The Schopenhauer Cure(61)
“Oh, Pam,” said Bonnie shaking her head slowly. “No wonder you’re in shock now.”
“Wait, wait. You haven’t heard the worst about this monster.” Pam was revved up. Julius glanced around the room. Everyone was leaning forward, fixated on Pam, except of course Philip, whose eyes were closed and who looked as though he were in a trance.
“He and Molly were a couple for another two weeks and then he dropped her, just told her he was no longer having fun with her and was going to move on. That was it. Inhuman. Can you believe a teacher saying that to a young student? He refused to say any more or even help her move the things she had left at his flat. His parting gesture was to give her a list of the thirteen women he had screwed that month, many of them in the class. My name was at the top of the list.”
“He didn’t give her that list,” Philip said, eyes still closed. “She found it when burglarizing his living space.”
“What sort of depraved creature would even write such a list?” Pam shot back.
Again in a disembodied voice, Philip responded, “The male hardwiring directs them to spread their seed. He was neither the first nor the last to take an inventory of the fields he had plowed and planted.”
Pam turned her palms up to the group, shook her head, and muttered, “You see,” as if to indicate the bizarreness of this particular life-form. Ignoring Philip, she continued: “There was pain and destruction. Molly suffered tremendously, and it was a long long time before she trusted another man. And she never trusted me again. That was the end of our friendship. She never forgave my betrayal. It was a terrible loss for me and, I think, for her as well. We’ve tried to pick it up—even now we e-mail occasionally, keeping each other informed of major life events—but she’s never, ever, been willing to discuss that summer with me.”
After a long silence, perhaps the longest the group ever sat through, Julius spoke: “Pam, how awful to have been broken like that at eighteen. The fact that you never spoke of this to me or the group confirms the severity of the trauma. And to have lost a lifelong friend in that way! That’s truly awful. But let me say something else. It’s good you stayed today. It’s good you talked about it. I know you’re going to hate my saying this, but perhaps it’s not a bad thing for you that Philip is here. Maybe there is some work, some healing that can be done. For both of you.”
“You’re right, Julius—I do hate your saying that, and, even more, I hate having to look at this insect again. And here he is in my own cozy group. I feel defiled.”
Julius’s head spun. Too many thoughts clamored for his attention. How much could Philip bear? Even he had to have a breaking point. How much longer before he would walk out of the room, never to return? And, as he imagined Philip’s departure, he contemplated its consequences—on Philip but primarily on Pam: she mattered far more to him. Pam was a great-souled lady, and he was committed to helping her find a better future. Would she be well served by Philip’s departure? Perhaps she’d have some measure of revenge—but what a pyrrhic victory! If I could find a way, Julius thought, to help Pam reach forgiveness for Philip, it would heal her—and perhaps Philip as well.
Julius almost flinched when the buzzword forgiveness passed through his mind. Of all the various recent movements swirling through the field of therapy, the hullabaloo around “forgiveness” annoyed him the most. He, like every experienced therapist, had always worked with patients who could not let things go, who nurtured grudges, who could find no peace—and he had always used a wide variety of methods to help his patients “forgive”—that is, detach from their anger and resentment. In fact, every experienced therapist had an arsenal of “letting-go” techniques they often used in therapy. But the simplistic and canny “forgiveness” industry had magnified, elevated, and marketed this one single aspect of therapy into the whole shebang and presented it as though it were something entirely novel. And the ploy had garnered respectability by implicitly melding with the current social and political forgiveness climate addressing a range of such offenses as genocide, slavery, and colonial exploitation. Even the Pope had recently begged forgiveness for the Crusaders’ thirteenth-century sacking of Constantinople.
And if Philip bolted, how would he, as the group therapist, feel? Julius was resolved not to abandon Philip, yet it was difficult to locate any compassion toward him. Forty years before, as a young student, he had heard a lecture by Erich Fromm citing Terence’s epigram written over two thousand years ago: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.” Fromm had stressed that the good therapist had to be willing to enter into his own darkness and identify with all of the patient’s fantasies and impulses. Julius tried that on. So, Philip had made a list of women he had laid? Hadn’t he done that himself when he was younger? Sure he had. And so had many men with whom he’d discussed this matter.
And he reminded himself that he had a responsibility to Philip—and to Philip’s future clients. He had invited Philip to become a patient and a student. Like it or not, Philip was going to be seeing many clients in the future, and to forsake him now was bad therapy, bad teaching, bad modeling—and immoral to boot.
With these considerations in mind, Julius pondered what to say. He began to formulate a statement beginning with his familiar, I have a real dilemma: on the one hand…and on the other…But this moment was too loaded for any stock tactics. Finally, he said, “Philip, in your responses to Pam today you referred to yourself in the third person: you didn’t say ‘I,’ you said, ‘he.’ You said, ‘He didn’t give her that list.’ I wonder, could you have been implying that you’re a different person now from the man you were then?”