Free Lying on the Couch by Irvin D. Yalom Page B

French-Vietnamese student.
    Never had Carol known such pain. At first she turned everything inward: wept every night, refused to eat, skipped classes, got hooked on speed. Later, rage erupted: she trashed Rusty's room, slashed his bicycle tires, stalked and harassed his new girlfriend. Once, she fol-

    lowed the two of them into a bar and overturned a pitcher of beer onto them.
    At first, Dr. Cooke helped. After winning her confidence, he helped her to mourn her loss. The reason her pain was so intense, he explained, was that the loss of Rusty tore open the big wound of her life: being abandoned by her father. Her father was a "Woodstock-ian MIA"; when she was eight, he went to the Woodstock concert and never returned. There were a few holiday cards at first from Vancouver, Sri Lanka, and San Francisco, but then he stopped even that contact. She remembered watching her mother tear and burn his pictures and clothes. After that, her mother never again spoke of him.
    Dr. Cooke insisted that Carol's loss of Rusty drew its power from her father's desertion. Carol resisted, claiming she had no positive memories of her father. Perhaps no conscious memories. Dr. Cooke responded, but may there not have been a host of forgotten nurturing episodes.^ And what about the father of her wishes and dreams— the loving, supporting, protecting father she never had? She mourned that father, too, and Rusty's abandonment opened the crypt of that pain as well.
    Dr. Cooke also comforted her by helping her to assume a different perspective—to consider the loss of Rusty in her entire life trajectory: she was only nineteen, memories of Rusty would fade away. A few months hence she would rarely think of him; in a few years she would have only a vague recollection of a nice young lad named Rusty. Other men would come along.
    In fact, another man was coming along for, as he spoke. Dr. Cooke insidiously edged his chair closer. He assured Carol that she was an attractive, a very attractive woman, held her hand when she wept, hugged her tightly at the end of the sessions, and assured her that a woman with her grace would have no difficulty attracting other men. He spoke for himself, he said, and told her that he was drawn toward her.
    Dr. Cooke rationalized his actions with theory. "Touch is necessary for your healing, Carol. Rusty's loss has fanned the embers of early, preverbal losses, and the treatment approach, too, has to be nonverbal. You can't talk to these kind of body memories—they have to be assuaged by physical comforting and cradling."
    Physical comforting soon progressed to sexual comforting, offered on the sad, worn Kashan rug that separated their two chairs.

    4 8 ^ Lying on the Couch
    Thereafter, sessions took on a prescribed ritual: a few minutes of checking in on her week's events, empathic "tch-tchs" from Dr. Cooke (she never called him by his first name), then an exploration of her symptoms—obsessive thinking about Rusty, insomnia, anorexia, problems concentrating—and then finally a reiteration of his interpretation that her catastrophic reaction to Rusty drew its strength from her father's desertion of the family.
    He was skillful. Carol felt calmer, cared for, and grateful. And then, about halfway through each hour. Dr. Cooke would move from words to action. It might be in the context of Carol's sexual fantasies: he'd say that it was important to make some of those fantasies come true; or, responding to Carol's anger at men, he'd say that his job was to prove that not all men were bastards; or when Carol talked about feeling ugly and unattractive to men, he'd say that he could personally prove that hypothesis wrong, that indeed Carol was stunningly attractive to him. Perhaps it might follow Carol's crying when he'd say, "There, there, it's good to let it out, but you need some holding."
    Whatever the transition, the remainder of the session was the same. He'd slip off his chair, down to the frayed Persian rug, crook his finger