Mount Misery by Samuel Shem M.D

Author:Samuel Shem, M.D. [Shem, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81561-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

11

“It’s not working. This therapy’s not working. Let’s just forget it.”

It was a week later, halfway through my session with Cherokee, and I was about to lose him. I had used the Malik approach, first trying to persuade him to bring Lily in with him for a meeting. No way. Then I had suggested that his obsession with Schlomo fucking her was a turning away from his life.

“What life? I’ve got no life. You don’t get it. This overshadows everything. Focusing on it with you has made it worse. It’s there constantly now, just below the surface: ‘He’s fucking her in therapy.’ Today, the only thing I’m looking forward to is seeing your patient Christine again after my session’s over. In fact, I might as well leave early. Spend some extra time talking to her.” He started to rise from his chair. “Let’s just forget it. I guess I’m just a hopeless case.”

My heart sank. And I’m just a hopeless case as a therapist.

The past week had been a weird, conflicted time. There were only four patients on Thoreau, and so I had had time to read and think. And play basketball. Malik had organized a LAMBS game for the four adolescents, and I’d joined in. Even Oly Joe had uncurled once a day to play. But I had also started reading Freud, the papers A.K. had suggested: for Cherokee, paranoia; for Christine, penis envy during interminable analysis.

The paranoia paper was incredible. In a scant twelve pages Freud managed to describe the neurotic mechanisms in the normal condition, jealousy, the pathological condition, paranoia, and the reason for both these conditions, “a defense against homosexuality.” I’d been struck by how perfectly Cherokee fit Freud. I’d copied out a few quotes, which were now lying before me on my desk:

Delusional jealousy represents an acidulated homosexuality, and rightly takes its position among the classical forms of paranoia. As an attempt at defense against an unduly strong homosexual impulse it may, in a man, be described in the formula, “Indeed I do not love him, she loves him!”

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