Gazing in the mirror, my primal process still
in progress, I glimpse again fragments of another
process, ten years past, belonging to another
universe of style and method. I discover that
some traumatic events, previously dealt with in
analysis, appear altogether different as I
re-experience them on the primal path.
I fell and fractured both bones of my right
forearm when I was five years old. Under
analytic scrutiny, the memory of my hand:
paralysed, deformed, frightening before my
eyes, yielded only dim fantasies of punishment
for masturbating with that hand. Later in
primal work I recovered the terror of being alone
in a hospital, waiting to have my arm set; dreading they would put me to sleep and I might never
wake up.
Swimming out of the confused sleep of
anesthesia, I found my arm aching inside a
plaster prison, tied to the crib so I couldn't injure
it. I needed comfort, needed something or
someone familiar, but nobody was there all
night. I remembered the feeling of abandonment, the terrible helpless longing; until a nurse
came with some orange juice - my only relief
from fear and loneliness. I know now the terror
of that night was but one bead on a string upon
which hang earlier horrors of feeling totally
vulnerable to the hurt of losing Mommy. Against
those early pains, guilty fantasies about masturbation seem to pale. The top layers of fear, the
layers I could wrap my mind around without
being shaken deeply, were often interesting, but
revealed little of what lay closer to the core.
I was one of those people who found it hard to
feel and talk at the same time. Talking and
thinking used to shut off my feelings. Sometimes
when I was lying on the analytic couch, some
strange feeling would come over me. There were
no words to describe it. just as I was beginning to
sink silently into the feeling, the voice behind the
couch would prompt me to speak. As soon as I
would try to describe the feeling in words, it
would vanish. Often the analytic process cut off
my feelings in this way, though that was not my
intent nor the intent of a warm and caring
analyst.
There is something that hurts, looking back
even now, after many years: the scary, empty
feeling of deprivation that prevailed almost all
the time during my analysis. Was it only what
was already inside me, transferred, as the theory
says, into the analytic situation? Yes, and in
addition to that, it was the rigid discipline, the
abstinence from touching in analysis. I sensed
even then the unfulfilled possibilities of contact
with my analyst, which might have been more
healing than the enforced flowering of my
desperate fantasies of restitution - restitution for
what didn't happen then with my parents and
wasn't happening now with this new person.
It
was useful to find out that I had inside me a bad,
stony, terrifying witch-mother and a benign,
gentle, good mother - but I found out only with
my mind. None of my body sensations participated in that process because my mind was
always there, making words to shield my body in
the desert of the analytic field.
The healing times I remember best were not
moments of analytic brilliance. I came in one
day especially dejected and started dumping on
myself more cruelly than usual. Something in
what I said must have touched her, for, as I recall, before my analyst had even sat down, she
leaned over and said to me in a gentle voice,
"Why do you hurt yourself that way?" It was a
question that needed no answer, unlike many
other questions that came up during those four
and one-half years on the couch. It was a question that spilled the light of her compassion over
me and said to me, "You need not hurt yourself,
you can be good to yourself." That was a beautiful moment of caring, not a moment of
analysis.
A complex crisis reared up halfway through
the analysis. I was beginning my final year of
medical school, having just finished a taxing and
scary clerkship in medicine on a busy city
hospital ward and gone on to obstetrics, when
suddenly, without warning, I felt frightened and
decided to leave medical school.
Most medical
students have that fantasy many times over, but
this was the first time it had seriously occurred to
me, and I acted on it. My analyst was marvelous
during those days. She worked with clarity and
aplomb, sitting facing me as I requested, helping
me sort out what was really happening. I was
pleased and relieved when we put it all together,
and five days later I resumed my work at
medical school.
We identified some reasons: (1)
A professor who was in charge of the medicine
clerkship had criticized me and raised my
castration anxiety at a vulnerable time during
the analytic process; (2) blood from the genitals
on obstetrics had further increased the intensity
of my castration anxiety; (3) there was my ever present identification with my father, who
dropped out of graduate school before finishing.
That version seems incomplete now that I
know about a more profound terror which
lurked unrecognized: I could not stand to see and
hear babies being born. I could not bear to be
reminded about the agony of birth. All the rest
was true, too, but of my birth terrors we knew
nothing and never found out anything, and
never could have found out anything because it
all happened before I had words. There was no
way to communicate it, no way to look for it by
Freudian psychoanalytic technique.
What I gained then was a sense of mastery
over my anxieties that let me finish my training
limpingly, never welcoming the task of delivering a baby, but shutting myself off and pushing
myself through that and many other experiences
just to get to the other side. When I terminated
analysis, having run dry, there were still many
unexplored paths and annoying little symptoms
that were so adaptive I could hardly expect them
to be recognized as such; a tendency to obsess
about my schedule, a certain compulsive
dedication to my work, an incapacity to enjoy
myself except in a productive activity. All these
fit so conveniently into the life of a doctor that
they might be called virtues. I still was not in
touch with my feelings most of the time because
most of my feelings had no words, and words
were all I had dealt with in my analysis.
I came at last onto a path where thoughts and
words come second, feelings are uppermost, and
where unmet needs can be gratified to the full,
even to the overfull, where I got more than the
familiar deprivation of an analyst-Mummy,
poker-faced, walking stiffly by the couch to
reach the anonymous, safe seat behind. Now I
have accepted a primal good Mummy and truly
let in her caring touch and supporting cuddles,
allowing me to grieve at last for what I did not
take in as an infant. Even then I was trying to
satisfy Mommy by pretending to be a happy
baby, hiding my needs.
Scary though it sometimes is to be straying off
the familiar narrow path of analysis into
uncharted primal territory, I am grateful to have
known both routes. I owe completion of my
professional training and a fruitful marriage to
the internal changes that came about during
analysis. It was perhaps as far as I could let
myself grow at that time. I owe the liberation of
my true self to the still-continuing process of
primal re-integration.
During analysis, I had
only opportunity to withstand more deprivation,
using my mind to cut and slice, redefine and
control the ways I dealt with deprivation long
ago. Now I am beginning to fill an inner place
that was hollow for so long. I am letting my
spirit out of the shackles of compulsive work so
that it soars free where it will. I am supported by
loving and touching others, rather than only
headwork. The old void is being filled at last and
my adult self begins to rest on a secure
foundation for the first time.
During analysis I dreamed of leaping down a
waterfall. My father had jumped before me. I
landed safely in the water, but he was lying hurt
upon the rocks. I went to his unconscious body
and was moved by a tender feeling, wanting to
be close, to hold him. In analysis, that dream
yielded the insight that it was safe to feel tender
and close with my father only when I saw him as
weak, sick, injured or helpless. That knowledge
provided no satisfaction of my unmet need to be
close to him. The day came, years later, when I
revisited that waterfall in a beautiful fantasy
which completed some important primal work
on my father. I was a great eagle, flying down
the face of the waterfall, swooping over the
foaming pool, brushing my father's body with
the tip of my wing, sending up gleaming sparks
all along it, transforming him into a bird like me.
We circled playfully around the falls in the misty
spray, then both of us dropped into the pool,
now becoming children who played together in
the water. Thus I broke through the barrier of
the past: father isolated from son. I brought the
playful children living inside us together at last
through the magical power of transformation
and resolution that resides in us all, waiting only
to be unlocked from the shackles of a false self.
After that, I felt close to my father for the first
time in years.
I began with the right arm; I finish with the
left. Fitting, since the right arm acts for the left
side of the brain, the thinking, reasoning powers
of the mind, while the left arm acts in response to
images, feelings, intuitions from the right side of
the brain, the part of me long denied full
expression.
Not long after I broke my right arm, I was in
the laundry in the basement of our house and my
left hand got caught in the wringer of our
washing machine. The wringer, motor-driven,
drew my arm in and through up to my shoulder
before my father succeeded in reversing it so that
the bruised arm rolled back the same way that it
had gone in. In analysis, I remembered the
incident like a scene in a movie, recalling the trip
to the doctor to learn if my arm was broken, and
relief that it was only bruised. I never learned
what that incident was really about until I
started having shooting pains down my left arm
and woke up one morning screaming, "Nol Not
againl" and thinking about the scene in front of
the washing machine. I knew it was time to
repair that trauma.
I came to my group, told of the incident and
asked the therapists to put my arm back in the
wringer when it was time. Burt came to me a
few minutes later while I lay breathing deeply on
the mattress, and he asked me what was going
on. My adult self was hovering about thirty feet
above the laundry room, looking at my little-boy
self in front of the washing machine, not
wanting to come closer to him. Burt said, "Unless
you help your little boy, how can you expect him
to go through that pain again?" I brought my
adult self down, reluctantly, to the side of the
little boy I once was, standing in front of that
washing machine. Burt came over and applied
his forearms lengthwise to my left arm. I uttered
the cries and wails of a newborn infant.
In those days, the work on each trauma began
with a related piece of birth primal. It had been
the sudden pressure on all of my left arm at once
that had thrown me back into birth trauma. My
body experienced that; there was no intellectual
analysis involved. I just let it flow, and when my
cries were done I told Burt, "This time, roll your
arms cross-wise like a wringer." Burt came again
after I had been breathing for awhile and started
rolling my left hand as hard as he could. Before
he had gotten above my wrist, I was screaming,
"Nol Nol Nol I won't let it happen again." I was
pulling with all my might to get my arm out of
the wringer. This time, with the help of my
adult, I succeeded in wrenching my arm free.
The moment my arm was out, feelings I had
never recalled began to surge up. I felt wretched
and began shouting at my parents: "I couldn't
get through to you. You wouldn't listen. You
didn't care what I was feeling. It was so awful at
home. I couldn't tell you what I needed. You
weren't there. I was so angry, I was so hurt, and
you weren't listening." I poured it all out, crying
and yelling, until I came to the end and knew
what has always been true - that I had put my
hand in that wringer. I did it myself. It was not
an "accident." There had been no other way to
get the pain out, to let them know my hurt. I had
been too scared to complain to them in any other
way. I cried and cried and cried when I realized
what that poor little boy had done to his arm just
to make his parents know that he was hurting. I
held his hand and said, "I'll never make you do
that again. I'll always try to listen to your
feelings. You won't ever have to do that again."
We stayed awhile together holding each other and then the joyful little boy that I could have been if somebody had only been there to listen, led me up the cement stairs out of that dismal cellar.
We threw open the storm doors and rolled around together on the grass, laughing in the sunshine.
When I last contacted Dr. Stephen Proskauer in 1996, he was a research physician at the University of Utah. -- Editor