Physician Heal Thyself–The Weird Tale Of A Demented Psychiatrist And Torture On The Couch

Lottie Baum sat quietly by her patient lying somewhat uncomfortably on the couch.  This was his first visit to Dr. Baum, but his troubling emotional episodes had become debilitating, and he finally sought professional help.  

Dr. Baum specialized in family psychology, a specialty dealing with the particular traumas that resulted from family dysfunction.  She had plenty of business, for marriage being the perennially troubled institution it had always been, there was no shortage of clients.  If it hadn’t been for the advice, counsel, and treatment of Dr. Baum husbands and wives locked in contentious, often hateful marriages because of religion, tradition, or inertia might well have succumbed to their murderous thoughts.  It didn’t take much, Dr. Baum knew, for thoughts to turn into intentions and intentions into action; and she was a genius at pulling those mental strings.

The offspring of bitter and resentful parents fared no better.  They were the innocent victims of couples who simply hung on too long, deferred divorce or separation under illusions of reconciliation, but only became more mutually destructive.  Dr. Baum’s agenda was always filled.

The patient on the couch, tentatively at first, answered the doctor’s questions, and immediately felt a relief.  He was getting years of frustration, anger, and hateful thoughts off his chest.  Slowly but progressively her questions became more pointed and honed in on what she considered were the issues at the heart of his problem. 

She was no Freudian and did not seek to probe his relationships with his mother or early childhood  traumas.  She knew from experience and a long professional history that marital problems were the result of marriage itself.  Edward Albee had erroneously concluded that marriage was the crucible of maturity - that the confines of an indissoluble marriage would bring out first the worst but eventually the best of human accommodation and resolve. In Dr. Baum's view such confines only exacerbated the loss of identity, the squelching of sexual desire, and the competition between naturally aggressive individuals.  It was surprising that there were not more troubled patients coming to see her.

All well and good so far, but this particular psychiatrist, unbeknownst to her clients, was addled with her own hateful resentments, nasty, decades-long suspicions that colored the treatment of every poor soul who came to her thinking they would get an objective, medical opinion.

The old adage that it takes a crazy doctor to cure a crazy patient was untrue in Dr. Baum’s case.  Her active psychoses – her emotionally twisted, deeply seated resentment of her siblings had inhibited any kind of normal personal intimacies.  In fact after having disrupted what had been a particularly well-balanced, caring, and respectful family, she defensively assumed that the problem was with them, not with her.  She was fine, responsible, dutiful, and honorable.  It was they who were selfish, greedy, self-serving, and uncaring; so how could anyone be capable of love and respect?  

As her neurosis progressed into psychosis, diffidence turned virulent and then downright hostile.  Because of here venal, manipulative brother, not only was no man worthy of her, all men fell into the same, bloody category of chauvinistic ignorance.

No matter how much she considered lesbianism, she could never bring herself to sexual intimacy with another woman; and, thanks to her sisters’ emotional deafness and rivalry, she harbored the same vile hatred for women as she did for men.  

She found herself with no recourse and desperately looked for outlets for her thwarted family sentiments.  She finally found it in Laura Ashton, a childhood friend who had survived a wayward husband, a brutal slavishness to discipline and order, and a growing resentment of men.  

Laura, like most of Dr. Baum’s female patents could never manage to leave her husband.  In the best of times she still felt love for him; at the worst she felt herself subjugated and oppressed; but in the main she simply took her pound of flesh, a death by a thousand cuts, and continued her marriage of insult and injury without mortality.

By the time that Lottie and Laura reconnected, they both had gone far around the bend; and what might have been a casual relationship was quickly annealed by their psychological despair.  Laura and her husband had started off well, children of the Sixties with few cares for whom marriage seemed right, but whose significant differences soon got in the way.  He was by nature an arrogant, dismissive man; and she a demanding, limited woman.  She was attracted to his insouciance and bad boy attitudes, and he found her a stabilizing emotional foundation after many very unstable episodes.

Soon the two women had become partners in crime, both dependent on the other not because of any serious affection, but for commiseration and mutual understanding.  Laura found Lottie’s personal insights magnetic – she was the first person who really understood her – and Dr. Baum saw in Laura the confirmation of all her personal and professional assumptions.  Men were shit, there was no other way to say it, but women of a certain age, crippled by social norms and expectations, found no way out.  Laura had become more and more bitter, angry, and injurious; and Lottie Baum had become more critical and less objectively caring for her male patients. 

Whenever a man showed up at her office and lay back on the couch, she began to take her own pound of flesh, honing in on his heretofore concealed vulnerabilities and digging at them until they were raw, unhealable wounds.  “It’s necessary” she said to one man reduced to tears by her painful probing, “if you want to get better”.  Of course by this time in her life and career she had lost any serious professional intent and was only out to humiliate and destroy.  Her patients were so naïve and her deception so canny and disguised that they put up with her abuse like masochists.

Laura had less luck.  Her Lady Macbeth attempts to unman her husband went unnoticed by him.  He, sensing her emotional dependence, her legacy of a dominant father, and her overweening sense of social propriety, simply paid no attention either to her entreaties or sallies, and went on tomcatting to his heart’s desire.  At first he tried to disguise his adulteries, then, when he realized that his wife had neither the gumption to confront him nor the will to leave him, he simply upped the adulterous ante.

The more her husband’s indiscretions increased, the closer Laura got to Lottie Baum.  They became a cabal of two, a dyad of unhappy, futile emotionally dysfunctional women.  “I need you”, said Lottie to Laura; but she meant only as fodder for her practice.  Laura in her increasing frustration with herself and her husband was able to feed the psychiatrist with new twists and turns of a bad marriage. Lottie in turn  had no idea of the depth of resentment of women, how much they put up with, and how indifferent, callous, and ignorant their men were. 

For a while she treated women, but found them insipid and dithering; besides, there was no challenge in treating such complaisant fools.  The real challenge was the men – not curing them of course, but driving them further into guilt, shame, and emotional misery.  By late middle age she had become a true harridan, a scourge, and a very sick woman.

She was failing as a psychiatrist, finally outed by rumor and innuendo and then censured by the American Psychiatric Association; and flailing as woman.  She suddenly felt closed in by her demented friend, Laura, and reached out to distant relatives, cousins, and acquaintances to whom she turned when she found an opening for expression of her need but who left her on the curb when her friendship became an oppressive bother.

“I need to psychoanalyze myself”, she said one morning looking in the mirror at the grey, sagging, lined and puffy face which greeted her; but since she had never regarded her torturous treatments of patients, her dependency, or her twisted friendship with Laura as problems, there was nothing to psychoanalyze. So caught in the downward vortex of unadmitted psychoses, she lost contact with everyone. The APA pulled her membership, the State of Connecticut cancelled her license, Laura disappeared, and latched-on families were long a thing of the past.

So this particular psychiatrist did not cure herself or even try; but she had become so demented that her illness became a righteous experience.  She was right, always had been right, and always would be right, and so be it

Faux Truth And The American Dream–What Donald Trump Taught Us About Fooling Most Of The People Most Of The Time

Betty Murphy was a proud woman, anxious like many first generation Americans, to set straight the record of her European past.  Her relatives, she insisted, came to this country long before the potato famine, were quickly assimilated into the mainstream of American life, and as thankful, enterprising immigrants contributed more than most to the economy.  

Yes, her father had been a bartender in South Boston, and The Blarney Stone had indeed been a place of drunken brawls and immoderate behavior; but that did not tarnish the image of a man of principle and hard work who provided for his family and then some.

Betty had gone to Catholic schools, made her First Communion in a dress of white organza sewn by her mother, carried a bouquet of lilies, and wore a special tiara and veil fashioned by her aunt Tilly, confined to a wheelchair but deft as ever with a needle and thread and well-known for her proper but yet fanciful and imaginative accessories.  

Betty was a pious little girl, obedient, and demure.  She lifted her eyes up to the cross of Jesus with love and admiration, kissed the ring of the archbishop when he had visited South Boston, made the stations of the cross every Christmas and Easter season, and was the favorite of the Sisters of Charity who in the basement of St. Aloysius taught her the catechism and good Catholic manners.

She was only a modest student, deflected from serious study, her mother thought, because of her unusual piety; but then again, displacement by Our Lord was certainly a blessing.  Betty was moderately attractive, never a standout among the girls in her class, stunning Irish blue-eyed, dark-haired beauties, but as she  grew older, her inner beauty attracted equally pious and serious boys, one of whom, Billy McGonigal, married her at eighteen.  

College was never in the offing for her because of indifference to her studies, her religious avocation, and meagre family finances. The young couple lived at first with her parents then rented the top floor of a three-story building nearby.  The apartment was, like everything else in Betty’s life, modest but acceptable.  The front windows gave onto Fletcher Street, the greengrocer’s stand, the firehouse, and the Irish American Patriotic Club.

As she grew older, Betty became more aware of the confines of her neighborhood, her marriage, and her opportunities.  She was destined to be a pretty little Irish housewife in an Irish neighborhood, in an Irish city.  She longed for Times Square, the Capitol, and the palm trees of Collins Avenue.  It seemed like a fanciful, impossible dream until the War.  

Her husband who had distinguished himself in France and came home with a silver star was offered a job as an aide to an important colonel in the Pentagon.  He and a very happy Betty moved to Washington, installed their three children in Catholic schools, and began their lives anew.

Betty, who had never really gotten over her Irish heritage, the bar, the grocery stands, and the corned beef and cabbage dinners of her youth, took to her new respectability with energy and enthusiasm.  Finally she was a real American married to a war hero, mother to three model children, and a woman of standing in her new suburban community.  

She read Emily Post and the style sections of the daily newspaper, but anxious to keep up with the more educated women of her acquaintance began to read the front page, then finally editorial opinions.  At first she was hesitant to offer comments on what she had read, but soon gained confidence.  Her comments were a blend of fact and association.  She couldn’t make heads nor tails of the arguments about Soviet expansionism, interest rates, or social malaise, so she embellished her remarks with intuition – the way things must be or must have been. 

At first the women at her weekly tea groups and charity bazaars were impressed with her knowledge of American politics and economic affairs, then realized that much of what she said was just quacking and fabrication.  “No”, Betty would reply when questioned, “I read it in the Post” and go on to add bits and pieces of random information that had come her way.  Whatever the reporter had written was soon lost in a miasma of South Boston recollections, hearsay, and snippets from popular midday newscasters.  Yet she sounded authoritative, for she had inherited the gift of gab from her father.

At about this time, Donald Trump had risen to power and was in his halcyon days of lovely deception.  Trump was a master of theatrics, rabbit-in-a-hat magic, and magnificent Las Vegas glitz, rhinestone, and pasties.  He had become president not because of his policies or his geopolitical savvy but because of his vaudevillian genius.  No one was better than he in the art of masterful deception, the God-given talent for sounding good with a sturm und drang braggadocio, a verbal gladiator that had supporters at his feet and opponents apoplectic.

He set a new standard for American politics, the final accounting for faux truth.  He was Betty Murphy’s idol because he made things up, embellished, embroidered, and treated the truth as a cheap commodity to be traded in, sold, or buried.  

The truth, as Kurosawa, Browning, and Durrell knew, is a very subjective insubstantial affair which means different things to different people and thus without meaning or value.  It was only the story, the narrative which had any point, the origins of which held no interest wither to Donald Trump or Betty Murphy.  The two were prestidigitators, masters in the art of confabulation which was not meant to trick or deceive, but to reset the truth gauge.

Betty’s tea ladies finally had had it with her stories which became more and more impossible.  She used her ignorance of history to create her own versions of wars and palaces.  They sounded better to her than the real thing, whatever that was.  “It was Disney”, she said, “who created the Grinch Who Stole Christmas”, seeing in her mind’s eye Walt’s marvelous fantasies of Snow White and Cinderella.  He had to have created the Grinch as he had designed every other fantastical, endearing character.  She had no interest in giving credit to Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak, or any other illustrator of child fantasy.

Whereas Trump was a master of timing, Betty could not stop herself from pronouncing faux truths.  Every conversation was stopped dead by her non sequiturs, clotured by her impossible interpretations, shut down by her illogical conclusions.  Yet she hammered on, more and more convinced of the rightness of her vision.  She quoted source after source, inventing editorial content, conflating years and figures, each of which strayed farther and farther from the truth.

Meanwhile as Betty became an oddity, an oddball, and finally a clownish, twitchy, woman, Donald Trump prospered.  His admirers who cared little for the ‘truth’, preferred imaginative twists and turns just like in Hollywood, couldn’t get enough.  Thousands thronged his whistle stops, watched him on television, devoured his words in print and on social media.  He knew that the truth was overrated, and each time a critic tried to pin him down to specific dates, times, and events, he answered with not one but a series of non sequiturs, befuddling the questioner and delighting audiences.

Betty Murphy was the local master at the art of the non sequitur.  She, however, never knew that she was drifting off message, her grasp of current and historical events was so slight.  By this time no one cared, some polite smiles and thank you’s and the afternoon, the tea parties, and Betty Murphy were over and done with,.

Donald Trump was not done with by any means, kept up the greatest show on earth since the last time Barnum & Bailey came to town, was elected president, lost, never lost traction, continued to nettle, annoy, and rile his enemies; and despite attempts to erase him, he came back with a vengeance, was re-elected and continued his three ring circus for another four years.