’Reilly-Knapp

Abstract

This article explores the nature of the schizoid process, in which withdrawal serves to protect the individual in the face of psychological collapse. Someone who uses schizoid defenses for survival fears living in relationship and splits off from both the external world of experiences and the inner self. Caught between external and internal conflicts, the person may withdraw into autistic encapsulation, a primitive method of protection, and life is endured in a state of isolation, ambivalence, and confusion. This article considers how the schizoid condition may manifest as dissociative and autistic states, and a fourth pattern of insecure attachment is introduced. Case vignettes are used to illustrate the phenomenological experiences of the schizoid’s unspoken and sequestered world and to identify how contact and the methods of inquiry, involvement, and attunement are used in an intensive therapeutic relationship.

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In the schizoid condition, a person lives an isolated and insulated existence with the outer world cut off and the inner world compartmentalized. This invisible fortress, as it was described by Bettleheim (1967), severely restricts the person’s contact with others and reinforces ideas that are self-generated and based on fantasy. Participation in living is seen as threatening, so others are only tolerated in order to survive. For schizoid individuals, the emergence of the self was arrested in childhood, and the self is now maintained in an encapsulated state that supports the integrity and continuity of a self, however limited and confined this may be.

Understanding how the schizoid condition develops requires examining early stages of development, formation of the script system, and the impact of relationships on the organization and consolidation of a sense of self and self with others.

In the earliest years, experience is known and organized in terms of sensation or the body ego. The very spirit of the infant is experienced in felt body experiences and the early relationship with the primary caregiver. Within that relationship, a sense of interrelatedness evolves in which the infant experiences a “me.” When the child’s earliest experiences consist of impingements and threats, with no one around to offer protection or comfort, and subsequent life experiences reinforce the world as dangerous and undependable, a large part of the person’s potential for fully experiencing the self is affected. Shut out of awareness, fundamental parts of self-states (states of “me-ness”) are stored as encapsulated mental structures that preserve the integrity and the continuity of a subjective sense of self. Archaic fixations—those parts of childhood experiences that have not been integrated—are also closed out of awareness as dissociative states.

What is required in a therapeutic relationship so that the uncommunicable, walled-off parts of the schizoid client can be spoken, heard, and understood? And, at the same time, how can the integrity and consistency of the client be maintained so that self-emergence is facilitated? These two questions, along with a description of the schizoid world as dissociative and autistic, are the central subject of this article.

As transactional analysts, we are in a unique position to work with both the intrapsychic and interpersonal components of a self hidden from the world and even from the person himself or herself. We understand the formation of ego states (Berne, 1961), the script system (Erskine & Zalcman, 1979), and the theory and methods of an integrative transactional analysis (Erskine, Moursund, & Trautmann, 1999), all ofwhich support an in-depth, relational psychotherapy. I find that an effective way to reach the withdrawn, isolated part of the person is to use Berne’s archaic Child ego state construct, a script system analysis, and the methods of inquiry, attunement, and involvement—the last of which are central to integrative psychotherapy as developed by Erskine and Trautmann.

Splits in the Self: Constructs from

Fairbairn and Guntrip

In describing schizoid withdrawal, object relations theorists Fairbairn (1952) and Guntrip (1968/1995) suggested that the ego splits into four parts. Fairbairn described two splits. In the first, there is the central ego in touch with the outer world and another part of the ego that withdraws into the inner world. The second split occurs when the withdrawn ego splits into the libidinal ego and the antilibidinal ego. As the central ego desperately tries to cope with the outer world, the needs and wants of the child (libidinal ego) are obstructed by a persecutory ego (antilibidinal ego). The inner conflict created between needs desired and needs diminished or discounted leaves the intrapsychic domain in confusion and turmoil. When asked what they need, these schizoid individuals usually answer, “I don’t know” or “It really does not matter.”

Guntrip added a third, ultimate split of the libidinal ego into the oral ego and the regressed ego. This then is the dilemma of the schizoid position:

The primitive wholeness of the ego is now lost in a fourfold split, a depleted Central Ego coping with the outer world; a demanding Libidinal Ego inside persecuted by an angry Antilibidinal Ego; and finally a Regressed Ego which knows and accepts the fact that it is overwhelmed by fear and in a state of exhaustion, and that it will never be fit to live unless it can, so to speak, escape into a mental convalescence where it can be quiet, protected, and be given a chance to recuperate. (Hazell, 1994, p. 178)

A person who has split off parts of the self has lost perspective on the outer world as well as on inner experience. Ego formation becomescompromised. Erskine (1997) described how a part of the self becomes lost; I characterize it as the hidden self. In fact, the withdrawn part of the person is both lost and hidden.

Marie came to treatment because she was depressed and felt that she was alone and isolated. She reported that she always did things herself because there was never anyone there to help her. She said she felt like she was invisible when growing up. When asked what she wants or needs she has “no idea.” She experiences herself as “frozen in time and space.”

Between Objects: Withdrawal and

Dissociation as Defenses

With the schizoid defense there is no relationship with another, no connection even with oneself. In working with people who use the schizoid condition as a protective position, I observe that there is not only a primitive withdrawal (e.g., to an autistic state of being), but also a dissociative defensive stance used to protect the continuity of existence. The ability to separate experiences from awareness, to use dissociation when the self is being threatened, allows the individual to escape from perceived danger. Withdrawal, as well as separation from internal and external experiences, becomes the shield against overpowering circumstances.

In a study of 12 infants whose mothers were severely depressed, Fraiberg (1987) observed states of physiological shutdown in which withdrawal led to immobilization and freezing. Similarly, with schizoids, retreat into isolation and compartmentalization of unintegrated experiences allow them to continue to exist in a defensive system marked by continual vigilance, confusion, and solitude. Attempts to connect, followed by withdrawal from others and even the self, keep the person in perpetual isolation, revoking external object relations and living as what Guntrip (1968/1995) characterized as a “detached spectator” (p. 18).

Schizoid individuals withdraw from internal objects that are disturbing and powerful. They may find temporary relief in the encapsulated isolation, a place in which to rest from the exhaustion and intensity of both internal and external upheaval. However, this farthest andextreme withdrawal is so remote that the person is totally cut off: Wants, needs, and demands are unknown. Primitive barriers keep the person isolated and lost even from the self.

My premise is this: In the schizoid condition, the person lives in a world of isolation created by withdrawal from others; the person also lives in a matrix of unintegrated life experiences, while at the same time attempting to cope with the real world. He or she lives between—suspended as it were—because there is no sense of where to settle and what to call “me.” The withdrawal, along with the dissociated parts of the self, remains compartmentalized. For example, in recounting her autistic state, Williams (1993) described living in a world of perpetual blindness, deafness, and muteness even though she could see and hear and had the ability to speak. She used her withdrawal and dissociative states for protecting and sustaining her life. Such an autistic encapsulation is a protection of the child, and when maintained into adulthood, it constitutes a fixated, protective dynamic in the Child ego state. Being able to identify ego states, and especially Child ego states, has helped me to work with this early archaic position and to deal with the primary process that is inherent in the schizoid condition.

Understanding and appreciating Winnicott’s (1988) work on impingements has also been useful in working with schizoid individuals. One way to deal with an impingement is to try to get away from the disruption or shock because it is overwhelming. If there is no one to soothe or comfort, then another solution is attempted. It appears that the autistic encapsulation comes about because the world is too much, so the person retreats into a space described by clients as “nothingness,” “a black hole,” “a shell,” “frozen,” and “not belonging to the world.” Khan (1974) reported a client who described herself as “living in a blanket” (p. 142). One of my own clients wrote, “The pain is too much; I want it to go away. I can make it go away because I go away, even from me.”

For such individuals there can be little connection to the real world because there is no way to connect even with their own sense ofwho they really are. Fantasy supersedes reality. The world becomes dangerous, with no one to support, validate, or normalize thoughts and feelings. The norm becomes precarious attachment, at best, and most often avoidance of others. Such withdrawal to a fixated Child ego state enables the individual to cope; however, these adaptations reinforce archaic responses rather than enable the evolution of the self and new possibilities for dealing with problems. Often these individuals report feeling like an “it,” and they project this sense of being an object onto others, expecting to be treated in return as an object rather than a person.

In summary, the works of Fairbairn, Guntrip, Bettleheim, Khan, Ogden, and Winnicott support my conclusion that autistic encapsulation is the psyche’s most primitive form of organization and the earliest form of withdrawal. This withdrawn existence as a protection is at the core of the schizoid condition. Also at the core are the developmental fixations and the dissociative states that reinforce the withdrawal. These are discussed in the next part of this article.

Detachment and Encapsulation:

The Hidden Self

As a result of recent developmental research, we now know that the infant is a distinct, active participant in his or her environment (Cassidy & Shaver, 1999; Marrone, 1998; Stern, 1985). We also realize that for healthy development to proceed, babies need the presence of a loving mother figure who helps orient the baby to the world and eventually to his or her own being. As Bettleheim (1976) wrote: “The infant must first become important to a human being he can influence and who therefore becomes important to him” (p. 229). Mutual influence facilitates development by giving to the baby a sense of who “me” is. Through the infant’s actions and the appropriate responses from a caring other, the baby is invited to move out into the world with a beginning awareness of his or her self and a connection to others in the environment. In contrast, someone with a schizoid defense has no perception of invitations to be in theworld and with others. Within the schizoid structure the splitting keeps the need for contact and connection with others out of awareness.

Work on attachment may help us to understand how the isolation and detachment from others endures in the schizoid compromise. (The compromise involves remaining suspended between desired contact with others and withdrawal from others.) In developing his theory of attachment, Bowlby (1958, 1969, 1973, 1988) identified affectional bonds as the basis for the growth of a secure and self-reliant personality. When there is separation, threat of separation, or no response to a need for attachment, the child first protests by crying and moving his or her body in an attempt to recover the mother. The child is not only angry, but anxious. If there is no response, the child realizes that no one is going to come and he or she becomes sad and quiet. Exhausted and left alone, the child ultimately detaches from the situation and even from his or her own sense of being. With cumulative trauma (Kahn, 1974), in which there are breaches in the mother’s role and perhaps also trauma involving major boundary impingements, detachment may be one of the primary components for survival and coping. Responsiveness from another, usually a preferred other, is the reciprocal response that is needed when needs are activated. When a responsive caretaker is missing, detaching from the needs and wants may become the norm.

As Marie went back to her early years she began to realize how depressed her mother had been. Marie remembers when she was very small being told by her mother to “go to your father” when she asked for her mother’s help. She went to her father and was abused. She separated herself from everyone. She separated herself from the abuse memories by pushing them out of awareness. With no one there, she disowned her wants and needs.

As the child becomes detached, needs and desires from infancy through adolescence are solidified or frozen in time. Affect cannot be modulated and integrated. No sense of being a self can exist when internal and externalexperiences are perceived as chaotic; the wholeness of the ego states is lost, and the withdrawn, regressed part of the individual lies encapsulated. In his description of impingement on the child’s boundaries, Winnicott (1988) illustrated through his drawings the infant’s return to a state of “isolation in quiet” (p. 128) in order to gain some sense of being alive. For her part, Fraiberg (1987) described a “conservative withdrawal” after flight from threat (p. 200). This primitive isolated place is what sequesters the person in the withdrawn, schizoid position and protects a sensitive, vulnerable state of being from internal and external disturbances.

However, maintaining this protective position inhibits activity and has a profound effect on mastery and self-efficacy. A system of organizing experiences is constructed to avoid the feelings and memories of life experiences. An armor of detachment and indifference, along with withdrawal surrounded by an autistic barrier, places the person in a hidden world in which fantasy runs rampant and overwhelming feelings are the norm. Basic needs and wants become lost in a massive psychic withdrawal, and relationships are dismissed because what is most needed is also what is most feared. The person is left suspended between both internal and external world encounters with no real relationship with either. The inner world consists of object relations filled with fantasies and dreams and a shell created by primitive isolation; with regard to the external world, the person is uninvolved and neither wants another nor has any expectations of help from another. It is as if the person cannot stay in either place and ends up lost, frightened, and alone. Cut off from relationships, there is no authentic sense of self. The experience of self-loss is considered to be “the result of an intersubjective catastrophe in which sustaining relations have been broken down at their most basic level” (Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997, p. 55).

The Fixated Child Ego State

One of my intentions here is to help clarify some of the confusion that exists about archaic ego states, fixated defensive processes, and thepsychological neglect in trauma. It is useful for transactional analysts to consider Fairbairn’s and Guntrip’s levels of splitting in working with the archaic Child ego state. Berne (1961) stated that “the child includes an archaic Parent, an archaic Adult, and a still more archaic Child representing a still earlier ego state to which under stress it may return” (p. 301). Withdrawal as a protective procedure was described by Winnicott (1988) when he illustrated the infant’s return to a state of “isolation in quiet” in order to regain some sense of being alive. So it is with Guntrip’s model of splitting, which details an early preverbal withdrawal. Berne’s archaic Child contains a primitive state of being that becomes a place to maintain life; this seems identical to the considerations of Guntrip and Winnicott. The massive withdrawal, a temporary reprieve, becomes a way of life—an aspect of the life script. In transactional analysis, the script patterns of isolation, withdrawal, and splitting need to be considered when doing script analysis. Beliefs, feelings, desires, fantasies, behavioral patterns, and reinforcing memories are the focus of treatment in a therapeutic, relationship-oriented, integrative psychotherapy (Erskine & Moursund, 1988; Erskine & Zalcman, 1979). In the withdrawn and hidden place there is only existence, with no true sense of self and no sense of self with another. The person remains uninvolved, unintegrated, and lives in quiet desperation. Patterns of withdrawal and dissociation comprise the schizoid condition.

The “Between” Space

An intensive psychotherapy is needed to affect the childhood core in individuals manifesting schizoid structures. Uncovering the conflicts underlying the problem, understanding the unconscious material, and creating a relationship are important in reaching the core of the Child ego state and its archaic content. Effective therapy with these clients requires working with both the hidden, sequestered part of the person’s being and the unintegrated historical experiences. It involves understanding the unconscious emotional conflicts, the unmet needs, and the loss ofrelationship. These individuals come to know and understand their experience through contact with their unmet needs and internal conflicts within the therapeutic relationship. Both the here-and-now relationship with the therapist and regression to stages of fixation and dissociation provide the path for unfreezing the early ego formation and the unfolding of a self. This is not an easy task, nor is it easy to put into words. For both client and therapy, the therapeutic process is unique to the relationship, and so it varies from moment to moment. Theory and technique are used as a guide, with the relationship as the medium.

The theory and methods I use derive from an integrative psychotherapy approach (Erskine & Moursund, 1988; Erskine, Moursund, Trautmann, 1999). For those struggling with schizoid symptoms, the therapeutic relationship provides the contact-in-relationship that facilitates healing and the emergence of the withdrawn, lost self. Through gentle inquiry, the person’s subjective experiences can be explored, historical content examined, ways of coping understood, and the vulnerability of a hidden, frightened self supported. The therapeutic relationship becomes the matrix in which meaning and affective memories can be constructed so that the person’s narrative can be better understand and integrated. Cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioral components are analyzed through inquiry into the person’s phenomenological, historical, and script systems.

The ultimate purpose of the relational space created by the client and the therapist is to provide a place in which the client can reorganize an internal sense of being and emerge from isolation and historical detachment. Winnicott (1958) first described this place as “potential space” (p. 54); he identified this intersubjective field as an intermediate area of experiencing in which client and therapist work with the client’s repetitive patterns of feelings, thoughts, actions, and sensations. What is unknown and unthought becomes known and understood, what is disavowed and alienated becomes connected to feelings and sensations, and in this process, actions and behaviors arerecognized.

In the reorganization of the personality, therapeutic interventions that deal with regression must be considered.

In one session Marie’s finger was barely moving as she laid curled up in her withdrawn “nothingness.” I reached out and with the tip of my finger touched the tip of her finger. She responded by curling her finger against mine and increasing the skin-to-skin pressure. Contact was made.

In such situations, a secure foundation forms out of contact with another who is present, attentive, and responsive to the person’s wants and needs. Such merger or attachment allows for the feeling of one-with-the-world that may evolve into an immersion in relationship in which interpersonal involvement is sought and received. Clearly, relational needs are not present only in childhood; “they are components of relationship that are present every day of our lives” (Erskine & Trautmann, 1996, p. 322). In relationship we engage with others; in a secure relationship, spontaneity, flexibility, and intimacy can be exhibited, and each person can be who he or she is.

Patterns of Insecure Attachment

From our earliest attachments, we form a secure or insecure base. When relationships are not predictable and one’s sense of being is threatened, then uncertainty can result, and the child experiences that the sought-after relationship is sometimes there and sometimes not. This is called ambivalent attachment. A second type of insecure attachment, avoidant attachment (Bowlby, 1973), is characterized by minimizing the need for connection such that the child does not expect the other to be present or responsive. A third pattern of insecure or anxious attachment—disorganized attachment (Marrone, 1973)—has also been identified. In these cases the person’s life narrative is forgotten or confused, as seen in dissociative disorders (Barach, 1991; Liotti, 1992), and connection with the attachment object is haphazard.

I propose a fourth pattern of insecure attachment, which I call “isolated” attachment.” In this pattern, relationships with others are notsustained in the representational system of the psyche. Internalized objects are exterminated by a barrier or shell. Cut off from people and the world, cut off from his or her needs and wants, the person withdraws so far into “nothingness” that no one is there, and even the sense of one’s being is nullified. This annihilation of the sense of self, of one’s own personhood, makes this pattern of attachment different from ambivalent, avoidant, or disorganized attachment; with isolated attachment there are no objects, no relationship at all. The person may take on the appearance of disinterest, indifference, and/or disdain and seem unapproachable or unreachable.

Methods of Dealing with the Encapsulated

Self in Therapy

Because of the extreme isolation and annihilation of self and others that characterize those with schizoid disorders, therapy with such individuals needs to respectfully and consistently support the client’s unique position, deal with his or her motivation and the need for contact, and take into account intrapsychic processes such as ego states and life script. I have found the following methods to be particularly useful in this work.

Contact with the withdrawn ego state. Providing a safe place for the emergence of the self and the establishment of a therapeutic bond is primary in therapy with severely withdrawn individuals. A major premise of integrative psychotherapy is that humans are relational and that the need for relationship is a primary motivating factor. The way we experience relationship is through contact, both internally and externally (Erskine & Trautmann, 1996). By making and being aware of contact and disruptions to it, the fixations and withdrawal that are part of the schizoid person’s psychic system and the relationship with the therapist can be analyzed. What has been imbedded in a history of helplessness, disorganization, and the threat of disintegration of the person’s being can be carefully uncovered and understood in the context of today’s life experiences. In working at the boundaries of hidden self—but one that is being invited into the world—the schizoid dilemma is revealed: to stay inside orto surface into the world. How the individual, with the therapist’s support and encouragement, can move from a position of avoidance of contact to connection with others becomes a major focus of the therapeutic work. Inquiry into the schizoid experience will help the person recognize: (1) the existence of withdrawal; 2) the significance of interruptions to contact through withdrawal; (3) the use of withdrawal as a coping strategy; and (4) the vulnerable self, hiding and lost to contact.

The withdrawn space of encapsulation and the loss of relationship in the withdrawal need to be understood as an attempt to resolve internal and external conflicts experienced in the past.

Marie silently walked into my office and sat down on the couch. She withdrew into that empty and private space; she became more distant. I have often sat with her, usually in silence, honoring the withdrawal. Out of fear she withdraws and out of intense loneliness she reconnects.

Involvement. Involvement has been described as the therapist’s willingness to be affected by the client, a reciprocal affective response from the therapist, a sensitivity to the client’s developmental level, a commitment to the client’s welfare, and an appropriate therapeutic relationship (Erskine, 1993; Erskine, Moursund, & Trautmann, 1999). In therapy with severely withdrawn individuals, the therapist must have the capacity and willingness to enter into a merger with the client and to remain committed to the therapeutic relationship. In relation to schizoid withdrawal, involvement as a therapeutic method pertains to: (1) acknowledging the existence of withdrawal: “You have this withdrawal . . .”; (2) validating the importance of the withdrawal: “There are important reasons for your withdrawal”; (3) normalizing the withdrawal: “This was a way for you to maintain your self”; and (4) using the therapist’s attuned responses: “I am here with you.”

Involvement encourages acknowledging both the client’s internal process and the relationship with the therapist. This is crucial with schizoids because encapsulating reactions result when“attention has been deflected away from the objective world . . . in favor of a subjective, sensation dominated world which is under [the person’s] direct control” (Tustin, 1986, p. 25). Moving from the intrapsychic to the interpersonal realm allows the client to be heard, seen, and understood by another (the therapist) and to bring into consciousness the “black hole” or “shell” of disconnectedness. Finding points of contact and sharing the therapeutic space empowers the client to move out of the frozen, autistic shell. One client related to me that he had never before let anyone know about his hidden place; he was afraid if he did he would be labeled crazy and locked away just as his sister had been.

As clients begin to deal with their protective defenses, they will, at times, enter the archaic encapsulation. At such points the therapist’s involvement is crucial to the reorganization of internal experience. This merging was described by Little (1981) as “basic unity” or “primary total undifferentiatedness” (p. 109). There is no clear sense of self or other, no distinction between inner and outer stimuli (Pine, 1985). In such cases, there is a merging of client with therapist that is “near absolute” (Kahn, 1974, p. 149). In this fusion the therapist must “be there, alive, alert, embodied, and vital” (p. 157), but without impinging on the client’s experience.

If the therapist is successful, a magical state is created in which the illusion of uninterrupted unity through involvement exists. Such oneness allows the client’s emerging self to grow by interacting with the therapist as a part of the environment. A return to oneness gives the client a chance to find his or her psychic roots and to repair what Balint (1968) described as the “basic fault” (p. 21). One woman described her experience of oneness with the therapist as floating in an ocean—she had no boundaries, no beginning, and no end. From this place she reported she could begin to be in touch with herself.

In the therapeutic relationship the therapist joins with the client in experiencing the affective connections needed for oneness and for emergent self states. The therapist, who is actively involved in the process, invites theclient into relationship by monitoring the client’s experiences and the meaning given by the person to contact with the therapist. For individuals who have walled themselves off through massive withdrawal, as in the schizoid position, the therapeutic relationship can serve as the site of the “undisturbed, harmoniously functioning other . . . [where] ‘twines’ coexists with oneness” (Ogden, 1990, p. 212). What we as therapists perceive of our clients’ signals and our responses to these signals is important for the development and preservation of the therapeutic relationship. While working with a regressed client, body sensations and movements are monitored. The therapist responds with words, motions, or even physical contact to the client’s sounds or movements. As Brazelton and Barnard (1990) wrote, “Human experience originates in empathic forms of actual physical touch” (p. 57). Telling a client that I hear her silent cry or see the tear trickling down her cheek is often enough to let the person know I am there. A touch of a finger tip, as with Marie, permits contact. Focusing on sounds and movements also encourages activity that has been suppressed.

This regressive state, one of basic union as described by Balint, Little, Ogden, Pine, and Tustin, illustrates the essential role of the therapist in being with a client who has returned to the hidden self. A regression-in-relationship permits the client to be in the experience and at the same time to have someone present in a way that is enough, yet not too much. Therapists must be sensitive and respectful of the wants, needs, and fantasies that are awakened for the client in this regressed place and accepting of the intense affects that result without themselves becoming either overwhelmed or withdrawn in response.

There were times in session when Marie would not say a word. Even her body appeared lifeless. At other times she would pace or walk out of sessions in rage or panic. She reported watching me “from deep inside” to see how I responded when she was hopeless, raging, or fearful. She often expressed how important my aliveness was to her because it helped sustain her in her darkest moments. Myacceptance of her, wherever she was, was also important to our connection.

The relationship with a regressed, withdrawn person involves consummate patience, tact, and skill (Tustin, 1986). In his work, Arieti (1974) wrote that the therapist needed perseverance in reaching such individuals. With regression, the therapist needs to be aware of the moments when the client is reaching out of the isolation. Through the intersubjective field, the therapist can monitor his or her own personal experience as well as the client’s meanings and affective experiences in the enactments. Contact with the client is initiated gently through a calm, interested presence. In the shared space between client and therapist, activity and inquiry should be minimized so that the emergence of the withdrawn Child ego state is encouraged.

As the client moves through the psychic agony of loss and desolation and the physical pain of the regression, the therapist takes on a more active role in holding the desperate feelings. The therapist must bear both the client’s intense affects and his or her own countertransference reactions. Regression takes the client and therapist to “areas where psychotic anxieties predominate [and need to be] explored, early experiences uncovered, and delusional ideas recognized and resolved” (Little, 1990, p. 83). (Little is using the British term “psychotic anxieties” to refer to the child’s attempt to deal with a chaotic and unmanageable situation, one that overwhelms sensory perception.) The regression experiences enable the person to give meaning to what has not been reachable by encountering in the presence of another what was unknown and making meaning of these events. The experience of regression and relationship are both needed and dreaded for the client. However, working with the regression as regression-in-relationship facilitates awareness and growth in a person’s sense of being. Once constructed as a closed system, the person begins to slowly open up to the outside world.

Attunement. The method of attunement supports the development of a core self by providing the sensitivity necessary for establishing a basic oneness or basic unity.Erskine and Trautmann (1996) conceptualized attunement as “a two-part process: It begins with empathy—that is, being sensitive to and identifying with the other person’s sensations, needs, or feelings—and the communication of that sensitivity to the other person. . . . It is a process of communion and unity of interpersonal contact” (p. 320). Attunement is also categorized by the degree of resonance and reciprocity needed for contact-in-relationship. With the use of attunement the therapeutic relationship is enhanced by serving as the therapist’s inner guide to inquiry and the meanings that are given to the client’s experiences. Cognitive, affective, rhythmic, and developmental attunement are the major categories that the therapist blends into the therapeutic relationship to enhance contact (Erskine, Moursund, & Trautmann, 1999).

Another way to view attunement is to look at internal disruptions to contact on four levels: existence, importance, resolution, and the self. In this way I have identified four components of the attunement process: affect resonance, attentiveness, mutuality, and openness and sharing.

Affect resonance is the ability to resonate physically. The development of the self was described by Winnicott (1988) as moving from the merging of the infant with the environment, to the strengthening of the body-self as a unit dependent on physical care, to “the dawning of awareness” and recognition of another, and finally to the gradual development of socialization (p. 8). Affect resonance permits the client’s sounds and movements to be perceived and taken in by the therapist. “I hear you” and “I see you”—whether indicated verbally or nonverbally—acknowledge the client’s existence and strengthens his or her body ego. Much as the mother in the infant-mother dyad mirrors her child, the therapist reflects the client’s experiences, and the contact between the client and therapist thus becomes a pattern of relationship. Quiet moments (Pine, 1985) or “stillness at the center” (Little, 1981, p. 125) also facilitate a sense of body identity. In therapy, the strengthening of the body self is accomplished by the physical presence of the therapist and with words from the therapistsuch as: “I am here with you. You are here with me. I am aware of you in the space we are creating. You have an impact on me.” For the person who is withdrawn and lost to self and others, this is the beginning of a long process during which a self can begin to unfold.

Attentiveness or attention to the present and immediate circumstances involves the interest and consideration the therapist gives to contact patterns and responses in meeting the client’s aliveness. The therapist must be attentive in such a way that his or her responses are instantaneous, what Guntrip (1968/1995) called “immediate relatedness” (p. 312). Without this immediacy, the client may again withdraw. The therapist’s attention to the client’s patterns of disconnection and attempts at connection provide information on when contact can be initiated. The therapist must also attend to concrete symbols used by the client so that archaic subjective experiences can be given meaning and understood. The therapist’s inquiry into the client’s symbolic world validates the client’s symbols in the context of the client-therapist relationship and transforms these symbols cognitively into abstract thought. With the therapist’s guidance, the client becomes the interpreting subject (Ogden, 1990) who can generate his or her own thoughts and interpret his or her own symbols. This provides the individual with the necessary cognitive experience to move out of fantasy and imagination into the real world.

Mutuality is another important component in contacting the hidden self. Khan (1989) described “how the clinical process gradually involves two persons in a mutuality of relating and, if things fare well, in time enables them to part from each other in a state of grace and awakened unto their hidden selves” (p. 9). Mutuality focuses on the intersubjective field, that is, a sense of two people working together in a shared, reciprocal relationship. Much like the mother who teaches her young child to balance strong affects by supporting feelings for the child, the therapist absorbs (via countertransference) and embraces the affect through involvement in the client’s experience. Thus the organization of the client’s self comes about through the sustenance and help of another whoresponds to needs, wants, and feelings within the context of shared events. Both client and therapist benefit in a mutuality of relating.

Exploring how the client currently tries to get his or her needs met reveals the protective mechanisms established in relation to earlier objects. The therapist’s interest in and consideration of the client’s needs, wants, and fantasies communicates the therapist’s commitment to and responsibility for the client’s well-being and increases his or her awareness of internal processes. Attention to breaks in the relationship and to therapeutic failures provides the therapist with a guideline about where and when to connect with the client. Disruptions in contact also provide the client with information on how, when, and under what circumstances he or she disengages from contact.

Openness and sharing are also important elements in attunement. Not only does the client open himself or herself to the process, the therapist must also be an active part of the relationship, both candid and sensitive, vulnerable and open. Openness is facilitated by owning capabilities and limitations and acknowledging criticisms. The therapist’s participation in ongoing supervision allows for monitoring the course of treatment and supports an outcome of growth for both client and therapist.

Conclusion

We do not yet understand all the factors involved in psychic healing or psychotherapeutic failure. However, specific factors can be identified that help us as therapists to help clients in their growth and development. One variable that is well documented in the clinical literature is that a consistent and dependable relationship with another provides an organizing experience that facilitates the emergence of the self for the client. The chaos of a “broken line of being” (Winnicott, 1988, p. 135) lessens through the experience of continuity provided by a relationship with a caring and responsive other.

One of my clients, an artist, brought one of his sculptures to a session. On the outside were three pieces of clay that looked like rhinocerosskin, which he described as a protective wall. When he removed the outer shell he held a heart in his hand—his broken heart—which he had been able to uncover in the therapeutic relationship. Dealing in therapy with his isolation, withdrawal, dissociation, and developmental stages of fixation allowed him to reclaim himself. This illustrates how working with the dissociative parts of the schizoid position is not unlike working with dissociative identity disorder; both require integrating fragmented, compartmentalized experiences.

The secret citadel, described by some clients as a bunker or a fortress, is a survival adaptation, a compromise between isolation and commitment to relationships. Coming out of that citadel means giving up a familiar way of life and requires immense support and encouragement. In therapy, the relationship between client and therapist facilitates these experiences as the client discovers, “This is who I am, how I feel, what I believe, and what I do; this is my past and where I came from; and this is what I need to do now to be responsible for myself and others.” For seriously withdrawn clients, regression-in-relationship can provide a safe environment in which client and therapist work and live together safely over time while the client goes through the essential experiences required for the formation of a stable sense of self. As one client wrote: “In my withdrawal I can sense you [the therapist] and I do not feel so alone. I get to know and understand this place I created a long time ago. I am not as afraid of this place or of you as I used to be. I am beginning to come out a little. A place for me to be with you is growing.”

“The rebirth and regrowth of the lost living heart of the personality . . . is the ultimate problem” (Guntrip, 1968/1995, p. 12). As therapists we are entrusted with the very heart and spirit of the schizoid client, the part that has clung to a thread of hope, no matter how thin, that life can be different. We owe it to each of them to reach into our own hearts and souls as we do the therapeutic work, using our sensitivity, intelligence, and awareness as we invite their hidden, encapsulated selves to joinus in the real world.

Marye O’Reilly-Knapp, D.N.Sc., C.S., is a Certified Transactional Analyst, a psychotherapist in private practice, and codirector of Phoenix Centers, Devon, Pennsylvania. She is also an adjunct professor for Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, and an associate of the Institute for Integrative Psychotherapy, New York. Please send reprint requests to her at 905 Newtown Rd., Devon, PA 19333, U.S.A.

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Cassidy, J., & Shaver, P. R. (Eds.). (1999). Handbook of attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications. New York: Guilford Press.

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Special thanks to Richard G. Erskine, Ph.D., for his lectures and discussions on the schizoid process, to the Professional Development Seminar in Kent for their support, and to Robin Fryer for her editorial assistance.


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This article was first published in the Transactional Analysis Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 44-54. Reprinted with permission of the ITAA

Goooooooooooo -- Bama

It's all over but the cryin'.

A Boring Life

After all the dislocation of my life, and the uncertainties of my existence, it is paradise to be in this quiet apartment in Washington. Some people say that my neighborhood is the dreariest part of northwest Washington. I am a stranger here, but I feel at home: it is life, and I am content--yes, miserable, but content with my misery.

I spend the day doing small things, drinking my morning cup of coffee, going to the library, then coming home and listening to music; afterwards going for a walk, shopping for dinner, cooking my evening meal. In between all this activity, when I have a quiet moment (as if all my moments were not quiet!), I look over my notes. I am daunted by them--the strange handwriting, the bizarre references, the bizarrely-boring notes about my life (if one might call it a life). There are two large notebooks, about two hundred pages, filled with my writing. There is too much of it. Some pruning is in order, I should think. There's enough material here for a hundred blog posts, at least.

It's a relief to have household chores to do. They keep me from thinking, just as thinking keeps me from living. My chores are brainless and tiring, they are just what I need.

I think of myself when I was a little boy coming home in the middle of the day for lunch. I had a very serious face, very pale from the Philadelphia winter and perfectly smooth. I had small beautiful hands and deep brown eyes that were so expressive my mother did all she could to please me. She gave me treats, bought me chocolate at the corner store, and cakes for my after-lunch dessert. She watched television with me, sitting next to me. When I was at school my mother missed me so much that sometimes she went early to meet me, and loitered until I appeared.

"What do you want for lunch?"

"A ham sandwich with Swiss cheese."

It delighted my mother that she could make me happy by being with me and offering me these simple things.

Actually, all this is a lie. My mother all but ignored me, and never picked me up at school. When I started kindergarten, my mother had a neighbor child walk me to school to acquaint me, no doubt, with the cruel reality of life that mother is not always there to offer comfort. I accommodated myself very early to the fact that my mother mostly ignored me, rarely tried to please me, and never offered an empathic observation to soothe my troubled heart.

Rules of Engagement for Librarians

Paragraph Two: Dress.

Librarians shall wear business attire. At no time during library hours shall any librarian remove any article of clothing, such as tie, belt, socks, suspenders, etc. Librarians shall not wear helmets, padding, or prosthetic devices (unless prescribed by a physician licensed to practice in the District of Columbia). Male librarians shall not wear girdles or "elevator"-type shoes. Per above, librarians shall not remove shoes or throw same at each other during regular library hours. Once the library is closed for the day, librarians shall be permitted to toss articles of clothing, excepting underwear, into the information desk drawer for keepsake purposes.

Paragraph Six: Hand gestures.

"Italian," "French," "Latino," "Bulgarian," or other ethnic-style gestures intended to demean, impugn, or otherwise derogate library patrons or other librarians by casting aspersions on patrons' or librarians' manhood (or womanhood), abilities as lover, or cuckold status are prohibited. Standard "American"-style gestures meant to convey honest bewilderment, doubt, etc., shall be permitted. Librarians shall not point rotating index fingers at their own temples to imply that other librarians or patrons are mentally deranged. Librarians shall at no time insert fingers in their own throats to signify urge to vomit. Librarians shall under no circumstances insert fingers into the throats of patrons or other librarians.

Paragraph Seventeen A: Bodily fluids-Perspiration.

The library branch manager shall make every effort to maintain a comfortable temperature in the library. Librarians shall make reasonable use of underarm deodorant and other antiperspirant measures, subject to review by the branch manager, before regular library hours. In the event that perspiration is unavoidable, librarians may deploy one plain white cotton handkerchief measuring eight inches square. Handkerchief may not be used to suggest that librarian wants to surrender to the capricious whims of patrons. Capricious whims of patrons include, but are not limited to, engaging in the prohibited act of saving personal documents on the hard-drive of the public access computers or using patrons' sputum to clean the computer screen.

Paragraph Forty-Two: Language.

Librarians shall address each other in terms of mutual respect ("Mr. Branch Librarian," "Ms. Assistant Librarian," etc.) Use of endearing modifiers ("my distinguished colleague," "the honorable branch manager," "Pookie," "Diddums," etc.) is permitted. The following terms are specifically forbidden and may not be used until after regular library hours: "girlie-man," "draft dodger," "drunk," "ignoramus," "Jesus freak," "frog," "bozo," "wimp," "toad," "Lickspittle," "rat bastard," "polluting bastard," "lying bastard," "demon spawn," "archfiend," or compound nouns ending in "-hole" or "-ucker."

Paragraph Fifty-eight: Spousal references

Each librarian may make sparing references to his or her spouse. All references to consist of boilerplate praise, e.g., "I would not be the librarian I am without [spouse's first name]" or "[spouse's name] patience and generosity allowed me to obtain my Master of Library Science degree."

Paragraph Seventy-two: Hypothetical scenarios

Librarians shall not pose hypothetical scenarios involving biographies, mysteries, dictionaries or other reference items, etc., so as to taunt other librarians with respect to their knowledge of the Dewey decimal system. Such hypothetical scenarios might include, but are not limited to, questions about the Kennedy assassination: "Where would you shelve a thesaurus of historical novels concerning the mystery of the second shooter?"

Paragraph Ninety-eight: Gary Freedman.

No librarian shall mention the name "Gary Freedman." In the event that any librarian utters said name in the course of regular library hours, said librarian shall be banned from ordering pizza for the next 72 hours.

A Writing Boy

The writer is a solitary traveler through life. As a boy I loved to sit alone on the curb, staring into the gutter. I would watch the iridescent colors shifting on the oil and water and I figured out that the slop of the Seventeenth Street gutter was reflecting the sunlight overhead. A small boy, just sitting there, I had emotional feelings, very powerful, of gladness and mystery, and I wanted to say something, to tell someone, about that. But there was no one to whom I could speak. I knew my sister would laugh; I feared my father would scoff; and my mother, well, maybe my mother would simply walk away and continue her housework. Or, if I felt that odd constriction in my chest and told her, she would tell me that children do not feel odd constrictions in their chest. To the present day, when I write about what I call the light within, the sense I've always had of the mystery of joy in life, I get the same tightness in my chest and with it, the old sense of trepidation. I am sometimes afraid to go on. I always knew I had the talent. I wanted to write but I was afraid of that talent. I knew I would cut myself off from my parents and my sister; and yet, how could I hide it? Lose the joy? I was always afraid that if I allowed the fire to burn, I would die. If I allowed the fire to go out, I would die. So the talent was dangerous. If I used it, I would kill myself. To confront it head-on would be too much to bear; but how could I throw it away?

Beethoven's Fifth

It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it. Whether you are a person who taps surreptitiously when the tunes come on--of course, not so as to disturb the others; or a person who can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music's flood; or like a person who can only see the music; or like a person who is profoundly versed in counterpoint, and holds the full score open on his knee; or like the person who remembers all the time that Beethoven is "echt Deutsch"; or who, like the young man seated in front of me who can think only of the young lady seated next to him and who plans to bed her later in the evening: in any case, the passion of your life becomes more vivid, and you are bound to admit that such a noise is cheap at any price. It is cheap, even if you hear it at Carnegie Hall, dreariest music-room in New York, though not as dreary as the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, Washington, DC; and even if you sit on the extreme left of that hall, so that the brass bumps at you before the rest of the orchestra arrives, it is still cheap.

The first movement had concluded and the Andante had begun--very beautiful, but bearing a family likeness to all the other beautiful Andantes that Beethoven has written, and, to my mind, rather disconnecting the heroes and shipwrecks of the first movement from the heroes and goblins of the third. I hear the tune through once, and then my attention wanders, and I gaze at the audience, or the organ, or the architecture. Much do I censure the attenuated Cupids who encircle the ceiling of the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, inclining each to each with vapid gesture, and clad in sallow pantaloons, and which the October sunlight strikes. "How awful to have to paint a man like those Cupids!" I think. Here Beethoven started decorating the tune, so I hear through once more, and then smile at the conductor on the podium with his exaggerated gestures. But the conductor, listening to the music, with his back to the audience, cannot respond to my silent chuckles. An old man seated next to me, too looks as if wild horses could not make him inattentive; there are lines across his forehead, his lips are parted, his glasses at right angles to his nose, and he has laid a thick, white hand on either knee. And next to him an old woman, so reserved, yet looking as though she wants to tap. How interesting that row of people is! What diverse influences have gone to the making. Here Beethoven, after humming and hawing with great sweetness, says "heigho," and the Andante comes to an end. Applause, and a round of "wunderschoning" and "prachtvolleying" from the German contingent. The young lady seated in front of me starts talking to her new young man; she says to him: "now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing"; and the young lady implores her young man to look out for the transitional passage on the drum.

"On the what, dear?"

"On the drum, sweetheart."

"No: look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back," breaths the young woman, as the music starts with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end. Others follow him. They are not aggressive creatures; it is that that makes them so terrible. They merely observe in passing that there is no such thing as splendor or heroism in the world. After the interlude of elephants dancing, they return and make the observation for the second time. They cannot be contradicted, for, once at all events, I feel the same, and have seen the reliable walls of youth collapse. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! The goblins are right.

The young man seated in front of me raises his finger: it is the transitional passage on the drum.

For, as if things are going too far, Beethoven takes hold of the goblins and makes them do what he wants. He appears in person. He gives them a little push, and they begin to walk in a major key instead of in a minor, and then--he blows with his mouth and they are scattered! Gusts of splendor, gods and demi-gods contending with vast swords, color and fragrance broadcast on the field of battle, magnificent victory, magnificent death! Oh, it all bursts before me, and I even stretch out my hands as if it is tangible. Any fate is titanic; any contest desirable; conqueror and conquered will alike be applauded by the angels of the utmost stars.

And the goblins--they have not really been there at all. There were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief? One healthy human impulse would dispel them? Men of action, men of substance, rough-hewn men, would say yes. Beethoven knew better. The goblins really had been there. They might return--and they do. It is as if the splendor of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one hears the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walks quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall.

Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendor, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.

The Librarian of the United States

Dramatis Personae

Brian Brown, head librarian, Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library

Bill Decosta, Assistant librarian, Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library

Gary Freedman, patron, Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library

Scene: Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library

BRIAN BROWN: (shouting) Bill, what am I going to do? Did you hear that Gary Freedman's gonna put a kibosh on me? He's crazy, he's out of his mind....

BILL DECOSTA: Steady, steady, now calm yourself, come on, now get a hold of yourself.

BRIAN BROWN: What the hell? He's supposed to be on medication. I don't understand. He told me he's getting medication. What happened to his medication!?

BILL DECOSTA: OK, quiet! Quiet! Now let me think!

BRIAN BROWN: I'm gonna call the cops. That's what I'm doing, I'm calling the cops.

BILL DECOSTA: The cops? What are you calling the cops for? They're not going to do anything!

BRIAN BROWN: What do you mean they're not going to do anything, they're the cops, they gotta do something, he just put the kibosh on me, do you know what the kibosh means, its a kibosh!

BILL DECOSTA: Yiddigtkk ka kibosh.

BRIAN BROWN: I mean it's a terrible mistake, I mean he thinks I ruined his last chance in life to make a friend. He never had a chance of being my friend.

BILL DECOSTA: Call him and tell him

BRIAN BROWN: That's what I'll do, I'll just call him and tell him, I'll tell him. That's all I'll do. He's a human being, I'll talk to him. He'll understand. Right?

BILL DECOSTA: Right.... Don't mention my name

(Brian Brown telephones Gary Freedman.)

BRIAN BROWN: Oh, I got the answering machine.

BILL DECOSTA: What's his message like?

BRIAN BROWN: Nice!

BILL DECOSTA: Eh!

BRIAN BROWN: (into phone) Hello Gary, listen this is Brian Brown, I really think there's been a huge colossal misunderstanding, . . .

BILL DECOSTA: Big! Big!

BRIAN BROWN: . . . and I feel if we can just talk about this we can straighten the whole thing out, so listen, so call me back. Bye.

BRIAN BROWN: (to Bill Decosta) This isn't going to work. Freedman's not gonna call me back. He threatened me. I'm calling the cops.

BRIAN BROWN: (on phone) Hello? Listen, I'm the head librarian at the Cleveland Park Library. Some crazed patron threatened me. He threatened to put the kibosh on me. (pause.) What do you mean, you're not going to investigate? But officer, he threatened me! I don't understand, that's not right! What if it was the President of the United States, I bet you'd investigate. So what's the difference, I'm the librarian of the United States, and I'll tell you I'm under just as much pressure. Alright, thanks anyway, ok bye.

The Observer

It is a thundery spring morning of blackish blowing trees and clouds the color of cast-iron, marbled by yellow cracks. The window beside me is made so opaque by the storm that I can see my face in it -- another person. But this one after a night of little sleep looks like a zombie who has risen from a hole in the ground to push his haunting face through the world. In the lobby of my apartment building are people on their way to work, carrying newspapers and clutching bags. My impression is not that they are hard-working and virtuous people but simply that they are better than me. Yet when I consider that they too have deep secrets I realize how alike we are.

On my own like this I close my eyes and hold my breath, like a man dropping into a well. I no longer ask myself whether I am happy. It hardly seems an important question, though it seems there is all the time in the world to answer it with a clear reply. I inhabit this space, all this hissing air, going from one life to another, believing I am unchanged. I have lived like this for a long time. But today (I have no idea why it had not occurred to me sooner--perhaps it was the sight of my face in the glass) I have an intimation of another self within me, someone lurking, and I thought: Who are you?

I am living many different lives, and I know I am a slightly different person with each person I encounter -- lie to each of them, or choose a different version of the truth for each of them; remembering what to include and what to leave out. We are secret cohorts. They invented me; I invent them. But for each of us there is a more complete person beyond all that fiddle. Wasn't I a new man when I was alone?

I did not want to take the effort to write anything, and so I mumbled to myself: maybe I am living my life like this not because I want to enhance it with the intensity of many selves, but rather because I am afraid to be alone. I am fearful of meeting face to face and having to give a name to that odd solitary man; I am afraid to see him (that is, myself or my many selves) whole.

But this rainy morning I see there is even an additional person that inhabits me. He is the observer, the witness to all this, like the inspector on a train who just enters the coach to examine tickets: not a word, not a murmur, only the nibble and bite of metal punch. This observer was the one who stands aside and makes the notes and writes. His life is lived within himself. He is silent, he seldom gestures, he never argues, he dreams, he is everything, he sees everything, and so he is the one who suffers.

He goes to the library, he takes long walks, he sits in the corner seat on the subway and his reflection never stares back at him -- his eyes are always fixed on other people. He is the one who reads items in newspapers entitled President Bush Defends Iraq Policy and Stock Market Plunges in Face of Inflation Fears on the Red Line. He takes long solitary walks. He makes excuses about not taking his medication and hurries away from demanding people to eat a snack from a fast-food restaurant in the park and feeds the leavings to the pigeons. He picks up discarded letters and reads them, foraged from the trash room in his apartment building for first drafts of messages that people throw away -- all that passion in a few lines; and he stares intently at the way women's clothes fit their bodies. If a woman glances at him he goes away; if ever he catches anyone's eye he looks askance and moves on. He is a letter writer. He kills time watching television. He goes to museums. He sits alone at concerts. He loiters in libraries. In the early darkness of winter he pauses at the lighted windows of houses and looks in. He eats dinner standing up, never goes into good restaurants. If there is a fight on the street, or an argument in the next room, or a crossed line, or someone punishes a child, he is transfixed, and he listens. He is alert, he is alive -- not an actor waiting in the wings for a cue that would bring him on stage. This is his real existence, and there is no time to waste, because his life is passing and it is no more than a bubble the size of a seed pearl rising to break at the surface of the liquid in a tumbler, and then it would be over.

Being alive is being alone, I write, concealing my small notebook behind my hand. Being alone is being alive.

The Ore and Aura of the Real

I swim in a sea of reality, but that makes me no more a fish than Moby Dick was. Mine is an unreal universe in which the exceptional is commonplace, in which the transient states of frustration or depression or meaninglessness are the norm. I am not a character whose life conforms more or less to the life of the ordinary man. I am an anticharacter in my experiences and in my sense of the world of reality. I require the fabulous and the bizarre. That is my metier. My purpose and philosophy of life is nonrealistic, fabulous even. I breathe the air that normal men breathe, but that makes me no more normal than any tragic figure of literature. I am both the author and the creative transformation of a fantastic tragedy. You, my friends, both real and imagined readers, are the audience of an absurdist play worthy of Beckett.

One might state it as an axiom: the anticharacter requires not only a nonrealistic setting, but a nonrealistic (or fabulous) purpose and philosophy of life in the author. I myself admirably fulfill this axiom. Not even my most fervent admirers would maintain (at least I hope they wouldn't) that my assumptions about the human condition, and far less normal human reactions to it (even if we did accept my premises), are a realistic portrayal of what is the case. We have to say something like this: I convey how things sometimes feel for the normal person when he or she is depressed or frustrated. But in my world depression and frustration are the normal course of life. In all those common extrapolated usages, there is a sense of the ludicrous for the normal man. But not for me. My life is ludicrous. My experiences, my feelings, my thoughts reflect a nightmarish dream world or something out of a book, both literally and metaphorically. Yes, for me, since early childhood, real life suddenly became like "something out of a book" -- it would seem unreal to a normal person. But for me life is unreal. Life is not like something out of a book. Life is something out of a book. My literary models are fragments of my lived experience. I have erected in actuality a model of a hypothetical universe that is much worse than the actuality. But that unreal world of the unreal is my actuality. What is interesting is that my life approximates a world more characteristic of tragedy than of the novel. No one has ever blamed Oedipus Rex or Lear for lacking realism, since we have all been trained to make the necessary metaphorical leap, to suspend what constitutes our ordinary standards of reality. And that is what you, the audience, is required to do in appraising my life, my world. You must suspend what constitutes your ordinary standards of reality.

With me it is the articulation, not the articulated, that fundamentally matters. The process and not the content is all and everything. What I wish to convey in my writings is the experience of the bizarre and the meaningless. The failure to see this is why so many who read me have failed to grasp my essence. I don't think it is altogether mere bad memory that will make you unable to recall concrete descriptions of my experiences and feelings from my writings. It is of course part of my intention that what should stay in the reader's mind is the general process, not its details. What I wish to convey is a pathological process of existence, like the state of anemia. You cannot make discoveries about anemia with normal-blood-count patients; or about anxiety neurosis with the bovinely contented. I cannot convey my message by relying on ordinary means. My means are to extract from published material the essence of identifications and associations that make up my personality. That means or method -- what some call simple plagiarism -- is my message. I restate and paraphrase what I identify with. I am like a mirror. The mirror reflects images. The mirror does not contain an original image, like a painting. But that is the purpose and the process of the mirror. My writings are a mirror that does not describe my world, but which reflects my world. My blog posts are mirror images of myself. I suppose my purpose is an existentialist one. My intent is to reflect the meaninglessness and futility of human existence. I want to show that the imitative life is the only real life. I and my writings are an extraction of the world's sorrows, griefs and passions from the ore and aura of the real. I am a miner of reality, the reality that is mine.

A Thousand Leering Grimaces of Life

I am an impostor with many selves. My life narrative is a place where imaginative revisions seem (at least to me) necessary. I understand that we must all construct a story of our lives: the quiet tale we repeat in our heads, after dark, while falling asleep. Without compunction, I change my story at will, inventing details, shaping and reshaping my persona to suit myself and the needs of my avocation as writer and my personal life. But I don't like it when others dwell on the details of my life history. "You seem to be spending too much time thinking about Gary Freedman," I tell people. At the same time, my writing demands a reading in tandem with the writing. The personas in my fictions, and the nature of my own character, enthrall me, and I work busily at inventing and deepening both, looking for reality through the lens of art in both instances.

Lives are lived in circles, not linearly, with past and present looping each other. This seems especially true of me, who takes my own family history as synechdochal, standing in for the family history of the artist. My sense of the present is profoundly shaped by my sense of the past, and the past brings a peculiar pressure to bear on the present in my life and writings. I am besotted with history, my own and those of people around me. I live within this history, and the history becomes me.

So how do I manage to transform my little postage stamp of a life into an imaginative space where I can roam happily over several decades, creating a vast anthology of human experience from limited materials? I was, after all, no obvious genius from the outset, being a shy boy from Philadelphia. Unlike some writers, I have no large experience of the wider world. I write consciously, applying myself with great energy to the task before me, with a deep understanding of what I am doing.

In a very real sense, I have fathered myself, having seen fatherhood diluted as it passed down from my grandfather, then to my own hapless father. I have a visceral need to regard myself as independent of the family, to lift myself over my sister and parents and everyone else around me. I do so by making fictions, all kinds of fictions. I became an artist in my own mind, creating a story to fit this need. I have become many other things as well, an outcast, a bohemian poet, a world traveler, a historian, a friend, a criminal, and so forth. These are all masks put on for the occasion, the life-phase, the person in front of me, the immediate need.

Finally, of course, I have adopted a persona that all the world can accept, that of the conquering hero of prose fiction, a man on a par with Faulkner, or Joyce or Hemingway, able to reframe the family saga and the society into which I was born through the complex operations of my writings. Over time, the mask has grown onto my face, becoming my features, the very skin itself. Only the wild, sad eyes peeking out through the mask tell the world about the soul lurking behind it. Those eyes, with their countless changes, suggest something of the many thousand selves that make up the person called Gary Freedman, only a limited number of which you will ever come to know.

The Bush Doctrine

Have you ever heard of the Bush Doctrine? I only ask because Sarah Palin apparently never heard of the Bush Doctrine and she's running for the second highest office in the land.

But since, I assume, your time is not crammed with moose hunting and negotiating sensitive foreign policy issues with your neighbor, Russia, you know that the Bush Doctrine holds that the U.S. may pre-emtively strike a foreign nation that appears to pose a military threat to the United States. The Iraq war is an example of the Bush Doctrine in action (or inaction, as the case may be).

I was watching the TV show "60 Minutes" a few weeks ago that featured a piece on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. During the course of the piece a Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was asked whether the present economic crisis was foreseeable. He responded that not only was the current crisis foreseeable, it was actually foreseen two years ago.

Now I find that interesting. What action, I ask you, did President Bush take two years ago (or since) to pre-emptively address the coming economic crisis? Apparently, he took no action at all.

Ironic, don't you think? The President gets us involved in a war in Iraq based on less than credible intelligence that that country posed a military threat to the United States, but did nothing to preemtively address an economic crisis that was actually foreseen two years ago!

Obsession Brings College to Payson

By Suzanne Jacosbson

An obsessive fight, hard-waged, can wear a man out. Obsession’s cause, indistinguishable and perhaps irrelevant, dissipates after accomplishment. But accomplishment can define a life.

Doyle Coffey was fierce and still is, in his benign and jovial way. The 87-year-old man has sacrificed vacations, personal time, and his health to fulfill his quest.

Coffey’s obsession with Eastern Arizona College’s Payson campus drove him for 14 years while he, along with the college’s dean, Don Allen, fought to raise money to build a campus in Payson.

It takes more than two, of course, to build a college. Newspaper clips from 1995 show hoards of Payson students holding signs in front of a bus that carried them to Phoenix to lobby the legislature for money to build a Payson college campus.

“There were a lot of people involved in this besides Don and me,” Coffey said. “But we were the ones who kept everyone’s feet to the fire.”

The college originally ran out of a tiny strip mall location, with walls that vibrated when the neighboring washer and dryer ran.

Allen died a month before the campus officially opened. Some close to him speculate that fighting for the college hastened his death.

Coffey, who once raised money for the college door-to-door with a walker and a broken hip, says the fight put him in his wheelchair.

Speaking with a scratchy voice and wearing smudged bifocals, Coffey now sits, neatly dressed, in his electric wheelchair.

He sits with his back toward the golf course he never had time to play on, a welcome mat with a cup of coffee and the word “coffee” at the foot of an empty brown reclining chair. His wife, Margaret, sits in a matching chair.

Coffey lived through the Great Depression, in Oklahoma’s dust bowl, and was once hospitalized for a year with tuberculosis.

Born in Oklahoma in 1921, Coffey grew up a farm boy in a town called Sweetwater, near the Texas border. After earning a degree in agriculture from Oklahoma State University, Coffey found a job in Casa Grande and moved there in 1947.

Casa Grande in those days was primitive, Coffey says. The streets were dirt and the population was roughly 3,000. But Coffey was there for the cotton fields. He inspected the fields for insects, then decided which chemicals could kill them.

In 1958, Coffey contracted tuberculosis and spent a year in the hospital. The doctors told him to find a new career, like teaching school.

But you can’t keep a farm boy out of the fields, and he returned anyway. “I needed money,” he said.

On New Year’s Eve 1960, Coffey met Margaret, and the couple married one month later, in February 1961. “I thought I’d found a prince,” Margaret said. Both had been married before, but Coffey says, “we think it’s going to last.”

Trying to heed his doctor’s orders to stay off the fields, Coffey earned his teaching certification. He began his academic career in Coolidge, but eventually found a job in Casa Grande.

During summers, Coffey kept working in the fields. “He made more money in the summer checking fields than in school,” Margaret said.

Still, Coffey said, it wasn’t necessarily the money that inspired his dual employment. He liked staying busy.

After retiring to Payson in 1982 with plans of playing golf, Coffey first helped Payson School District pass a bond that failed twice before voters ultimately approved it.

The number would foreshadow a future proposition Coffey worked to pass, when Gila County voters were asked to pay a tax to fund their From page 1C

college. It too would fail twice before passing in 1990.

In 1985, Coffey was asked to sit on the college’s advisory board. Once a month for board meetings, Coffey drove two hours from Payson to Globe on a dirt road, eventually wearing out a pickup.

The county is gerrymandered, Coffey says, so that the south has more representation than the north. That power carried over to Eastern Arizona College, which provided classes in Gila County. Gila Community College did not yet exist — that battle is another tale to be told.

At every juncture, Coffey found himself asking the board, “What’s that going to do for Payson?”

Finally, one day Globe board members said, “If you damn people in Payson ever tell us what you want, we’ll help you get it.”

At that point, the idea for a Payson college campus was born.

“Come to my bedroom,” Coffey says, leading the way in his electric wheelchair. “It’s where I take all the pretty girls.” Hanging on his wall is a golden shovel — the ceremonial shovel that moved the first granules of dirt to make way for Payson’s college campus.

A picture on his wall shows then-Gov. Fife Symington signing a $1-million appropriation for the college in 1998. In 1995, the legislature approved the first $1 million.

In 1999, Coffey received the Payson Roundup’s Man of the Year award. That plaque hangs on his wall, too, along with a picture of a young Margaret, dark-haired and proud.

“OK, you’ve seen my treasure trove,” he said, aiming his wheelchair out of the bedroom, and into the kitchen where Margaret is talking on the telephone, and then back into the living room.

“I knew I had a selling job to get this done,” Coffey said. “I talked to anybody that would listen to me.”

In 1990, Coffey and other college officials convinced voters to approve a tax to fund Eastern Arizona College satellite campuses around Gila County, including Payson.

According to a news article from the time, northern county voters doubted the college’s benefits outweighed its costs. The measure failed in Payson, though Pine and Strawberry voters overwhelmingly passed it.

“I had people come up to me and just give me hell,” he said. “They just didn’t want their town to change.” Residents worried about students running amok in the streets.

After the tax passed, ensuring the college had enough money to run, Coffey moved on to raise money to build a real campus, with buildings not inside a shopping center.

“I (would) go down to the legislature, spend all day talking to the legislature. Some of them wouldn’t even see me, they wouldn’t even let me in to talk.”

Back in Payson, Coffey would call into the local radio station, telling people to call their representatives and demand a college. Eventually, the pressure worked and Coffey gained access.

“Yes, yes, you can see him. Stop these people from calling,” Coffey recalled legislative aides saying.

Coffey believed a campus would not only increase access to educational opportunities, but also increase community visibility.

“I can’t tell you how many meetings I attended,” Coffey said. “I spent all my retirement life on the college.”

A plaque sits on the college campus with his name on it, which Margaret points out when Coffey says he feels low.

But perhaps no amount of accolades could compensate for such sacrifice. At one point, Margaret recalled, Coffey became deeply depressed and lost 30 pounds. Doctors eventually diagnosed him with fibromylagia, a chronic condition defined by widespread pain and exhaustion.

“Well, let’s not get into that,” Coffey said.

“It’s part of the story,” Margaret responded.

Maybe Coffey was driven by a desire to improve education, but what makes a person devote themselves so fully to something that really has very little to do with them?

“I wish I knew,” Margaret said. It was probably because someone told him he couldn’t, she added.

“I wish I knew too,” said Coffey. “Margaret got to the point where she said ‘please don’t talk about the college.’”

“Well, it got to the point where it would consume the whole conversation,” Margaret said.

Coffey occasionally lunches with Pam Butterfield, now the dean of the campus for which Coffey so diligently worked.

“I’ve gotten to know Doyle since I’ve been here and we’ve become friends,” Butterfield said. “The town of Payson is very lucky to have had Doyle working on the college’s behalf.”

Curiously, Doyle showed no emotion while recollecting his years of struggle.

Instead, his recollections feature an objective account of circumstances, with even potentially bitter statements stoically delivered.

“A lot of people tried to take credit for the college,” Coffey says. That conversation is for a younger man.

“I just don’t have the energy at my age to follow through on it.”

Perhaps pondering an obsession’s source is pointless. Coffey can’t say why, exactly, he picked this specific battle to fight so hard. Maybe the simple answer is that once he started, there was no stopping.

Coffey said of his tenacity, “I’m just built that way, I guess.”

The man in Coffey’s living room is much older than the Coffey in pictures from eight years ago at the college’s dedication. Life’s end calls for reflection, and Coffey has much to reflect on.

He’s taken to writing his life’s stories, and just the other day he fixed the molding in his bathroom. People walk on the golf course in Coffey’s back yard that he hardly played on, but he doesn’t seem to pay attention. It’s a nice view, anyway.

“I like my life just the way it is right now, at 87-and-a-half,” Coffey says.

“After you get to 87 you count the half-years, too.”

(Suzanne Jacobson is my niece.)

This Isn't Going To Be Easy.

It happened a few months ago. I wanted to tell you about it at the time, but somehow I couldn't. I guess I needed to process it myself. I still haven't completely come to terms with it but at least now I can talk about it. I know I was not straightforward with you, and I should have been. Forgive me.

This isn't going to be easy. There's no good way to say it, so:

Bill Decosta is planning to retire three years from now.

I'm sorry. I know what hearing this does to you. He will be leaving the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library to retire, end of story.

It sounds so stark, a sentence that should never be said: Bill Decosta will be retiring. But it's all too true. Yes, I've had the same thoughts, over and over, that you're having now. Yes, the fact that he will be allowed to leave the Cleveland Park Library is senseless and baffling and self-destructive of the District of Columbia library system. I wish I had more comfort to give. Sometimes things happen that we simply can't explain.

There's no rhyme or reason -- I don't want to think about it, and yet somehow I can't stop. No librarian knows books better than Bill Decosta; the DC Library is one of the largest public library systems in the country; and so the library central administration decides . . . to let Bill Decosta resign? Am I missing something here?

The fact remains that Bill Decosta will be leaving Cleveland Park. I keep going over it. I can't help myself. It's like I'm numb. Bill. Decosta. Will resign. Cleveland Park. I mean, everyone knew Bill Decosta was thinking of leaving Cleveland Park. That rumor had been around for months, or even years. But thinking of leaving and actually leaving are two different things. As I sat in the library the other day, sitting among the other patrons, the finality of it sank in with all of us: "This is it. He's really leaving, Bill Decosta will actually be leaving Cleveland Park." People began to sob. Brian Brown, the head librarian, and a giant of a man, sat there with his shoulders just heaving. It had come to this.

An instant later, people were rushing for the exits. Nobody had been able to believe it, and now that it was happening they needed to tell the community at large. The director of branch libraries who won't let me use her name, due to grief, had her staff stencil "Bill Decosta is Leaving Cleveland Park" on the front of her limo, specifying that it be reversed -- kraP dnalevelC gnivaeL sI atsoceD lliB -- so that drivers in cars up ahead could read it and yield the road. Hazard lights flashing, she roared away into the Washington night.

As for me, I only wanted to go off somewhere by myself and curl into a ball. If I had any friends I probably would have ended up having a quiet dinner with them, talking of other matters, trying to lift one another's spirits and pretending the while that we weren't failing miserably.

Over time, we will learn that there are seven stages a person goes through when Bill Decosta leaves Cleveland Park. The first is shock and rage. The second is also shock and rage, with rage starting to predominate. The third is pretty much all rage; I forget the stages after that, because I'm still partly in shock. During the rage period, it is quite natural to put a lot of blame on Francis Buckley, the director of the faceless, soulless library system that runs Cleveland Park, who indeed has much to answer for. Obviously Francis Buckley must be a very disturbed person to allow such a thing to happen.

Strangely enough, I'm starting to feel better now. Confronting the sentence "Bill Decosta is leaving Cleveland Park," as I'm doing here, deprives it of some of its primal power to terrify. I repeat it out loud, in my normal voice, calmly: "Bill Decosta will be leaving Cleveland Park." And you see? The words are spoken, yet the earth continues to turn, the sun still shines, the flowers--

Oh, hell! Who am I kidding? I try to put on a brave face and then it goes all to smash. Why will this resignation be allowed to occur? Why will nobody stop that crazed fiend Francis Buckley from accepting the resignation? Why doesn't some courageous person at the library central administration come to his or her senses and alter the fateful course before it will be too late? And what about the rest of us? Why do we just sit idly by? Bill Decosta will be leaving, irrevocably, and the rest of us are doing, for all intents and purposes, NOTHING. Bill Decosta says he's going to retire so that he can spend his time hiking, traveling and listening to his wife play the harp, which is fine, but again I ask the painful question: Why? What greater purpose is served by a man who understands books spending his time hiking, an endeavor in which, frankly any person in reasonably good shape can succeed? I know I should accept what can't be changed, but I am not able to, and I refuse to. "Bill Decosta is leaving Cleveland Park." Make it not true.

Mr. Decosta is an associate librarian at the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library, in Washington, D.C.

An Analytic Hour

A troublesome (aren't they all?) new patient, thirty-seven years old, raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father had a typical petty bourgeois Jewish Orthodox background. The patient's mother was a Polish-Catholic. He is highly intelligent, a compulsive talker, extremely narcissistic and exhibitionistic. He hides his intellectual arrogance behind ironic self-deprecation. He cannot stop his diarrhea of talk, because it is his way of denying his essential constipation - his total inability to give of himself. His working for a large, prestigious law firm in the capacity of a paralegal (the patient trained as a lawyer) is not only a denial of his own failure to assume responsibilities, but reflects his inner feeling of guilt that only in a state of misery can he find a perverse fulfillment in life.

He gave me no chance to explain what psychoanalysis is all about, claimed to be very familiar with it, and proceeded to show that he lacks even the slightest understanding. He seems to think psychoanalysis is a self-serving rattling off of complaints and accusations leveled at others and oneself, instead of recognizing the serious introspection and contemplation it ought to evoke. He is capable of neither of the latter, because he feels he is so worthless that he cannot be serious about anything that touches him -- not his own self, nor his family, nor those he works with. He wants to do everything himself without any relation to, or contribution by, another person, in a typical masturbatory phallic fixation. He permits no one, including me, to make any contributions to his life.

Obviously, he has spent years at his self-justifying ruminations, where even his self-criticism is meant only to show how shrewd and honest he is about himself. Mainly the self-criticism serves to let him go on exactly as before without internalizing his guilt to the degree that he would need to do something about it; it serves him to avoid any need to change. He is convinced that to rattle off in this way becomes psychoanalysis when he does it aloud with me listening. Despite his long account of all that went wrong in his life beginning with infancy (!), there is absolutely no realization of his sickness -- his complete inability to relate to another person. How can he, when all he sees of the world is his own projections, which he is certain are true pictures of reality? He sees psychoanalysis as one vast catharsis, without the need for any deeper insight or internalization. Everything is just one huge ejaculation.

I doubt if he can establish even the minimal transference that would enable him to analyze. Probably his selecting me for an analyst typifies his unwillingness to give up his bondage to his Jewish past. I wonder if I should have insisted that he go to a gentile analyst. I may still have to transfer him to one. In our brief talk before treatment began, I asked him why, given his feeling that his troubles originate, in part, with his identification with his father's Orthodox Jewish background, he selected me, as his analyst. He could not understand my point, saying that no gentile analyst could ever understand him. He speaks as if the issue were finding an analyst whose sympathy and understanding are endless, as were his parents' -- not his own coming to understand himself. His selection of me for an analyst suggests that deep down he does not want to transcend his own background, and so chose an analyst who will not alienate him from what he pretends to hate, but without which he feels there would be nothing left for him or his life. It remains to be seen whether we can overcome this handicap. Since he thinks his need is to spill out, uninterruptedly, I shall let him, for a full week. Then we shall see if he can stop the spilling long enough for analysis to be possible.

He carries on as if to convince me that all the cliches of a spoiled Jewish boyhood are indeed valid: the overpowering, overindulgent, overprotective mother and the ineffectual father. Essentially the hour was one long alibi. I am to understand that if he cannot meet life, cannot relate to another human being, it's not how he construes things, but because of his parents and their background, along with two specific traumata. He is a master of the alibi, and like the clever lawyer that he is, he plays both sides of the street. He blames his misery on both kinds of trauma: the physical (an injury to his oral cavity -- at age two-and-one-half!!) and the psychological (his mother's lack of empathy). He must be certain I will see him as the suffering victim, no matter what kind of theories I hold about physical or emotional trauma as causing behavior like his.

Actually, it is not traumata, but only his disgust with himself, that forces him to defeat all those who love him (his parents, his potential friends, etc.).The tirade against his parents, especially his mother, is uninterruptible. A few times I indicated the wish to say something, but he only talked on more furiously. His spiel was like a satire on the complaints of most of my patients, and on the tenets of psychoanalysis: a satire on the dominating and castrating father, and a mother too involved in herself and her own life to pay much attention to her son. This extremely intelligent young Jew (or half-Jew) does not recognize what he is trying to do -- by reversing the oedipal situation, he is trying to make fun of me as he does of everyone, thus asserting his superiority over me and psychoanalysis itself.

His overpowering love for his mother is turned into a negative projection, so that what becomes overpowering is the mother's love for him. Overtly he complains that she would never let him alone, was all intrusive -- behind which lies an incredibly deep disappointment that she was not even more exclusively preoccupied with him. While consciously he experienced everything she did as destructive, behind this claim is an incredible wish for more, more, more. His is an insatiable orality which is denied and turned into the opposite by his continuous scream of its being much too much.

Even the most ordinary, everyday request from his mother, such as her reminding him to send a card on his father's sixty-sixth birthday, is experienced by him as the most unreasonable demand, forcing on him a life of guilt and indebtedness to his parents. Whatever the mother did for him was always too little; the smallest thing she requested was always too much. After listening all day to the endless complaints of patients about mothers who were never interested in whether they did or did not eat, whether or not they defecated, whether or not they succeeded in school, it should have been refreshing to listen to an hour of complaints about a mother who did exactly all that -- but it was not.

It was so obvious that he felt cheated at not being given enough. No doubt he is tortured by memories of his past, and by his present inability to be a man and enjoy normal sex. But he certainly makes the most of it, and nowhere do I see any effort on his part to free himself of this bondage to the past. Obviously be expects my magic and that of psychoanalysis to do this for him. An important clue, to be followed up later: he is fascinated by his father's constipation, which is so stark a contrast with his excessive masturbation and incessant, diarrhea-like talk. This seem like an interesting fixation at the phallic level, as though the father's constipation has made him so anxious about his own ability to produce that to compensate, he produces without interruption -- whether by masturbating, talking, writing letters, or intellectual productions and achievements. If he does not learn to hold in and store, but continues this indiscriminate discharge, analysis will certainly fail.

If I were to give a name to this patient after this first hour, I would call him "The most unforgettable character I've met." This is not because the patient thinks this designation is true of his mother, as he sees her (as is so of everyone and his mother) but because, while he wishes to believe the foregoing, his major effort is to impress me with himself as "the most unforgettable character I've ever met." Poor soul. Instead of trying to get from me the help he so desperately needs, he tries to impress me with his uniqueness. Everything he accuses his mother of, he is himself, in the extreme. She exploited him because she loved him so much. He exploits everyone because he loves no one.

My Daily Spaghetti

Nineteen-eighty-four was the Year of Spaghetti.

In 1984, I cooked spaghetti to live, and lived to cook spaghetti. Steam rising from the pot was my pride and joy, tomato sauce bubbling up in the sauce-pan my one great hope in life.

I went to a cooking specialty store and bought a kitchen timer and a huge aluminum pot, big enough to bathe a German shepherd in, then went around to all the supermarkets that catered to foreigners, gathering an assortment of odd-sounding spices. I picked up a pasta cookbook at the bookstore, and bought tomatoes by the dozen. I purchased every brand of spaghetti I could lay my hands on, simmered every sauce known to man. Fine particles of garlic, onion, and olive oil swirled in the air, forming a harmonious cloud that penetrated every corner of my tiny apartment, permeating the floor and the ceiling and the walls, my clothes, my books, my records, my violin, my bundles of old letters. It was a fragrance one might have smelled on ancient Roman aqueducts.

This is a story from the Year of Spaghetti, 1984 A.D.

As a rule, I cooked spaghetti, and ate it, by myself. I was convinced that spaghetti was a dish best enjoyed alone. I can't really explain why I felt that way, but there it is.

I always drank tea with my spaghetti and ate a simple lettuce-and-cucumber salad. I'd make sure I had plenty of both. I laid everything out neatly on the table and enjoyed a leisurely meal, glancing at the paper as I ate. From Sunday to Saturday, one Spaghetti Day followed another. And each new Sunday started a brand-new Spaghetti Week.

Every time I sat down to a plate of spaghetti--especially on a rainy afternoon--I had the distinct feeling that somebody was about to knock on my door. The person who I imagined was about to visit me was different each time. Sometimes it was a stranger, sometimes someone I knew. Once, it was the girl with slim legs who lived down the hall, about whom I had taken a fancy, and once it was myself from a few years back, come to pay a visit. Another time it was William Holden, with Jennifer Jones on his arm.

William Holden?

Not one of these people, however, actually ventured into my apartment. They hovered just outside the door, without knocking, like fragments of memory, and then slipped away.

Spring, summer, and fall, I cooked and cooked, as if cooking spaghetti were an act of revenge. Like a lonely, jilted girl throwing old love letters into the fireplace, I tossed one handful of spaghetti after another into the pot.

I'd gather up the trampled-down shadows of time, knead them into the shape of a German shepherd, toss them into the roiling water, and sprinkle them with salt. Then I'd hover over the pot, oversized chopsticks in hand, until the timer dinged its plaintive note.

Spaghetti strands are a crafty bunch, and I couldn't let them out of my sight. If I were to turn my back, they might well slip over the edge of the pot and vanish into the night. The night lay in silent ambush, hoping to waylay the prodigal strands.

Spaghetti alla parmigiana

Spaghetti alla napoletana

Spaghetti al cartoccio

Spaghetti aglio e olio

Spaghetti alla carbonara

Spaghetti della pina

And then there was the pitiful, nameless leftover spaghetti carelessly tossed into the fridge.

Born in heat, the strands of spaghetti washed down the river of 1984 and vanished.

I mourn them all -- all the spaghetti of the year 1984.

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The Police Raid

Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, "I'm going to ask you to come with me." They're always remarkably calm, these agents. If asked "Why do I need to go anywhere with you?" they'll straighten their shirt cuffs or idly brush stray hairs from the sleeves of their sports coats and say, "Oh, I think we both know why." The suspect then chooses between doing things the hard way and doing things the easy way, and the scene ends with either gunfire or the gentlemanly application of handcuffs.

Occasionally it's a case of mistaken identity, but most often the suspect knows exactly why he's being taken. It seems he's been expecting this to happen. The anticipation has ruled his life, and now, finally, the wait is over. You're sometimes led to believe that this person is actually relieved, but I've never bought it. Though it probably has its moments, the average day spent in hiding is bound to beat the average day spent in prison. When it comes time to decide who gets the bottom bunk, I think anyone would agree that there's a lot to be said for doing things the hard way.

October 12, 2004
I had been acting out wildly for the past several months.
I felt a simmering rage since my job termination in late October 1991 by a local law firm.
I had been defamed, seriously defamed by coworkers, supervisors, and even senior management attorneys.

Rumors had been spread in the firm that I was potentially homicidal. One coworker had confronted me with the bizarre accusation, "We're all afraid of you, we're all afraid you're going to buy a gun and shoot everybody."

In August 1998 two federal special agents of the U.S. Capitol Police forced their way into my home, and based on mistaken identity had accused me of having threatened to go to Capitol Hill with a gun and shoot two federal officers at point-blank range, execution style. I was told that I had been placed on a list of potential terrorists, another case of mistaken identity that had its origins in reports made by my former employer that I suffered from serious mental illness and that I was potentially violent.

In April 2004 I was banned from my local library. The library manager Brian Brown summoned Police officers who escorted me from the building. The library manager had found a letter I had written in which I expressed my anger about having been defamed at my former place of employment. I wrote, "people will pay for my pain." Those were the offending words. "People will pay for my pain." For that I was banned from the library for the next six months.

In August 2004 I had started to write letters to prospective employers inquiring about job opportunities. The letters were cynical parodies of job inquiries. I described my history: the allegations that I was potentially homicidal, the police raid at my apartment, and the ban on my access to the public library.

I knew that eventually I would get a visit from the local police or federal agents. No one could get away with writing letters of the kind I had written indefinitely. Someone would eventually put a stop to my activities. I knew that. I used to lay on the couch in my apartment in the evenings and every time I heard voices or footsteps in the hall I was convinced it was the police. I lived in that state of suspense for several weeks.

Columbus Day. October 12, 2004. I was sitting in the lobby of my apartment building. The lobby has a full-length window that looks out on a driveway that leads up to the building.

A police car drives up to the building, which I see from my seat in the lobby. The front-desk manager of the apartment building goes outside to inquire. "We're here to see a Gary Freedman. We're waiting for backup." "Backup!" says the front-desk manager, incredulously. "Mr. Freedman is a very gentle man, that's him sitting in the lobby." The police look at me from their patrol vehicle.

The police cars start to arrive, one after another. Five in all. Ten police officers of the Metropolitan District of Columbia Police Department arrive on the scene. In addition, four FBI agents show up. Fourteen police officers and federal agents in all.

The police enter the lobby. "Are you Gary Freedman?" "Yes," I say.

"Did you write a letter to St. John's University, a job application?" "Yes."

"Don't you know you can't write a letter like that to someone?"

The police frisked me for weapons. They escorted me back to my apartment, at my suggestion. Apparently that allayed their concerns to some degree. They no longer believed they were dealing with a homicidal maniac, but a severely disturbed individual. They didn't ask to search my apartment.

"Here," I said. "Here's a copy of a brief I wrote defending my position against allegations made by my employer that I'm a dangerous person."

"Who wrote this for you," the police asked.

"I did." An officer leafed through the brief that I had filed with the DC Court of Appeals. "Apparently you have your lucid moments." Yes, they thought I was crazy.

"I have clothes in the laundry room. I'm doing a wash. Can I go downstairs to get my laundry?" "No. We're certainly not going to let you go anywhere."

"This matter needs to be resolved," I said, referring to the allegations that I was potentially violent and homicidal. An officer said, "This is going to be resolved. Believe me, this is going to be resolved today!"

A police detective questioned me. "How can all these people say these things about you and none of it is true. Some of it must be true." There were two officers and a detective in my small studio apartment. The other officers and agents waited in the hall outside my apartment. Some were in the lobby.

An officer walked out of my apartment to talk to officers in the hall. They reached some kind of decision.

I didn't volunteer any information. They didn't read me my rights. I knew I was not going to be arrested. If they were going to make an arrest, they would Mirandize me. What were they planning to do?

"Come on. We're going," an officer said to me. I walked out of my apartment, and locked the door. I was led up to the lobby. "Is everything all right?" the front-desk manager called out to me.

I was led to a waiting patrol vehicle on the street in front of the apartment building. An officer handcuffed me. "This is just protocol. We don't think you're dangerous."

I was taken to DC General for a forensic psych exam. It was called a transport. We arrived at the psych ward of the hospital, where the handcuffs were taken off. It was early afternoon.

I was assigned to admitting. Someone took my valuables. I was given a hospital bracelet. A nurse took my blood pressure and temperature.

A brief time later someone questioned me about the letter I had written. The letter that had landed me in the hospital. "How do you know I'm not just a scam artist?" "A scam artist? the man said. "How so?" "Maybe I just act crazy to keep my disability checks flowing. Maybe there's nothing wrong with me. Maybe I just act crazy as part of a scam on the Social Security Administration. Well?" "That's what we're here to find out," the man said.

I was told to sit in the waiting area. A television blared in the room, while security agents monitored the patients. Some were asleep on couches. Others mumbled incoherently, or stared into space.

I wasn't scared. I thought, "I'll talk to the psychiatrist and then they'll let me go."

The hours passed. "Do you want something to eat?" a security guard asked me. "No," I said.

I waited and waited. I watched the psychiatrists, the patients, the security guards. I ignored the television. How long can this go on, I kept thinking.

It was now about eight o'clock in the evening. Finally, I was led into a small room by a psychiatrist, a Dr. Martin. She was a psychiatry resident. "Why did you write the letter?" "Why did people say these things about you?" "Have you ever had thoughts of committing a violent act?" "Are you seeing a psychiatrist?" The doctor's questioning was polite. Her demeanor was casual. Though I knew that meant nothing. She could just as easily decide to commit me or let me go.

The questioning lasted about thirty-five minutes or so. The psychiatrist left the room to consult with her supervisor. She returned. "We have decided not to make a commitment." The wait was over.

I was allowed to leave. I kept thinking:"Am I now free. Really free?"

Fortunately, there was a Metro station about two blocks from the hospital. I took the subway home. By about 9:30 that evening I was back at my apartment.

Though it probably has its moments, the average day spent in hiding is bound to beat the average day spent in confinement. That I now knew with certainty.

A Despairing Letter to My Sister

I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy, and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil, I have no friend: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate in my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavor to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling.

I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother!

What I'm Looking for in a Friend

What am I looking for in a friend? I suppose I'm looking for someone like the actor David Duchovny.

Goethe once said: "In the end, every idea is just a fart." I suppose great minds run along the same paths. Everything is just a collection of body functions. As David Duchovny once said about acting: "The human part of acting is all about basic body functions. Basically, the less complicated you are, the more primary your motivation is, the better actor you are. You take it down to the basics: eating, pissing, shitting, fucking. Those are the kinds of emotions that read. They're strong and good. They come across."

I guess, in the end, I'm looking for an intellectual relationship. A friendship with an intellectual guy, -- maybe Ivy, like David Duchovny -- someone with whom I can discuss abstract intellectual ideas. You know Duchovny got his B.A. in English from Princeton and was working on his Ph.D. at Yale when he went into acting. His dissertation at Yale was going to be titled: "Magic and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction and Poetry." Now that's what I'm looking for in a friend. A healthy taste for the intellectual and abstract.

Not that there's not another side to Dave: a homely, earthy, bawdy, Holmesean side. A world of eggplant and penises. Here's a description of David Duchovny eating lunch during a break in filming a movie, back in 1999: He's wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He is relaxed, affable even, playing a guy shooting the shit with a friend in a corner booth of a diner. He probes the contents of a Styrofoam container, the daily special from his favorite vegetarian restaurant, driven by special courier to the set, near a national park in Calabasas, an hour northwest of Hollywood. "Oh, my God," he says with mock horror, poking at a large eggplant, skinned, in a viscous brown sauce. "I think I've found John Holmes's penis!" That's John Holmes, the porn star -- not Oliver Wendell, although exactly how covert Justice Holmes's private side was remains a mystery. He might have done some porn in his day, though not videos, of course.

Duchovny's humor is your typical elevated Ivy humor -- Princeton, Yale, Skull and Bones humor -- wry, abstract, witty and urbane. A typical Duchovny joke: "I don't want to brag about the size of my cock, but I just got a sex change and a guy was fucking me the other day and he said: You have the biggest pussy I have ever fucked!" That's real Captain Vagina, Columbia University humor.Yes, that's what I'm looking for in a friendship. Wry, urbane, witty asides offered up amid intellectual abstractions concerning eggplant and penises. It's just so hard for me to find friends I can commune with on my level. Besides, eggplant is out of season right now.

Between Fear and Hope

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment.




I fear disappointment. I tremble before the prospect of disappointment. My early years sensitized me to dashed hopes, and the inevitable disappointment that followed. Today I shrink from life, lest I be seduced by hope, only to experience that hope evaporate.

I fear that psychotherapy holds out hopes for me that cannot be realized. Those who have been subjected to attempts at soul murder require one quality from the therapist or analyst above all others: patience. It is not hard to understand why change must be slow: there is so much distrust. The emotional connecting necessary for insight is initially more than soul-murdered people like me can bear. I learned as a child that to be emotionally open, to want something passionately, was the beginning of frustrating torment. The deeply ingrained bad expectations are felt toward parents and all "grown-ups." The distrust is based not only on the projection of "bad" feelings (derived from the aggressive drives and the inevitable frustration of wishes), which give rise to intimations of losing control and a terror of being overwhelmed by feeling. Such fears beset every child in the course of development; they also lurk in our subsequent fantasy life (although their intensity varies with the individual).

In addition to this, the distrust of parents and the entire affectively charged environment is based for soul-murder victims on experienced reality. I was abused and neglected and have learned a lesson: if I cannot trust mother and father, whom can I trust? So a really meaningful alliance with the analyst takes a long time to develop, although at first it may appear that one exists; in therapy I am likely to behave in an "as if" fashion, to posses a facade of relatedness that combines compliance to what is usually expected with a provocative defiance that has a gamelike quality for me. People around me must not matter too much.

And so I live in fear of hope.