Against Mental Health

If I ever see a shrink again it’ll have to be under a court order.

No, my rancor has nothing to do with what
happened with Frieda. Not, of course, that what happened with her wasn’t
at the time disappointing.

Fiftyish, on the boards of major
psychiatric associations and married to a man who was also a prominent
doctor, Frieda had been working with me for three years on my guilt and
shame problem. Although I wasn’t making much progress in that area — I
remained as afflicted by self-deprecation and most of the maladjustments
that attached to it as ever — I had, with her assistance, finally
stopped trying to go down on myself. And for helping to rid me of this
hazardous independence seeking compulsion — it had already resulted in a
couple of blown-out discs in my lower back and several hospitalizations
— I’d come to have a large admiration for her skills.

Large enough to send a live-in girlfriend to her for counseling.

While I was partial to poor hygiene and
self-destructiveness in a woman, I did have my limits. This girlfriend’s
habit of blowing her nose with her hair, for example, had long caused
my proudest erections to scramble into my bladder somewhere. What’s
more, the drug overdoses had evolved into too regular a thing. Routinely
called at work by neighbors who’d discovered her face down on the
apartment house stairs, and rushing home to flashing lights and frenzied
paramedics cutting through clusters of onlookers with a gurney, was
increasingly vexing.

But after they’d had a half-dozen sessions
together — the last couple of which were scheduled in the evening and
were unusually lengthy — the phone rang in the middle of the night.

“Let me speak to Madeleine.”

“Freida? Freida, Jesus, it’s three AM, she’s fast asleep.”

“Oh. Is her little winkie pinkie nestled in her nostril?”

“What? Uh, yeah. In the big nostril — like always.”

“Marcus, damn you, you’re in my way. Get out of my way.”

“Frieda?”

“Your grandmother was right, Marcus, you should have been aborted. Now give me Madeline. I need Madeline!”

But Frieda, you see, was ultimately
harmless. In fact, in hindsight, she left me better off than she found
me. She left me, that is, more profoundly wedded to my considerable
emotional issues than I’d been before.

Indeed, just a short time later I was in traction again.

No, I never had a true beef with Frieda. My quarrel is with the fool I saw after Frieda, with the bastard who cured me.

I knew Tim was special on our very first
meeting. In his mid forties, attired in a cashmere sweater and freshly
pressed khakis, he was tanned and radiantly handsome, with a perfectly
proportioned middleweight’s body (no slack anywhere), a fully relaxed
countenance, a deeply sonorous voice and a quick and booming laugh that
made me think of church bells. But if his appearance and bearing weren’t
enough, I was thoroughly enthralled when, as I seated myself in his
office — a spacious, sun-filled Upper West Side apartment that was
furnished with exquisite taste and adorned with plants and abstract
paintings — he took a long look at me, smiled, and said, “There’s
nothing wrong with you.”

That remark — and the accompanying scent
of Joop! Homme that gently wafted off of him — sealing the deal, I had
no doubts whatsoever about this guy’s competence to help me. He was the
real thing, a man who’d gotten into the psychology business to the
purpose of sharing an earned wisdom — not, like many of his colleagues,
in the hope of flushing out his personal demons and solving his own
mysteries by delving into the disturbances of his patients.

And imagining, during the appointments
which followed, that the faint strains of tasteful semi-classical music
always emanating from the other side of his office wall — music
interspersed with peals of laughter — were from a party that his
recently mended patients were having in the apartment next door (an
ongoing party to which you were invited upon your achievement of mental
health), helping me, or so I thought, is what he proceeded to do.

My situation, as I explained it, had
commenced at the age of four (I was in my thirties now) and originated
with my maternal grandmother. She was an exceptionally attractive woman —
sixty at the time but freakishly capable of passing for forty — who’d
come to live with us in the guest room of our apartment when my
grandfather died. Vain, self-centered and foul-tempered, she immediately
took a tyrannical command of the household and was critical of
virtually everything my mother and father did. She reserved most of her
ire for me, however. Relentlessly on my case, she berated and belittled
me at every turn, with either snide comments or, when she was especially
exercised, vitriolic outbursts.

My parents, who were both employed, left
me alone with my grandmother much of the time. But even when they were
home, they were too intimidated by her to counter her attitude towards
me. In fact, I cannot recall a single instance in which they more than
half-heartedly came to my defense.

Born frail and high strung, I’d been
cursed as a kid with a plethora of allergies and disposed to continual
minor illnesses, and my grandmother’s favorite appellative for me,
before it was determined that I needed glasses and she took to
addressing me as “four eyes,” was “weakling.” (When those glasses were
deliberately broken by a classmate three times my size, and I didn’t
fight back, she called me a “wimp.”)

But that was only a piece of it. My
performance in an elementary school musical wasn’t exactly “reminiscent
of Fred Astaire.” Because some of my grades were less than excellent
they “tarnished the reputation of the family.” Moreover, I was an
“inveterate slob.” She was forever haranguing me about the stains on my
shirts and the condition of my room. Much to her irritation, crumbs
seemed to follow me everywhere, obliging her to constantly pursue me
with a broom (the handle of which she often used to poke me in the
back). On top of that, I kept my hair too long, at a length that,
obscuring portions of my face, I felt comfortable with. But she twice
embarrassed me by forcing me to return to the barber shop to have more
cut off.

The most egregious of my offenses occurred
when I was six and barfed into her jewelry box, which happened to be
open on the dresser in her room, where I’d gone to chase an errant
Spaulding. The event was entirely spontaneous. No feelings of nausea had
preceded it. Frantic, I was about to try and clean the mess I’d made
when my grandmother entered. Her wrath was awesome. Screaming loudly,
slapping me in the face and calling me disgusting and despicable, I was
never allowed in her room again. (It was on that day that she would
utter the “abortion” statement and tell me I was ruining her life.)

Though she never enunciated a word of
praise for me or demonstrated any physical affection in all the time
preceding her death when I was in my teens, my grandmother did
exhibit odd moments of ostensible kindness. She baked a cake for my
eighth birthday and gave me an occasional present — a toy truck, a
baseball glove. But rather than interpreting such gestures as loving, I
experienced them, under the circumstances, largely as acts of pity, and
they managed only to harden my sense of worthlessness.

In the ensuing decades, and although I’d
been reasonably active and held full-time (if unrewarding) jobs, the
outcomes of my sense of worthlessness, besides a variety of peccadillos,
one of which I’ve mentioned, had been a chronic middle-grade depression
that was accompanied by a notable absence of aspirations, a marked
diffidence in the presence of strangers and a series of unsatisfactory,
when not downright abominable, relationships — I had little to give to
anyone and elicited just as little in return.

Tim patiently listened to my story, then
leaning forward and staring directly at me, he said, “Feelings of guilt
and shame are neurotic, useless and stupid. They serve no purpose and
help nothing.” I’d heard as much from four or five other shrinks without
really digesting it — Frieda who, incidentally, had divorced her
husband, married Madeline and quit her practice — was among them. But
when Tim expressed this notion it took hold.

Absolutely, I thought, of course.

On another occasion he said: “I can’t
comprehend how amazingly passive your parents were. Look. You were a
victim — and so apparently were they — of a deeply unhappy person with
serious anger issues for which you bore no responsibility and you
internalized everything negative that she threw at you. Well, maybe she
had a point about the crumbs, which I always have to vacuum up when you
leave. But you didn’t ruin your grandmother’s life. It was already in
ruins. She made you believe that your childhood physical ailments, most
of which you eventually outgrew, and your youthful mistakes, goof-ups,
fears and misbehavior were signs that you were an inherently bad person,
that you were deficient and inferior. This filled you with a consuming
sense of guilt. You came to define yourself as deficient and inferior.
But whatever upset your grandmother didn’t mean that you were a bad
person. You were a kid, for God’s sake. You were a sensitive kid who may
sometimes have quite naturally behaved incorrectly or acquitted
yourself in a less than stellar way. Fred Astaire? It’s okay to
feel remorse or regret when you do something wrong. You learn from that
and go on. But it’s not okay to feel a guilt that makes you think of
yourself as intrinsically bad. That’s the height of neuroticism. You
feel, now, in your adult life, that there’s nothing you can do about it
because being bad is who and what you are. That it’s your nature. Now
your belief that you’re bad contributes to and sustains a type of
behavior that just makes you feel worse about yourself.

“Your grandmother was a screwed up bitch. A child in a woman’s body. Get conscious, man!”

Along with such pronouncements, Tim, who
was adamantly opposed to the use of drugs, instructed me to engage in
extensive exercises between sessions. For the most part they involved
making daily lists of my feelings of self-loathing which, he promised,
would enable me to see how these feelings were merely the result of
dysfunctional thinking.

And it worked! Life transformed into
something joyous. I felt attractive and confident for the first time in
my life. Enthusiastic about virtually everything I encountered,
associating with people I would normally have considered to be above my
station, I was even seeing better and could do without my glasses. I
also stopped showering right after I masturbated — a pathetic
soul-cleansing ritual that I’d practiced since adolescence and that had
given my skin an unattractive prunish texture.

(Oh, and I was correct about the party. There was
a constant gathering of the freshly healed in the adjacent apartment
and I got to go to it. I celebrated my new mental health and got laid to
boot.)

But then, just like that, as if I’d plummeted into an unseen manhole, everything got very dark.

In early spring, on one of those rare
shining, cloudless days, with the temperature at a perfect 70 degrees, I
was strolling though a crowded street festival replete with brightly
colored merchandise stands, a rock band, a children’s Ferris wheel and
the aromas of all manner of ethnic cuisines, and realized that every
last one of the people there would one day vanish. Me included! I
suddenly saw, and much too distinctly, through the benign facade of
nature into its sinister underside. And with this recognition, which
wouldn’t go away, I began to live in what became a continuous state of
intense anxiety. Much of the time I cowered in my bed. I was afraid of
accidents. Terrified of germs. Even the notion of achieving a kind of
immortality through the prospect of reincarnation, which I’d sometimes
entertained over the years, offered no consolation now. While oblivion
would be awful enough, with reincarnation I could very well return as a
gazelle only to be ripped apart by a leopard.

Tim had raised my consciousness too high.

And then it struck me. Born under a death sentence we are naturally
prone to feel terror and guilty — guilty of whatever we did to deserve
our harrowing fate. We can’t withstand the guilt and the consequence of
our ultimate expiration that we assume has resulted from an irredeemable
transgression. We need to become absorbed in substitute, potentially
rectifiable forms of guilt. Acquired or neurotic kinds of guilt.
Neurotic guilt is ubiquitous and tenacious because it functions to
divert us from, and ameliorate the awareness of, our fundamental guilt
and the penalty that awaits us. We persuade ourselves that the acquired
problem we’re dealing with is the real and only one and that by focusing
on it we can conceivably fix it and be happy. (Crucially, the
discomfort and emotional pain it causes us imbues it with the
authenticity that we need to serve our goal.) But the kicker is that
since it palliates a deeper and more pressing issue, we are averse to really
fixing it. So, and necessarily in the interest of psychic
self-preservation, we immerse ourselves in it. We “work” on it. We make
an infinite project of it. (Essentially ineffective, interminable
therapy, for instance.)

I could see now that my grandmother was
suffering from a terror similar to mine, that her animosity towards me
was rooted in the fact that by making her a grandmother I had brought
her worse fears to the fore and that she had handled those fears in her
own idiosyncratic way. (You could say that how we respond to the fear of
death, the often convoluted manner in which we repress it, is central
to what distinguishes us from one another.) Downtrodden as she may have
made me, she had kept me afloat in the world. She’d presented me with a
way to deal with the problem of being alive by giving me a makeshift
problem that, albeit oppressive, I could abide. By losing the effects of
my grandmother’s disdain for me I no longer had an acceptable reason
for what was wrong. The guilt my grandmother laid on me had been a
blessing. Removing it didn’t liberate me but opened me to unmitigated
horror. Mental health is the enemy, it yields a clarity that undermines
and impedes anything resembling a satisfactory solution to our
existential dilemma. To thoroughly clear oneself of neuroses is
calamitous. We require a measure of mental illness in order to live with
even a semblance of internal equilibrium.

I owed my grandmother big-time for providing me with the burden of low self-esteem and its attendant disorders and miseries.

But now I was defenseless — and genuinely fucked up! (I wondered how many of Tim’s ex-patients were still at that party.)

So what did I do? I got my ass to a
psychopharmacologist, that’s what I did. No therapy. Just pills. After
months of experimenting with a multitude of anti-anxiety medications,
most of which produced bizarre nightmares, we settled on Thorazene. No
longer beset with trepidation (psychotropics are, at bottom, fear of
death medicines, are they not?), but in a perpetual semi-stupor instead,
I have literally no life to speak of anymore. Still, if I’m usually all
but comatose, there are hours when I’m sufficiently sentient to feel
cheated. Then what I fervently want is to appear unannounced at Tim’s
office door and, when he opens it, tear away, piece by piece, the
beaming-with-mental-health mask on his face, the mask that concealed the
skeleton behind it.