Read Lying on the Couch for Free Online

therapy but agreed to meet with a Christian Science practitioner for several sessions. Belle told me that their communication had improved, and both of them seemed more content with their relationship.

    2-2. -- Lying on the Couch
    "At the sixteen-month mark, all was still well. No heroin—no drugs at all—no cutting, bulimia, purging, or self-destructive behavior of any sort. She got involved with several fringe movements—a channeler, a past-lives therapy group, an algae nutritionist, typical California flake stuff, harmless. She and her husband had resumed their sexual life, and she did a little sexual acting out with my colleague—that jerk, that asshole, she met at the tennis club. But at least it was safe sex, a far cry from the bar and highway escapades.
    "It was the most remarkable therapy turnabout I've ever seen. Belle said it was the happiest time of her life. I challenge you, Ernest: plug her into any of your outcome studies. She'd be the star patient! Compare her outcome with any drug therapy: Risperidone, Prozac, Paxil, Effexor, Wellbutrin—you name it—my therapy would win hands down. The best therapy I've ever done, and yet I couldn't publish it. Publish it? I couldn't even tell anyone about it. Until now! You're my first real audience.
    "At about the eighteen-month mark, the sessions began to change. It was subtle at first. More and more references to our San Francisco weekend crept in, and soon Belle began to speak of it at every session. Every morning she'd stay in bed for an extra hour daydreaming about what our weekend would be like: about sleeping in my arms, phoning for breakfast in bed, then a drive and lunch in Sausalito, followed by an afternoon nap. She had fantasies of our being married, of waiting for me in the evenings. She insisted that she could live happily the rest of her life if she knew that I'd come back home to her. She didn't need much time with me; she'd be willing to be a second wife, to have me next to her for only an hour or two a week—she could live healthy and happy with that forever.
    "Well, you can imagine that by this time I was growing a little uneasy. And then a lot uneasy. I began to scramble. I did my best to help her face reality. Practically every session I talked about my age. In three or four years I'd be in a wheelchair. In ten years I'd be eighty. I asked her how long she thought I would live. The males in my family die young. At my age my father had been in his coffin for fifteen years. She would outlive me at least twenty-five years. I even began exaggerating my neurological impairment when I was with her. Once I staged an intentional fall—that's how desperate I was growing. And old people don't have much energy, I repeated. Asleep at eight-thirty, I'd tell her. Been five years since I'd been awake for the ten o'clock news. And my failing vision, my shoulder bursitis,

    my dyspepsia, my prostate, my gassiness, my constipation. I even thought of getting a hearing aid, just for the effect.
    "But all this was a terrible blunder. One hundred eighty degrees wrong! It just whet her appetite even more. She had some perverse infatuation with the idea of my being infirm or incapacitated. She had fantasies of my having a stroke, of my wife leaving me, of her moving in to care for me. One of her favorite daydreams involved nursing me: making my tea, washing me, changing my sheets and my pajamas, dusting me with talcum powder, and then taking off her clothes and climbing under the cool sheets next to me.
    "At the twenty-month mark. Belle's improvement was even more pronounced. On her own she had gotten involved with Narcotics Anonymous and was attending three meetings a week. She was doing volunteer work at ghetto schools to teach teenage girls about birth control and AIDS, and had been accepted in an MBA program at a local university.
    "What's that, Ernest? How did I know she was telhng me the truth? You know, I never doubted her. I know she has her character flaws but