There was an inappropriate harshness in my voice as I pointed out to Melinda Gold hart that her behavior toward the boyfriend she complained endlessly about was provocative and self-fulfilling. “Don’t you see,” I threw at her like stones, “the man behaves badly because you want him to behave badly.”
She shook loose a tear. I was supposed to feel sorry for mistreating her. Instead, I felt annoyance, wanted to shake some real tears out of that calculating soul. I was also aware — dimly — that these feelings were inappropriate, that I was behaving unprofessionally, that I was out of control.
Why do I go on like this?
This is not a confession but an investigation into feeling. I am imperfect.
Melinda’s parents had refused all authority, had pretended to Melinda that she could do anything she liked. They had offered her a world without boundaries, a dazzling chaos. Every step was a step off a precipice into space. The simplest acts for Melinda engendered paralyzing anxieties.
When Melinda first went into treatment with me she rarely talked during the therapy session. She withheld speech willfully, talked to me in her head, as she later reported, but could barely articulate a complex sentence in my presence. She was afraid of exposing her secrets, she said. We tried different arrangements to make her feel less vulnerable. For a while, we sat with the backs of our chairs together. She worried when she couldn’t see me that I had gone away, or was reading a book, or had gone to sleep.
“What are you doing now?” she would ask from time to time.
“Why don’t you turn around and see for yourself,” I said.
She sometimes turned, sometimes didn’t.
The same or almost the same conversation repeated like an echo. The repetition seemed to comfort her like the routine of a game. I know it lulled me into a sense of false comfort. The routines we established between us broke down the feelings of strangeness, created a bond of familiarity.
We moved our chairs into a whole range of configurations. That too was part of the game. We could do anything in my office, I wanted her to see that, without real danger.
If I was Melinda’s parent in the sense that she imagined me as a parent, I was also much of the time a fellow child with her.
When Melinda began to talk in our sessibns, she talked non-stop, the words coming out in barrages like machine gun fire. She alternated between silence and prattle, the talk a disguised form of silence.
She sometimes talked to me as if she were talking out loud to herself.
In most of her relationships, Melinda felt herself to be the victim though in fact she tended to be the controlling one. She rarely allowed herself, despite her pretense that it was otherwise, to not be in control. A way to control situations, while at the same time not feeling responsible for her life, was to make herself appear to be a victim.
A victim needs a victimizer to complete the circle.
Melinda had been dating the same man for five years — she was twenty-three when she came to me — a man she complained about whenever his name came up in the conversation. He was insensitive to her feelings. She was repelled by much of his behavior and — this a recurrent obsession — his odor. The repulsion was uncharacteristic. Melinda was not ordinarily squeamish and was subject to few sexual taboos.
Why did she continue to see him if he repelled her?
She tended to ignore questions in areas of confusion or ambivalence, would take recourse in silence. It embarrassed her to admit there was any question she couldn’t answer.
On the evidence, it appeared that she continued to see the man in order to complain of his failings. He was her occasion for grievance.
Sometimes she would say no more than a dozen words in an entire fifty minute session.
I didn’t urge her to speak, not at first, not directly. I knew from our first meeting that to ask something directly of Melinda was to be denied. How did I know that?
“I want to be part of your life,” she told me on one occasion. “I want you to think of me when I’m not here.”
“Sometimes I do,” I said. “I think of all my patients.”
She mumbled something.
“What?…What?”
“It’s cold in here, Yuri. Would you turn off the air-conditioning please. I’d appreciate it if you would consider my comfort once in a while.”
“You sound as if you’re talking to a servant,” I said.
“I don’t think you like me,” she said. She had a sly smile on her face.
“If you don’t think I like you, why are you smiling?”
Melinda pushed the corner of her lips down with her fingers. “Am I ugly?” she asked with a slight stammer.
“You haven’t told me why you were smiling,” I said.
“I wasn’t,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand.
When she took her hand away, her tongue shot out at me. “Are you angry? I don’t want you to be angry with me.” She raised her eyes which had been averted.
“You’re a tease, Melinda,” I said. “That makes people angry.”
“Fuck you,” she said, shouted it at me.
Her outburst, because it seemed so uncharacteristic — she had always been exceedingly polite in our sessions — shocked me. My first impulse was to order her out of the office — I wanted to punish her for offending me. “Fuck you,” I said in return.
Her face broke. “I won’t be talked to that way,” she said. “You have no right to say that to me.”
“You handled that very well, Melinda,” I said.
She smiled joyously through her tears, wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand like a child. “Oh thank you,” she said.
We moved in these sessions between war and seduction, different faces of the same aggression.
Her accounts of experiences with the man she referred to as her boy friend were unvaryingly unpleasant. It worried me that I was encouraging her to disparage him, that I had a personal stake in her negative feelings toward other men.
I mention my difficulties with Melinda to Adrienne who says, under her breath, that my misunderstanding of the girl is symptomatic.
I ask her to explain this unflattering description but she is in another room, her attention focused elsewhere. When I persist she says, “What do you really want?”
“Human contact,” I say.
Adrienne laughs without amusement, laughs wryly, laughs with some measure of disdain.
Melinda protested again and again that I didn’t like her, that it was only because I wanted her money that I continued to see her.
I tried different responses, admitted on one occasion that I sometimes found her unbearable. My remark brought a smile to her face, a look of triumph.
She denied that she was smiling.
We were facing each other that day at my insistence. The denied smile persisted brazenly.
Did I say that Melinda was seductive? Have I mentioned it anywhere?
“I wish I had a mirror so that I could show you your face,” I said. “You continue to smile.”
“You too,” she said, her smile opening like a blossom.
I traced my lips with an imaginary finger. It was possible that our unacknowledged smiles mirrored one another.
I felt the strongest impulse to say something hurtful to her. My feelings must have expressed themselves in my face because she blanched, seemed almost to tremble.
“I have the feeling,” she said, “that this is the beginning of the end of our relationship.”
I was trembling, though I didn’t know why, did and didn’t. I was conscious of wanting to assure her that I had no intention of dropping her as a patient and conscious of withholding such assurance out of anger.