I had to admit to Jennie that I was afraid to take a stand. But was it too much ... to give just a little and to keep things working for us?
“Why are you letting this man ruin our lives?” she asked.
When I couldn’t answer she relented. David was named Travis David.
In the days following, I was afflicted with a recurrent rash and sometimes by mysterious feelings of terror. I had gone wrong somewhere, and a secret decision had to be made. I picked up the phone, dialed a number, and made an appointment.
I started my analysis because I was in trouble. I needed expert help and I went out and got it. Later it dawned upon me that this is really the significant thing: not that there are so many people in today’s world who need help, but the miraculous urge on the part of the individual himself to get well. The fact that people on the whole don’t want to be sick, don’t want to be haunted by nameless difficulties, convinces me that at the very bottom of one’s being is the urge to be good, to the good. This is more important than any description of the experience of analysis, which, although it may be invaluable to the person who suffers through it, is but a process of living ... nothing more. After all, it was Freud who said that life is two things: Work and Love.
As I came to tentative grips with my fears of rejection—and the self-rejections these fears imposed—I began more and more to act like myself, like the man who started the Seven Stairs. If Hamlet’s problem lay in his fear of confusing reality and appearance, so, too, was mine. Only I was not Hamlet and my task was not the avenging of a father’s murder. My task was even more basic. I had to just keep on giving birth to myself.
It was a long time before I perceived that Lionel Blitzsten was less a cause of my problem than a factor in its treatment. Who was this strange and often solitary genius, who died leaving such a rich legacy of interpretative techniques to his profession, who lived like an ancient potentate, offering to a crowd of sycophants whatever satisfactions are to be gained from basking in reflected glory?
My relationship with him revealed things which I was slow in admitting to my analyst. I shall never forget the energy I expended telling my analyst how “good” I was. Fortunately I wasn’t in the hands of a charlatan. He interrupted me—one of those rare interruptions—and told me that we both knew how good I was, so quit wasting time and money on that.
Lionel was like life itself: an amalgam of selfishness, egoism, cruelty; of goodness, gentleness, compassion. He offered it all in almost cosmic profusion, and with cosmic capriciousness. Once he remarked: “The world owes me nothing. When I die, I will not be sorry. I had joy, still do; I had love, still have it; I had friends, still have them. I had all and felt all and saw all and ... believed all. I had everything and I had nothing. I had what I think life, in its total meaning, is: I had the dream, the ‘chulum mensch.’”
This I believe is what he was—a “chulum mensch.” It contained everything a dream could and should, good and bad. And much of it was glorious. No one who shared this part could thank him enough for the privilege of being admitted.