!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
The following Thursday, Petyr led us through “Sexual Boundaries: How feelings of guilt, shame, and anxiety surround erotic feelings and erotic counter-transference.”
“Sexual feelings between analyst and analysand often present pitfalls in the therapeutic process,” he began. “Analysts classically find it difficult to openly discuss their own feelings about the client, being unable to admit them to themselves, much less share with their colleagues, and especially with the patient.” As he spoke, he remained seated, hesitant to walk amongst us. His hooded eyes clung to his lecture notes while his hands rigidly held the paper. Afterwards, wrapping a shawl around his neck, he hurriedly grabbed his long wool coat and aimed quickly for the door.
Once in the atrium, he turned to find me, saying, “I’m sorry, Sarah. I will not be able to share dinner with you this evening, you and Jeanne. I must get to the train station, I’m picking up the boys, who are traveling with their mother. They are spending the Christmas holidays with me, while she gets to use the Vermont condo.” He sighed with resignation, then brightened a bit in ironic amusement. “It’s funny, I think, that they spent Chanukah with their mother, who is …not Jewish, and yet, due to the peculiar custom of shutting schools for two weeks during a holiday many of us do not recognize, they will live with me during that difficult fortnight.” With a slight bow, he slapped his Kangol cap over his bristly hair, turned, and strode out into the night.
Jeanne and I gather dinner from the carts, skeptically eyeing the attempt to mimic holiday fare: dried-out turkey breast, soggy peas, pale orange sweet potatoes ladled with runny faux-maple syrup.
“You’d think, given the history of psychoanalysis, and” – I glanced around the room – “the persuasion of the majority here, that we could dispense with this ritual?”
Jeanne laughed, crinkling her eyes into narrow slits. “Petyr’s not here, so you’re going to talk like him?”
I ignored the jab. “This sexual boundary stuff…Love seems simple. Isn’t that what we were saying last week? But you took years to find Roger, and I’ve…” I trailed off, vainly searching the plate for some latkes or gefilte fish.
Jeanne continued smiling. “Still looking for love in all the wrong places, Janie?”
“One thing I did learn, I think, is that true love – lasting love – comes from someone who cares about who you are, who you really are, not some imagined ideal, not what you mean or seem to them.”
“And you haven’t found that yet?”
“I don’t know,” I tried. “I want – I need – someone to whom I can give my heart, fully, but still retain my soul, for me. And be loved for being that person, who doesn’t swoon, who wants to create a couple, a family, a new creation, bigger, deeper, fuller, beyond either of us as individuals.”
Jeanne turned serious. “I’ve watched you, Ja…Sarah, this last month, here with Dr. Cohen. You don’t have that look of swooning – I’ve seen that in you before, you know – you seem fully yourself with him…”
“I know, I know. This love I’m talking about grows, grows slowly, doesn’t explode like it did when our bodies were bursting with fresh new ideas about the world. But Petyr – I don’t know. He’s still in…transition, still with one foot in New York, wondering why he can’t stay with his family, the other, here in Boston, looking for something new.”
“It doesn’t feel like time yet, you mean?”
I gently laid my knife and fork across the still-full plate, and slowly pushed it towards the center of the table.
After New Year’s, we returned to discuss “Erotic Countertransference and Self-Disclosure.” Two weeks with his sons had refreshed Petyr Cohen. He filled the room with knowing laughs as he described the advantages of using erotic feelings in the analytic process, while warning us of the pitfalls.
“You do not want to be the Doctor who wakes up one morning to see his – or her – name and professional reputation besmirched in headlines in the Boston Globe. We must be even more careful, in these changing times, when the slightest raised eyebrow, wink, or half-smile could not only be misinterpreted, but even used against us as evidence of nefarious intentions and action.” He paused for emphasis, then said, “In this modern era, the dictum goes far beyond, ‘Keep your hands to yourself’.”
As we sat down I asked Petyr, “How are your sons?”
He breathed in deeply, smiled, and spread his arms wide. “They are both growing, so much, so fast. Stuart, the older, has begun to read the books I’ve been sending, a new one every month. The latest is a history of the Lewis and Clark expedition. He told me he wished he had the chance to go off, explore, and discover someplace untouched by man. Peter, he’s all involved with his new roller skates, the fancy kind with urethane wheels, what to they call them?”
“Inline?” Jeanne prompted.
‘ “Inline. Yes, that’s it. Perfect for rolling along through the park while his mother jogs beside him…” He caught himself short, frowned, and grew pensive.
I put in, “That’s Petyr, Junior?”
“No, with an ‘e’, not my ‘y’. Too much of a burden, I think, to pass that on.”
“Last time, Jeanne and I talked about your seminar, and got into a discussion of love again. Made me think, want to ask you, why do people pair up? What is the driver of love?”
He seemed to relax with the opportunity to delve into a favorite topic of his. “Of course, in all creatures, the iron tyranny of DNA, of sexual reproduction, demands a mate. It may be the most powerful force on the planet, the insistence of those four nucleic acids to replicate their double helical structure.”
“Oh?” I countered skeptically.
“Yes. Think of how much the surface of our sphere, our Gaia, has been changed by evolution, how the very oxygen in atmosphere was created by plants, how long-dead creatures have returned to further fill our air with their nitrogen and carbon oxides.”
I scoffed, “I think you’re getting far afield from what I asked!”
“No, listen. Even though intellectually, scientifically, we can see that human reproduction is a primary basis for people pairing up, the magic, the beauty, the miracle of it all is that we feel this urge not as a pure primal desire, but has something hallowed and fulfilling, as love. Forming couples, forming families, is at our very core, what makes us alive, what keeps us alive.” He placed his napkin down for emphasis.
I heard an echo in my head, and shared it with Petyr and Jeanne. “Life, life itself, is reason enough to be living, I like that, I like that very much.”
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