Of all the patients I have seen in my 40 years as a psychoanalyst, Daniel was the strangest. He was the most inaccessible, inwardly tormented and infuriating man I have ever known, and yet he stayed in therapy with me for over a decade, calling faithfully every week — he insisted that his work schedule precluded coming in person — even though he spent many of those sessions in silence or addressed me as if I were inanimate. He drove me crazy, he haunted me and he moved me, sometimes all in the same session.
The reason he came to me was simple. He wanted, as he put it, to “become a participant in the human race,” and to learn how to relate to others of his species. I was hired to teach him how to do it.
Daniel initially chose me for this job because he had read a book I wrote about “problem siblings” that resonated with his own childhood. He had been terrorized by his older brother’s daily violent outbursts, which his parents had done nothing to contain, and had concluded early on that relationships offered no comfort or satisfaction, merely depletion and misery.
Needing or being needed by anyone seemed perilous to Daniel. He barely exchanged a word at work with colleagues whom he’d known for years, and his home, which he shared with his extraordinarily longsuffering wife (who had problems of her own), had the air of a monastery, where words were exchanged only by necessity.
Daniel rarely followed through on anything I recommended: having brief conversations by appointment with his wife, going to the company cafeteria, keeping a journal of his thoughts, emailing me between sessions. He would always agree to try, and then find excuses or forget the assignment.
[For more of this story, written by Jeanne Safer, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...ight-region&_r=1]
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