Lying on the Couch Read Online Free Page A

lectures I gave her about this, how many books and articles on the topic I gave her to read.
    "But she was like a child in a woman's body—a knockout woman's body, incidentally—and her craving for contact was relentless. Couldn't she move her chair closer? Couldn't I hold her hand for a few minutes? Couldn't we sit next to each other on the sofa? Couldn't I just put my arm around her and sit in silence, or take a walk, instead of talking?
    "And she was ingeniously persuasive. 'Seymour,' she'd say, 'you talk a good game about creating a new therapy for each patient, but what you left out of your articles was "as long as it's in the official manual" or "as long as it doesn't interfere with the therapist's middle-aged bourgeois comfort." She'd chide me about taking refuge in the APA's guidelines about boundaries in therapy. She knew I had been responsible for writing those guidelines when I was president of the APA, and she accused me of being imprisoned by my own rules. She'd criticize me for not reading my own articles. 'You stress the honoring of each patient's uniqueness, and then you pretend that a single set of rules can fit all patients in all situations. We all get lumped together,' she'd say, 'as if all patients were the same and should be treated the same.' And her chorus was always, 'What's more important: following the rules? Staying in your armchair comfort zone? Or doing what's best for your patient?'
    "Other times she'd rail about my 'defensive therapy': 'You're so terrified about being sued. All you humanistic therapists cower before the lawyers, while at the same time you urge your mentally ill patients to grab hold of their freedom. Do you really think I would sue you? Don't you know me yet, Seymour? You're saving my life. And I love you!'
    "And, you know, Ernest, she was right. She had me on the run. I was cowering. I was defending my guidelines even in a situation where I knew they were antitherapeutic. I was placing my timidity, my fears about my little career, before her best interests. Really,

    Lying on the Couch ^ ^ 5
    when you look at things from a disinterested position, there was nothing wrong with letting her sit next to me and hold my hand. In fact, every time I did this, without fail, it charged up our therapy: she became less defensive, trusted me more, had more access to her inner life.
    "What? Is there any place at all for firm boundaries in therapies? Of course there is. Listen on, Ernest. My problem was that Belle railed at all boundaries, like a bull and a red flag. Wherever— wherever —I set the boundaries she pushed and pushed against them. She took to wearing skimpy clothes or see-through blouses with no brassiere. When I commented on this, she ridiculed me for my Victorian attitudes toward the body. I wanted to know every intimate contour of her mind, she'd say, yet her skin was a no-no. A couple of times she complained about a breast lump and ask me to examine her—of course, I didn't. She'd obsess about sex with me for hours on end, and beg me to have sex with her just once. One of her arguments was that one-time sex with me would break her obsession. She'd learn that it was nothing special or magical and then be freed to think about other things in Hfe.
    "How did her campaign for sexual contact make me feel? Good question, Ernest, but is it germane to this investigation?
    "You're not sure? What seems to be germane is what I did —that's what I'm being judged for—not what I felt or thought. Nobody gives a shit about that in a lynching! But if you turn off the tape recorder for a couple of minutes, I'll tell you. Consider it instruction. You've read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, haven't you? Well, consider this my letter to a young therapist.
    "Good. Your pen, too, Ernest. Put it down, and just listen for a while. You want to know how this affected me? A beautiful woman obsessed with me, masturbating daily while thinking of me, begging me to lay her, talking on and on about