Eve Marx

My first brush with therapy came in college, the first semester of my freshman year in an introductory acting class. It was taught by a practicing psychotherapist named Dee Henoch who had a double life as an actress and director. She was dedicated to the school of Method Acting, which as she explained was actually therapy. “The Method,” as she called it, forced actors to reach into their past to summon raw feelings and naked responses to things they had personally experienced. In class, we recreated primal scenes where we were told to briefly inhabit the personas of other people who, at heart, were us. Having started college at 17, I was the youngest person in the class. Luckily, I had plenty of traumatizing life experiences to draw on.

One day I was assigned a scene where I was paired with another young woman who had thirty pounds on me and at least seven inches. Have I mentioned I was an undersized shrimp? In the set-up, she was playing my mother and I the daughter who was late coming home. Somehow this scenario, which was all too real for me, imploded very quickly into my screaming, dissolving into tears, and throwing a vicious tantrum. Everyone in the class applauded but I had a hard time coming out of the scene. When the class was over, Dee pulled me aside and started asking questions.

“I think it would be beneficial for you to begin therapy,” she advised.

Having no means or ability to pay for therapy, let alone find a therapist, I started taking psychology classes. I read Adler. I read Kinsey. I read Fromm and Carl Rogers and Kubler-Ross. In no time at all, I came to the conclusion I was neurotic, paranoid, disaffected and suffered from an inferiority complex. At the same time, I credited myself for being a survivor and having the emotional agility to overcome trauma. I knew I was scarred and damaged from my early life and grasped that the very thick skin I developed to help me overcome my early obstacles might be the thing that would hobble me. At that point, I pledged myself to a life of constant self-examination.

In grad school, I had a work/study scholarship that required I be a counselor to others while being in counseling myself. For awhile, I saw a therapist on West End Avenue my aunt favored but he was old and boring. I spent most of our sessions wondering what my aunt saw in him. I got a side gig working for a clinical psychologist in the West Village. I was way uptown on the Upper West Side in a ratty apartment, subsisting on egg drop soup I made by dropping a raw scrambled egg into a can of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup.

The psychologist had a successful practice working almost exclusively with young women; he specialized in neurotics and narcissists and he had a lot of theories. By now I was self-styling myself as a writer even though I had no published work. The therapist — let’s call him Hank — hired me as his ghostwriter. Our deal was anything I wrote would have Hank’s name on it. For reasons unexplained, he was under professional pressure to get his thoughts in print. He sought publication not just in clinical professional journals, but also in The New York Times. He had a hard-on about a popular column named “Hers”, which he called “feminist bullshit.”

Our meetings consisted of me coming over in the evenings after he finished seeing patients. His office was also his residence, a ground floor unit in a doorman building near Washington Square Park on lower Fifth avenue. Patients could access the little anteroom he used as a reception area from a street entrance on the side of the building, circumventing interaction with the doorman. I preferred entering through the lobby, somehow feeling it was important the doorman monitor my comings and goings. I was pretty sure after our second meeting Hank was nuts. During our meetings, he sat in his therapist’s chair and I sat on the couch taking notes.

At first, I wrote down everything he said but since so much of it sounded either disorganized or crazy, I began jotting down phrases and fragments, hoping to piece together something publishable and coherent. After each meeting, I went back to my gritty apartment and typed up rough drafts of articles he might submit. About two months into our arrangement, I wrote something he loved so much he decided to send it to the Times. It was a letter to the editor rebuking a “Hers” column. To my amazement, the letter ran on the editorial page signed with Hank’s name. Even though I had no goals at all to be a ghostwriter, I was very pleased.

Our arrangement fell apart a few weeks later when I arrived early for our meeting. I sat quietly in the anteroom waiting for Hank to finish his session. Through the closed door, I could hear him talking to a patient. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He called her fat. He said she was unlovable. He said she would never keep a man. I could hear the woman weeping through the closed door. I was growing angrier by the minute.

The session ended and the woman came out. She looked just a few years older than me. She was definitely still in her 20s. I lowered my eyes respectfully so we didn’t have to make eye contact. She probably assumed I was his next patient. Hank left the door open and I entered his living room and took my seat on the couch. I pulled my notebook out of my bag and arranged my face to appear like I was ready to take notes.

Hank was in a bellicose mood. He paced. He ranted for a few minutes about self-absorbed neurotic women who channeled their neuroses into food.

“They either eat too much or they don’t eat at all!” he declared. “Let’s focus on that for our next subject.”

“I heard you call that woman ‘fat,’” I said, straining for an even tone. “You said she was unlovable. Do you think that was helpful or were you just trying to upset her?”

Hank glared. “So now you’re the expert?” he said. “One little letter in The New York Times with my name on it and you think you’re a therapist?”

“I think I’m going to write to the Times and tell them you’re a fake,” I said. “I’m going to tell them I wrote that letter and that you’re a lousy therapist.”

Hank’s face went red with anger. He clenched his hands into fists. He suddenly got up and went into the bathroom. I heard the lock click into place.

“Get out, get out,” he shouted. I walked closer and saw he was pushing twenty dollar bills at me under the door. I waited until there were five of them and then I left.

A few years later, I was working as an editor at the men’s magazine Penthouse. The really cool thing about the magazine was their policy to pay for any therapy you wanted. A few people were in classic Freudian analysis. The woman who edited the kinky digest magazine “Variations” was doing dream theory and role play. I chose a therapist who was trained in the Theodor Reik method. Reik himself had been a student of Freud in Vienna who went on to found the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City. My day job was selecting and editing Penthouse letters and writing under a pseudonym (still ghostwriting) a monthly column where sexual dreams and situations made up by me were analyzed by none other than the famous analyst Albert Ellis. Gradually, my work with the Reikian therapist, whose name was Ann, made me think that I might want to be a therapist. I admired Reik’s writings on criminology, masochism, literature, and religion. I regretted not going to the John Jay School of Criminal Justice. With the proper education, I would have been a great profiler. But that bus had left the station. It was too late for me to become a cop, but maybe I could be a therapist.

With Ann’s encouragement I applied to the NPAP training institute. I liked its location, on 13th Street in the heart of Greenwich Village and that, as a student, I was entitled to cheap therapy via the Theodor Reik clinical center. This arrangement helped pay Ann to be my therapist. I can’t say enough good things about her. She was, for a time, the mother I never had. We talked a lot about my mother and what a difficult person she was. Ann, who mostly listened, told me the clinical names for the mental illness my mother had and let me know that if one day my mother did succeed in killing herself, I was not to blame. She told me she thought it amazing I hadn’t grown up to be a prostitute or a drug addict. She seemed to think it was remarkable I grew up at all. Her words were powerful and liberating.

It wasn’t only about my mother. She asked me about my relationship with my cop boyfriend who was 17 years my senior and how I’d had no father but several excellent father figures. We talked about my fear of being in debt and dread of owing anybody. I saw her twice a week. At one point she urged me to come three times a week but that was too classic Freud for me. Also, seeing her more often would make it more difficult for me to keep anything private. It turned out I was good at deception, which I understood to be a form of acting, a technique I’d learned years before from Dee Henoch.

Just like my aunt’s shrink on the Upper West Side and the madman on lower Fifth, Ann used her apartment in Peter Cooper Village as her office. We met in the living room, which she kept fairly dark. The windows were covered with heavy drapes. There was beige-wall to-wall carpet and the couch and Ann’s chair were beige. It was very beige. There was no art on the walls or ornaments on shelves or even books that might give Ann’s taste away. She dressed very blandly in contrast to my girlfriend Kim’s therapist who wore cashmere and diamonds. Kim and I spent every Friday night together watching “Dallas,” ordering in Chinese, getting high, and discussing our therapists. Kim was in some kind of clothing competition with her therapist whose expensive style she admired. When she started getting her hair cut at Bumble & Bumble where her therapist went, I became concerned. While I wanted to be a therapist like Ann, I did not want to be Ann. I thought her apartment was awful.

One day when I arrived at Ann’s place, she seemed unprepared. Her office living room was a mess. For the first time ever, it looked like people were using it. There were wadded-up tissues on the end tables and a half drunk glass of water. “My son is home sick from school today,” she said apologetically. Until that moment, I didn’t know she had a son. This was exciting.

“I’ll do my best to pretend he’s not here,” I lied, settling in. I was obsessed to see her son, glimpse him slipping past the doorway. At one point I heard him coughing and there was the sound of a door opening and footsteps. I caught the briefest possible glance of an adolescent boy entering a bathroom. I was elated for weeks.

Around the middle of our third year working together I realized I was scripting my meetings with Ann. I was becoming a writer after all and felt I had to be amusing. I assume now that she saw through me and knew half of what I said to her was performance. From my classes at the Institute, I understood enough about the therapeutic process to know that, like transference, this was a phase I was going through. My concern was I wouldn’t come out of it and I’d never again be authentic in my treatment. One thing she said at the time stuck. We were discussing my fall-back position in times of stress to dissociate and detach and basically act, often, like nothing was happening.

“Why not try acting like a grown up?”Ann suggested. “If you’re acting, act like one of those.”

One day during therapy I asked Ann if this was what her working life was like, listening to people like me spend their fifty minutes nattering about their bad boyfriends, their lousy jobs, complaining about their roommates. Do you spend most of your day listening to privileged people whining? I asked.

“Well,” she said, “Yes, that’s a lot of it.”

I’m not really sure what happened but one day Ann took me by surprise to say she thought we were coming to the end of our work together. Maybe she got sick of my performing or she really thought we’d come as far as we could go. I remember being stunned. I asked how much time we had left. By this time, I was coming only once a week and seemed to have run out of things to say ten or fifteen minutes before our session was over. I was doing well at work and getting along with my bosses. I was still seeing the cop but I knew the end to that was near. My mother was gallivanting around with her new boyfriend and for the most part leaving me alone.

When we said goodbye, I asked if I could hug her as we stood in her hallway. In the three and a half years I’d been in treatment, this was the first and only time we touched. By then I’d quit taking classes at the Institute and dropped out of the program. I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a therapist. I was more interested in writing about people than healing them.

Ann gave me a big hug at the door. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “I have confidence you’ll find your way.”

For months after I stopped therapy I thought about calling Ann and booking a session. I broke it off with the cop. I changed jobs. Despite my progress, I often felt lost and in despair. But then I remembered things Ann told me about myself, and her confidence in me. I don’t remember Ann’s last name. What I remember is her gentle laugh and her boundless ability to listen. Maybe that’s all the therapy anyone needs. Someone to listen.