In the mid-Fities when I was 14 or 15, I told my mother I was homosexual: that was the word, back then, homosexual, in its full satanic majesty, a combination of evil and sickness.
Of course, I'd learned the word from her. She was a psychologist. Throughout my early childhood, she'd been studying part-time for a master's degree in child psychology. Since I was not only her son but also her best friend, she confided everything she was learning about me - her live-in guinea pig - to me.
When I was seven, my parents divorced. My mother had ordered my father to choose between her and his mistress (who doubled as his secretary); he chose the mistress. My mother was devastated. Although she had a giant capacity for reinterpreting every loss as a gain, even she couldn't find something positive in divorce.
It was a good thing she'd taken that degree because now, at 45, she had to go to work to supplement her meagre alimony. She laboured long hours for low pay as a state psychologist in Illinois and Texas, administering IQ tests to hundreds of grade school students and even 'projective' tests (the Rorschach, the House-Tree-Person) to children suspected of being 'disturbed'.
I was tested frequently. She, who was so often overwrought at home, given to rages or fits of weeping, would become strangely calm and professional when administering a test. Her hands would make smoothing gestures, her voice was lowered and given a story-telling sweetness ('Now, Eddie, could you tell me everything you see in this ink blot?'). I, too, was transformed when tested, but toward anxiety, since a psychological test was like an X-ray or a blood test, likely to reveal a lurking disease: hostility, perversion or craziness or, even worse, a low intelligence.
There was nothing consistent or logical about my mother's thinking. She found me wise to the point of genius and often said she wanted to write a book about raising the Exceptional Child ('Let him take the lead - he will teach you what he wants to learn'). But then I was also half-crazy, dangerously unbalanced, 'borderline psychotic' with 'strong schizophrenic tendencies', suspiciously apt at imitating wisdom and understanding, a flatterer, a robot programmed to resemble a thinking, feeling human being.
I'd read in one of my mother's psychological manuals a long entry on homosexuality that I could scarcely understand. But I did take in that whereas adult homosexuality was an entrenched ego disorder caused by an unresolved Oedipus complex and resulting in secondary narcissistic gains that were especially hard to uproot, in every early adolescence, the individual, the boy, passes through a homosexual stage that is perfectly normal, a brief swirl around the Scylla of orality and the Charybdis of anality before surging to the sunny, open seas of mature genitality. I could only hope that I was just passing through a phase.
After I told her I was homosexual, my mother sent me to a Freudian psychiatrist for an evaluation. I had just read Oscar Wilde and was determined to be as brittle and brilliant as his characters. I sat on the edge of my chair, hectic red flowers blowing in my cheeks, and rattled on and on about my condition, my illness, which I was no more able to defend than Wilde could.
The psychiatrist told my mother that I was 'unsalvageable', that I should be locked up and the key thrown away. My mother reported this scary judgment to me, and to my father, though I begged her not to. Of course, neither she nor I was capable of dismissing this diagnosis as a dangerously narrow-minded prejudice held by a banal little suburbanite in a brown suit. No, it came from a doctor and was as unquestionable as a diagnosis of diabetes or cancer. The doctor's level of sophistication or humanity was irrelevant. I began to read books about psychoanalysis - Freud himself, especially The Introduction to Psychoanalysis and The Interpretation of Dreams, but also the softer, less pessimistic American adaptations of his thought by Erich Fromm. I couldn't find much about homosexuality in any book, but enough to know it was sterile, inauthentic, endlessly repetitious and infantile.
Somewhere, I came across the theory that homosexuality was caused by an absent father and a suffocating mother. Perhaps my mother had been the one to suggest that my father's absence had queered me, for she was always eager to work out the multiple ways in which his desertion had harmed us all.
Eventually, I asked my father to send me to a shrink. The father of a schoolfriend was a psychiatrist who recommended me to James Clark Moloney.
I had no idea what to expect at Dr Moloney's practice in a Detroit suburb, but I certainly thought he'd be a small man with a varnished pate and an inky comb-over, many books (some in German) and in his waiting-room the sorry smell of old tobacco. I was in no way prepared for the cages of shrieking birds, the Papuan deities and, in the garden as seen through a plate-glass window, a gilt statue of a meditating bodhisattva. I fancied myself a Buddhist but of the austere Theravada sort, and I sniffed at Dr Moloney's idolatry, even though I'd come here precisely because I sought a compassionate intercessor, a bodhisattva of my own.
He had a leonine mane of white hair, a bulbous nose with a sore on one side, close to the tip, which he kept vaguely clawing at, as an old dog will half-heartedly try to free itself of its collar. He wore sandals on big, yellow-nailed feet, shapeless trousers held up with a rope, a short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt. He licked his lips constantly. He made me feel very prim, especially since I'd put on my favourite Brooks Brothers suit.
Moloney had but one master theory and he proposed it to everyone as an answer to every ill. He believed in the introjected mother. Every infant has the right to expect and enjoy unconditional love from his mother, at full throttle and all the time. Modern women, however, are deformed by societal inhibitions and their own deprivations as children. They are incapable of giving complete, nourishing love; when I told Dr Moloney that my mother hadn't breast-fed me because she had inverted nipples, he slapped his knees, let out a great cry and leapt to his feet. 'You see!'
The emotionally starved, alienated child decides to mother himself. The faint, elusive image of his mother's face and warmth he incorporates into his inner pantheon. Now he is no longer dependent on her vagaries and caprices. Now he can beam her up whenever he needs her. If he sucks his thumb, he is nursing himself. He has become a closed circuit - with only one crucial disadvantage: such total independence is virtually synonymous with madness. He has lost all vital connection to the outside world.
When he thinks he has fallen in love with a real woman, in point of fact all he has done is to project his mother's imago on to a neutral screen. Since he's not relating to a real person in all her shifting specificity but instead to the fixed outlines of the introjected mother, he cannot interact with the flesh-and-blood woman. As an infant, he learned how dangerous it was to open up to an actual, autonomous Other. I was taught all this during my very first hour with Dr Moloney - or rather my first 90 minutes, since he was eager to prove to me he was not like one of those goddamn tightass Freudians with their finicky, fucking 50-minute hours. He also needed to lay out his entire theory during our first encounter so that it could begin to sink in.
As I learned in session after session, Dr Moloney had served in the Pacific as an army doctor. There, in Okinawa, he had observed that infants were fearless and happy because they never left their mother's side; they were carried everywhere, papoose-style, bound to their mother's back, their heads looking out above hers - 'that way they feel united to her but in charge'. Moloney loved to insult my parents ('Don't think I'm a castrating asshole like your father, an anal perfectionist...') and believed he could give me the unconditional love that he thought I craved and that his version of my mother had denied me. He would often interrupt me to say: 'I love you, goddamn it.' His eyes would fill with tears and he'd idly pick at his infected nose or come at the sore on his forehead from above, fat fingers stretching down, his elbow cocked to the ceiling. But on some days he had to search for my name.
As best I could figure out, he'd had a more conventional past, reflected in his first, unimpeachably Freudian book, but now he'd become cracked over the introjected mother and the Okinawan papoose cure. He wore heavy turquoise and silver bracelets, black amulets on his hairy chest and lived surrounded by bobbing, chiming deities from the Pacific, Asia and Africa (Freud had inaugurated this taste for carved African statues, as photos of his Vienna cabinet revealed).
The other Freudian remnant was the couch. As I lay on it, Moloney, out of sight behind me, took notes (or wrote something, perhaps one of his pamphlets). I could hear him back there at his desk coughing or rummaging around for something or scratching with his pen. More than once, I caught him dozing. That he was asleep changed his preceding silence in my eyes from a sharp, therapeutic instrument into an obtuse abnegation. I bored him. This man who claimed to love me was zoning out on me. 'I know what you're thinking,' he shouted. 'You're probably mad as hell. And you have a right to be. You have a right to unqualified love. No time limits, no lapses, eternal, unqualified love. But even Homer nods. The baby squalls, and he's completely in his rights. If I were perfect - and you deserve perfection, it's your birthright.' Here he got confused and scratched his nose.
He considered my tendency to over-intellectualise one of my most serious defences. If I disagreed with one of his interpretations, he'd laugh, show his small white teeth and say: 'If you go on winning every argument this way you'll soon enough lose every chance at happiness. No one around here doubts your intelligence. It's just that I want you to break out of your closed circuit and touch another living human being, goddamn it.' And here he groped for my name before sketching in a feeble gesture that ended in a shrug. I learned to question all my impulses, to second-guess my motives, to ascribe a devious, unconscious purpose to my most unobjectionable actions. If I had a dream about making love to Marilyn Monroe, Moloney would interpret it as a 'flight into health', a ruse I'd invented to throw him off my track by appearing normal, cured. 'In this dream, I'm Marilyn Monroe,' he'd say, perfectly seriously. 'Like her I have long hair, a wide mouth, I'm voluptuously put together.'
I saw Moloney three times a week during my last two years at school but I could never get him to concentrate on my homosexuality. 'You'll see, old boy,' he'd assure me, 'Once we clear away the psychic underbrush all that will wither away.' He wasn't even very interested in my sexual adventures at school and elsewhere, though he warned me that 'excessive acting out' would make me less sensitive to treatment. If I entered into detail about my love for a teacher or my sexual bribery of a football star, he'd wave his hand as if brushing cobwebs out of his face and say: 'Spare me, spare me.' When I asked him if smoking marijuana was dangerous, he assured me it led directly to heroin addiction.
The only moment when Moloney would truly pay attention to me was when I reported a dream to him. He was Freudian, I suppose, in believing that a dream was 'the royal road to the unconscious'. Now I agree with an Italian doctor friend who ascribes the primacy of dreams in Freud's system to the Viennese habit of eating cheese after dinner. Like Freud, Moloney felt that one of the analyst's main tools is picking through the transference. Freud, however, insists that the patient must know nothing concrete about the analyst, so that it will be clear even to him that he has invented everything and attributed it to the doctor. In the classic Freudian transference, the analysand recreates with his analyst his damaging relationship with his parents; when he recognises that the doctor has done nothing at all to justify such wrath, resentment or fear, he is forced to admit (and abandon) his habit of endlessly 'projecting' bad motives and harmful feelings on to everyone around him.
With Moloney, however, the experiment was compromised. Because he constantly chattered about himself I did know a lot about him, which I had the right to interpret as I saw fit. He might say: 'Stop projecting!' but only his authority lent credibility to such an objection. He was my first shrink, I had nothing to compare him to and he was my only chance of becoming a heterosexual, of ending the terrible suffering I was enduring as an outcast. He told me so himself; he was certain he was the only qualified doctor around. I contemplated suicide more than once.
Moloney convinced me that I should not go away for school (I had been accepted at Harvard) but should attend a nearby state university so that I could continue my sessions with him. He had close to 50 patients now and was seeing them from six in the morning till midnight, seven days a week. To stay awake, he was swallowing handfuls of Dexedrine and then coming down in the evening with constant swigs of bourbon. I'd drive every week the 50 miles from Ann Arbor into Detroit in a borrowed car. I'd have the 11pm hour, when Moloney was smiley and drunk, then I'd sleep on the analytic couch and awaken him, with great difficulty, for the 6am session. I'd have to blast him out of bed by playing his favourite record, 'There Is Nothing Like a Dame'.
His own life was beginning to come apart, he told me. He'd fallen in love with a patient who was seriously ill and he'd left his wife for her. But then, when his wife was diagnosed with a terminal illness, he'd gone back to her. Now his wife was dead and the patient was in a mental hospital.
Moloney seemed more and more disoriented. He was often confused, no longer just the overworked, sometimes indifferent, forgetful doctor but someone obviously lost. He'd aged quickly. He forgot to shave and sometimes he smelled of hangover. His hands trembled and he no longer took notes. His old bravado still hung from him in rags, as if he were a scarecrow in a field the farmer had let go fallow. I was bitter because I saw I had sacrificed my academic career to him, to the forsaken prospect of being cured. At the same time, I felt a deep affection for him, because he was vulnerable and hurt.
I discovered that despite his medical training and his years of psychoanalytic experience, he was sure that there was nothing in a male homosexual that couldn't be straightened out by a good woman - or even just a woman. I decided to break with him but when I thought of driving into Birmingham to tell him, my unconscious invented several excuses. My eyes swelled up - 'angio-neurotic oedema' was Moloney's diagnosis over the phone: 'skin rage'. He added: 'The baby is swelling up like a poisonous toad in order to scare off the Good Mother, me, in this case.' My foot became swollen and infected; I was hospitalised in the school infirmary.
At last, I decided I'd never get well until I broke with Moloney. When I limped into his office, I saw that the sore on his nose had become the size of a quarter and he'd let his brows grow so shaggy that they half covered his eyes. Through this white fringe, he looked out at me with huge, red eyes. For some reason I thought of a white plant feasting on shadow and decay - a mushroom.
'I'm leaving you,' I said, my voice hard and unsteady. 'I can't go on seeing you. It's not working out.' I had prepared many arguments but I didn't need them. Moloney said: 'You're right. I think you're right.'
I was never sure of what became of him. One of his old patients said he had given up his practice and moved to Mexico. Another said he'd lost his mind and been confined to an asylum.
After him, I had an orthodox Freudian from Vienna who'd renamed herself Alice Chester. At least her name didn't really go with her heavy German accent and her Jewishness; I invented a difficult war for her, possibly a concentration camp. I probably invented her Jewishness as well as her name change. I knew nothing about her except that she was a small, heavy-lidded woman who smiled with an irony that seemed at once exhausted and twinkly, if that's possible. She almost never 'offered an interpretation'. I knew from my reading that a strict Freudian, the sort I'd been longing to see, didn't offer interpretations during the first half-year of treatment. Although I was analysed by her for two years, she never said much. I longed for a detailed reconstruction of my infancy and childhood, week by week, but she never delivered. Sometimes, I feared she didn't really understand English; her constant, ironic smile could just as well have been benign incomprehension or a frightened camouflage of her ignorance.
Once, when I was talking about how I 'identified' with Harry Haller, the suicidal hero of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf , she exhaled smoke, then suddenly lit up with recognition and eagerly exclaimed, ' Ach! Der Steppenwolf! ' She nodded vigorously and smiled hugely. The air was juicy with the explosive German words.
How she must have missed Vienna as she sat there in her tidy little house in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, a thousand miles from the nearest café. How she must have resented that dim, larval life of Detroit, to which irony or self-consciousness would have seemed as irrelevant and unusable as jalapeños in Cracow. I sometimes told friends at school that my shrink was a member of 'the original Vienna Circle', as if she'd worked with Freud himself, which was just possible chronologically if she was as old as the century (I had no idea of her age).
Once she said she thought my school friends sounded as if they were self-amused and non-relating, which I instantly repeated with whoops of exaggerated laughter to them. For I'd discovered a few other gay guys in Ann Arbor and I regaled them with stories about my shrink. They'd hold their sides, weep with merriment and shout: ' Ach! Der Steppenwolf !' We thought we were terminally sophisticated.
When I graduated and moved to New York in 1962, I was too poor to afford a psychoanalyst. I was no longer on my father's payroll. Besides, I was too immersed in Greenwich Village gay life to want to be cured right away. Two years later, however, I was back in psychotherapy, this time with Frances Alexander, a PhD psychologist who conducted groups and practised something called 'transactional therapy'. At that time, in 1965, even sophisticates had not yet learned to ridicule 'New Age' or 'California feel-good' systems. I never read the bestselling book on which that system (now forgotten) was based, but apparently it labelled most exchanges between people according to a fairly limited taxonomy of games or transactions.
Therapy, as best I could tell from our group sessions, was aimed at unmasking these strategies in order to force the participants to return to (or invent) a sincere, heartfelt communication of feeling. We learned not to play the martyr ('Poor Me!' another client would cry out triumphantly), nor to invoke authority, nor to induce guilt in others, nor to cloak our healthy anger in humble depression ('Let it out, goddamn it!'). Freudian psychoanalysis, with its high fees, its glacial slowness, its obsession with childhood sexuality, incest, dreams, the unconscious, the patriarch, the anus, with its arrogant conviction that the patient should be kept ignorant of its methods and theories, was already foundering, challenged by the more democratic group therapy and its principle of every man his own shrink.
And then Stonewall came along, the uprising in Greenwich Village in June 1969, which announced the beginning of gay liberation. Feminism, the sexual revolution and the Vietnam War protests were in full force. It was just a matter of moments before the cards were reshuffled and someone shouted 'Gay is good,' to make a grand slam with 'Black is beautiful'.
Not immediately but soon enough, Freudian psychology went up in flames and became no more powerful or present than the smell of ashes in a cold fireplace the morning after. Most of the problems Freudianism had addressed were no longer experienced as an individual need to adapt to conventions, but as conventions that needed to adapt to individuals. Everyone asserted his or her rights. In the Fifties, people had been ashamed to admit they were inadequate; in the Sixties, they became proud to announce they were victims. Psychoanalysis had been addressed to shame culture; identity politics addressed a culture of complaint. Rilke had said: 'You must change yourself!' but now people said: 'Everyone else must change.'
In the mid-Seventies, during an unhappy love affair, I sought help from Charles Silverstein, a gay psychotherapist. He was one of the psychologists who had led the so-called 'nomenclature' battle in the American Psychological Association. A band of gay therapists had convinced the larger organisation to reclassify homosexuality as falling within the normal range of behaviour instead of as being an ego disorder. Just by going to him, I'd already scrambled all the rules of the game; now I wanted to be a happy gay rather than a rehabilitated homosexual.
Charles was as eccentric as Dr Moloney had been but not at all crazy. Charles was fat and chain-smoked, wore sandals and sloppy clothes and, of course, he had the usual carved African deities in his West Side living-room. He was pleasant but made no protestations of love. Love was irrelevant, which seemed more honest. For the first time, I'd found a shrink who listened with what I might call a fresh ear.
He seemed to have few preconceived ideas. When I complained of low self-esteem, he had me look in a mirror and list all my weak points and strong points; I was shocked to find out the strengths were twice as numerous. Sexual dysfunctions he approached in a straightforward behaviourist fashion - he refused to psychologise them.
For the more mysterious regions of the psyche, he traced out surprising new cause-and-effect relationships, tailor-made to me. I'd imagine I'd ended one subject (my father's death) and begun another (writer's block), but he'd show how the first caused the second. He taught me the ways in which internalised homophobia had left its traces all over me, like a lapdog's muddy footprints on clean sheets. He gave a strong impression that he didn't see himself as an authority, much less as a judge, but rather as a technician, someone who could put his professional training at my disposal. The possibility of transference was never discussed.
He was a Gestalt psychologist. I never figured out what that meant except in dream interpretation. Where someone like Alice Chester would interpret the props and personages in a dream as stand-ins for real events and people, Silverstein saw each element in the dream as one part of the personality interacting with every other. He'd invite me to be the sail and the compass, the sun and the shark, and to speak for them. The dialogue felt more complex and representative, even if in the end it was just as arbitrary.
Two decades later, in the fall of 1993, I started seeing my last or at least latest shrink. My young French lover, Hubert Sorin, was dying. I found a gay American therapist, Rik Gitlin, who hailed from San Francisco. Although I had been living in Paris for a decade I didn't want a French psychoanalyst. I despised Lacan, France's answer to Freud, a charlatan who counted his money while his patients talked and who invented the 20-minute 'hour' and felt authorised to reduce it to five minutes if the spirit so moved him, probably so he could cram in an even more lucrative turnover. I wanted to talk to my own kind of funny, disabused American gay man, someone who would laugh when I laughed and who developed his ideas by moving from anecdote to anecdote.
Rik was perfect. He was in his thirties, cute, bright, respectful (I was nearly twice his age). We sat in good chairs and looked at each other; the couch had been relegated to the Freudian attic. He took notes after each session and kept track of my numerous friends, as complicated as those cast lists that used to appear at the beginning of nineteenth-century Russian novels. Rik was one of the 'What-I'm-hearing-is-a-certain-amount-of-shame' school of therapy in which the psychologist peers through the client's social smiles and ironic demurrals to discern the stark outlines of his real feelings, often the opposite of those he intends to convey. This method depends on sound instincts, a nearly canine perception of signals pitched above the ordinary range of human hearing. Rik was gifted with this sort of sensitivity. He was also very companionable.
When I reflect upon my life, which has been touched by psychotherapy in every decade, I realise that during my youth, Freudianism was my main form of intellectuality, a severe, engrossing discipline too devoid of comforting to serve as a substitute for religion. Freudianism developed in me an interest in the individual and his or her sexual development and a strong sense that the progression from one stage to another could go in only one direction in someone healthy.
The 'residue' of this indoctrination was a narrow, normative view of humanity. But when I came to reject Freudianism in my late twenties, I replaced it with its opposite - an interest in groups rather than individuals, a morality that was situationist rather than absolute, and a rejection of every urge to 'totalise,' if that means to submit experience to one master theory. Psychoanalysis did leave me with a few beliefs, including the conviction that everyone is worthy of years and years of intense scrutiny, not a bad credo for a novelist.
I remember that Nabokov (or one of his characters) argues that Freud thought we admire a woman's hair because we desire her body, whereas the truth is we want to sleep with her because we're so awestruck by her beautiful hair. A novelist can work with Nabokov's insight because it respects the details, the sensuous surface, of experience, but not with Freud's, which is arid and reductive. I sought out therapy when I was deeply unhappy, driven by desires I wanted to eradicate because I felt they were infantile, grotesque, damaging and isolating. I was never cured, but society changed and redefined homosexuality as an orientation that was acceptable, or nearly so.
This is an edited version of Edmund White's essay, 'Shrinks', which appears in this month's issue of Granta. To order Granta for £6.99 plus 99p p&p, call Observer CultureShop on 0800 3168 171
