!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
My therapist returned from her August vacation just in time to save me from complete collapse before I started classes again my second year at B.U. As usual, we did not discuss her time off. I so wanted to ask her whether she, like many other Boston and New York analysts, spent that time on Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket. A great source of fantasy for me, she assiduously avoided any possibility of transference on that topic.
“What did you think, when you read Mike has found someone else to move in with? Do you still have conflict over whether that should have been you?”
Having dealt with my feelings alone for two weeks, I was ready with an answer. “It’s his life, isn’t it? That particular ship of dreams sailed a long time ago for me. I know I’m happy for him, on the intellectual plane. It’s just what he’d been looking for, all these years, I suspect, someone to play on the beach with.”
“You never wish that could have been you?”
“Apart from me loving it here in Boston, and him being enraptured with California life, yes, I do think about that now and then.” I didn’t want to open up any further about that, so I stayed silent, staring the the picture of a storm-tossed clipper ship on the wall next to her diplomas.
On cue, she persisted, “When you do, what do you feel?”
I sighed, knowing she would not let this go. “Sadness. Faded love. I wonder what he’s like, what she’s like, what they are like together. But not enough to find out. I think I’m ready to leave that behind completely. I don’t have time for memories, for the could-have-beens in the past. It’s hard enough working on a doctorate. Maybe it’s sublimation, turning things like that, like Howard leaving, into energy for, say, coming up with a thesis topic. I’m 25 now. They are part of me, always will be, and I’m grateful for that. But I don’t need them to be who I want to be. I’m getting there on my own”
To my amazement, she seemed satisfied. “And what about that thesis, Sarah?”
I smiled, and said, “I have my first meeting with my advisor next week.”
Julia Klein was one of the few female psychologists in the department at B.U. After getting her Ph.D from Yale 10 years earlier, she had stayed in New Haven until offered a tenure track in Boston in 1969. I asked for her after discovering her interest in childhood trauma, its effects and prevention. I thought she could help me use my experiences in the Childhood Development Unit to find a suitable study topic for my dissertation.
“It’s a hidden truth, Sarah,” she told me at our first meeting. “The men in our profession don’t see it, or won’t admit it, but millions of women know, abuse of children leaves scars that often get hidden.” I nodded, not really knowing where she might be going with this. “It’s the source, the fount of so many problems which bring people to a therapist.”
“What do you mean, ‘abuse’? People hitting their kids? Getting angry at them, emotional trauma?”
“Well that certainly does happen, but those things have not been kept in the shadows. I’m not talking about just getting yelled at, or spanked or beaten.” She paused, blinked her eyes rapidly, and went on. “Girls suffering at the hands of the men in their lives, young girls, teenagers, who are used by their fathers, brothers, uncles, neighbors. Then made to feel ashamed, as if it was their fault for being born female.”
I’d certainly heard about this, but never connected it before to the study of psychology. Freud certainly didn’t give it much credence. “I see,” was all I could say.
“Sexual abuse. Childhood sexual abuse. It can be so traumatizing, disorganizing a young woman’s relationship with her body, leading her to look for love in, say, risky sexual encounters. Damaging her ability to care for and raise her child if she does get pregnant. Since we don’t talk about it very much, it hasn’t been studied well. If we don’t study it, we can never know how to help those who suffer from it, or help create a better environment so it doesn’t happen, break the cycle, so to speak.”
Not knowing how to respond, I looked over at a painting on the wall to my left. A blue-jay, caught in raucous mid caw, its beak open, head tilted back, sat on a dark evergreen surrounded by impressionist yellow sun-splotches. “That’s an interesting painting,” I ventured.
“Oh, thank you. It’s one of mine, my hobby. So relaxing, to paint pure nature, after spending all day in the often dark corridors of the human mind.”
“Beautiful,” I murmured.
As if to herself, she said, “Art labors to make whole what is incomplete, to supplement by an act of imagination the fragments and scraps of life.”
I pulled out my pen, asking, “Wow, can you say that again?”
“Not mine,” Julia said. “I heard it last summer, in England, talking with a woman named Briggs, a Virginia Woolf scholar.”
All that Fall, we discussed possible thesis topics. Our bi-weekly sessions were the highlight of that year, as we talked about combining what interested me – mothers and their new babies – with what might be valuable for the future of our science.
“Young women – girls – who get pregnant. Is there anything we can do to help them get on the right path with their babies? What makes some of them more resilient, better able to love and nurture their child, instead of ignoring, rejecting, or otherwise inhibiting, harming their growth?” JK mused one December morning. “I think that’s something which would draw together all the threads of your interests, all your passion, Sarah.”
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