Psychoanalysis: The Magic and The Lie - Diary of a Five Day A Week Analysis 2005copyrightEsther Altshul Helfgott All Rights Reserved |
Isn't it strange how I weave myself back and forth from second person to first, as if someone else were sitting here beside me? My diary used to play that role for me. A three-ring loose-leaf notebook filled with yellow-lined pages, it was my confidant, my real best friend who sometimes kept my obsession with him from drowning us, but completely. Now that the analysis is over (and my mother died since then), I don't use my diary the way I used to. I don't keep it with me the same way anymore, and I miss it. I miss the part of me that used to write obsessively. Every waking moment a sheet of paper -- in the bathroom, in the car, by the kitchen sink. Not just to catch the words that needed trapping so I could dream and I could sleep but to understand the gaps in my thinking, in my writing, in my speech. Psychoanalysis changed my writing self, just as academia did. Now, I carry around a hard-backed blue notebook, the size of a mouse pad. I hardly write in it. Weeks go by, and the blank pages remain. I've unplaced myself. Where I used to write is gone. Now I'm cured, I want my madness back. Marie Cardinal, author of the autobiographical novel, The Words to Say It, dedicates the book she wrote about her psychoanalytic experience: "To the doctor who helped me be born." As if she had not been born before her analysis began. As if the person she became when the analysis was over was really different from the Marie who existed before. Perhaps, in her case, that was true. It was not in mine, and every analysis is different, to be sure. Whereas, psychoanalysis increased Cardinal's strength by helping her come to terms with conflicts in her past, psychoanalysis seemed to do the opposite for me. (At least, at this moment of writing, it seems so to me). It made me weaker than I was before, more dependent, as if I were a child of two again, waiting for Mother or Father or Brother to stand beside me, to hold my hand. I learned in psychoanalysis that my wait for them would never end; and so the waiting stopped, just like that, it stopped. And in place of Mother, Father, Brother and a sister finally born, I waited for my analyst; I waited for him. I talked to him, to us; but I waited for him. Ultimately, I waited for the analysis to end so we could be together, but always. Only part of this is true. The wait for Mother, Father, Brother, Sister, the Extended Family, did not stop; it never did. Only wish and fear said it did. And a fantasy life that kept me in the room with him. Two fantasy lives. Because in spite of his professional life -- the conferences he went to, the seminars he taught, the lectures he gave -- his life, as he spent it with me, plus his own imaginings from the past, reflected as they were in his interpretations, kept me in the room with him as surely as mine kept him in the room with me. All the fantasies and feelings, the ones clinicians call transferences - those that were mine - and the fantasies and feelings that were his - the ones clinicians call countertransferences, these trapped us in each others minds until we bled. I bled profusely; and though he tried to hide it, he bled too. I saw him bleed. In front of me, behind me, sometimes, even beside me. He bled. I saw him, I tell you. I saw him bleed. And how could he not? All that I told him. All that he told me. And didn't. |
Post-Analytic Diary 1995-2001 A Day in 1997 |
Psychoanalysis: The Magic and The Lie Diary of a Five Day A Week Analysis by Esther Altshul Helfgott, Ph.D. |
My mother, Anna, took this photo with the old Brownie I still use as a mock bookend, too light as it is to support anything but a 1940s reflection. Uncle Izzy had recently come home from the war and took us for a Sunday drive in his new car. |
At my father's sister's farm, Cockeysville, Md. Mother's hand is on my shoulder. |
Uncle Izzy, one of Mother's four younger brothers, was the gentlest man I knew. |
Psychoanalysis: The Magic and The Lie - Diary of a Five Day A Week Analysis 2005copyrightEsther Altshul Helfgott All Rights Reserved |
Helfgott Family, Post WWII |
This page was last updated on: July 10, 2005
