Ted was thirty when he came to see me, and a hermit(隐士). For the preceding seven years he had lived in a small cabin deep the woods. He had few friends and no one close. For three years he had not dated. Occasionally he performed minor carpentry jobs, but mostly he filled his days by fishing, reading and spending endless time making unimportant decisions, such as what he would cook for dinner and how he might cook it or whether he could no could not afford to purchase an inexpensive tool. Actually, by virtue of an inheritance he was quite wealthy. He was also intellectually brilliant. And as he said that first session, paralyzed(瘫痪的). “I know I should be doing something more constructive and creative with my life,” he complained(诉苦), “but I can’t even make the most minor decisions, much less big ones. I ought to have a career. I ought to go to graduate school and learn some kind of occupation, but I can’t get enthusiastic about anything. I’ve thought of everything-teaching, scholarly work, international relations, medicine, agriculture, ecology(生态学)-but nothing turns me on(使兴奋). I may get interested in it for a day or two, but then every field seems to have insurmountable(不能克服的) problems. Life seems to be an insurmountable problem.”
His problem began, Ted said, when he was eighteen and entered college. Until then everything had been fine. He had had basically an ordinary childhood in a stable well-to-do home with two older brothers; parents who cared for him even if they didn’t care much for each other; good grades and satisfactions in a private boarding school. Then-and perhaps this was crucial-came a passionate love affair with a woman who rejected him the week before he entered college. Dejected(沮丧的), he had spent most of his freshman(大学/中学一年级学生) year drunk. Still, he maintained good grades. Then he had several other love affairs, each one more halfhearted and unsuccessful than the last. His grades began to slip. He could not decide what to write papers about. A close friend, Hank, was killed in an automobile accident in the middle of his junior(三年级学生) year, but he’d gotten over it. He even stopped drinking that year. But the problem with decision-making became still worse. He simply could not choose a topic on which to write his senior thesis. He finished this course work. He rented an off-campus room. All he needed to graduate was to submit a short thesis, the kind of thing one could do in a month. It took him the following three years. Then, nothing. Seven years before, he had come here to the woods.
Ted felt certain that his problem was rooted in his sexuality. After all, his difficulties had begun, had they not, with an unsuccessful love affair? Besides, he had read almost everything that Freud had ever written(and much more than I myself had read). So during the first six months of therapy we plumbed(探究) the depths of his childhood sexuality, getting nowhere in particular(毫无进展). But in that period several interesting facets of his personality did emerge. One was his total lack of enthusiasm. He might wish for good weather, but when it came he would shrug his shoulders and say, “It doesn’t really make any difference. Basically one day’s just like the next.” Fishing in the lake, he caught an enormous pike(梭子鱼), “But it was more than I could eat and I have no friends to share it with, so I threw it back.”
Related to this lack of enthusiasm was a kind of global snobbishness(势利), as if he found the world and all that was in it to be in poor taste. His was the critics’ eye. I came to suspect he employed this snobbishness to keep a kind of distance between himself and things that might otherwise affect him emotionally. Finally, Ted had an enormous penchant(倾向) for secrecy(保密), which made therapy very slow going indeed. The most important facts of any incident had to be pried(撬开) out of him. He had a dream: “I was in a classroom. There was an object-I don’t know what-which I had placed inside a box. I had built the box around the object so that no one could tell what was inside it. I had placed the box inside a dead tree, and with finely fashioned wooden screws had replaced the bark over the box. But sitting in the classroom I suddenly remembered that I had not been certain to make the screws flush with the bark. I became quite anxious. So I rushed out to the woods and worked the screws so that no one could distinguish them from the bark. Then I felt better and came back to class.” As with many people, class and classroom were symbols for therapy in Ted’s dreams. It was clear he did not want me to find the core of his neurosis.
The first small chink(裂缝) in Ted’s armor occurred during one session in the sixth month of therapy. He had spent the evening before at the house of an acquaintance(泛泛之交). “It was a dreadful evening,” Ted lamented. “He wanted me to listen to this new record he’d bought, Neil Diamond’s sound track for the movie of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It was excruciating(折磨人的). I do not understand how educated people can actually enjoy such putrid(令人厌恶的) mucilage(粘液) or even call it music.”
The intensity of his snobbish reaction cause me to pick up my ears. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull was a religious book,” I commented. “Was the music also religious?”
“I suppose you could call it religious as much as you could call it music.”
“Perhaps it was the religion that offended you,” I suggested, “and not so much the music.”
“Well, I certainly do find that kind of religion offensive, “ Ted replied.
“What kind of religion is that kind?”
“Sentimental(多愁善感的). Mawkish.” Ted almost spat the words out.
“What other kind of religion is there?” I asked.
Ted looked puzzled, disconcerted(不安的). “Not much, I guess. I guess I generally find religion unappealing(unappealing).”
“Has it always been that way?”
He laughed ruefully(悲伤地). “No, when I was a fuzzy-brained(头脑不清的) adolescent I was quite into religion. My senior year of boarding school I was even a deacon(助祭) of the little church we had.”
“Then what?”
“Then what what?”
“Well, what happened to your religion?” I asked.
“I just grew out of it, I guess.”
“How did you grow out of it?”
“What do you mean, how did I grow out of it?” Ted was clearly becoming irritated(恼火的) now. “How does one grow out of anything? I just did, that’s all.”
“When did you grow out of it?”
“I don’t know. It just happened. I told you. I never went to church in college.”
“Never?”
“Never once.”
“So your senior year of high school you’re a deacon in the church,” I commented. “Then that summer you have an unsuccessful love affair. And then you never go to church again. It was an abrupt(突然的) change. You don’t suppose your girlfriend’s rejection had anything to do with it, do you?”
“I don’t suppose anything. The same pattern was true of lots of my classmates. We were coming of age in a time when religion wasn’t fashionable anyway. Maybe my girlfriend had something to do with it, maybe she didn’t. How should I know? All I know is I just became uninterested in religion.”
The next break came a month later. We had been focusing on Ted’s notable lack of enthusiasm about anything, which he readily acknowledged. “The last time I can distinctly remember being enthusiastic,” he said, “was then years ago, in my junior year. It was over a paper I was writing at the end of a fall semester course in modem British poetry.”
“What was the paper about?” I asked.
“I really don’t think I can remember, it was so long ago.”
“Poppycock,” I said. “You can remember if you want to.”
“Well, I think it had to do with Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was one of the first of the truly modem poets. ‘Pied Beauty’ was probably the poem it centered on.”
I left the office, went to my library, and came back with a dusty volume of British poetry from my college years. “Pied Beauty” was there on page 819. I read:
Glory(荣誉) be to God for dappled(斑驳的) things-
For skies of couple-color as a brindled(有斑纹的) cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim(为点缀在游动鳟鱼上玫瑰色的斑点);
Fresh-firecoal chestnut(栗子) falls; finches’(雀类) wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled(who know how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise him.
Tears came to my eyes. “It is, itself, a poem about enthusiasm,” I said.
“Yes.”
“It’s also a very religious poem.”
“Yes.”
“You wrote the paper on it at the end of the fall semester. That would have been January?”
“Yes.”
“If I calculated correctly, it was in the next month, February, that your friend Hank died.”
“Yes.”
I could feel an incredible tension growing. I was not sure what was the right thing to to. Hoping, I ploughed ahead.
“So you were rejected by your first real girl friend at seventeen and you gave up your enthusiasm for the church. Three years later your best friend died and you gave up your enthusiasm for everything.”
“I didn’t give it up, it was taken from me.” Ted was almost shouting now, more emotional than I had ever seen him.
“God rejected you so you rejected God.”
“Well, why shouldn’t I?” he demanded. “It’s a shitty world. It’s always been a shitty world.”
“I thought your childhood was quite happy.”
“No, that was shitty too.”
And so it was. Underneath its calm exterior(外部) Ted’s childhood home had been a continual bloody battleground(战场) for him. His two older brothers had picked on him with unparalleled(无与伦比的) viciousness. His parents, too involved in their own affairs and their hatred(憎恨) of each other to concern themselves with the seemingly minor problems of children, had offered him, the smallest and the weakest, no protection. Escape to the countryside for long, solitary(单独的) walks was his greatest solace(安慰), and we were able to establish that his hermitlike pattern had its roots in the years before he was even then. Boarding school, with its minor cruelties, had been a relief. As he talked of these things, Ted’s resentment of the world-or rather his ventilation(公开讨论) of that resentment-gathered momentum(动量). In the months that followed he relived not only the pain of his childhood and the pain of Hank’s death but also the pain of a thousand smaller deaths and rejections and losses. All of life seemed a maelstrom(不可抗的破坏力) of death and suffering, danger and savagery(野蛮).
After fifteen months of therapy there came a turning point. Ted brought into his session a little book. “You’re always talking about how secretive I am-and, of course, I am,” he said. “Last night I was rummaging(到处翻寻) through some old stuff and I found this journal that I kept during my sophomore(二年级学生) year at college. I haven’t even looked at it to censor(审查) it. I thought perhaps you might like to read the unexpurgated(未删改过的) me of a decade ago.”
I said I would, and I did for the next two nights. Actually, it was hardly revelatory except to confirm that his pattern as a loner, isolated by a snobbishness born of hurt, was deeply entrenched(根深蒂固的) even then. But one little vignette(花絮) caught me eye. He described how he had gone hiking alone on a Sunday in January and had been caught in a heavy snowstorm and had gotten back to his dormitory several hours after dark. “I felt a certain sense of exhilaration(兴奋),” he had written, “upon my return to the safety of my room, not unlike that which I experienced last summer when I came so near to death.” The next day in our session I asked him to tell me how he had come near to death.
“Oh, I’ve told you about that,” Ted said.
By this time I knew well that whenever Ted proclaimed he had already told me something, he was trying to hide it.
“You’re being secretive again,” I responded.
“Well, I’m sure I told you. I must have. Anyway, there wasn’t all that much to it. You remember I worked in Florida that summer between my freshman and sophomore years. There was hurricane(飓风). I kind of like storms, you know. At the height of the storm I went out on a pier(长堤). A wave washed me off. Then another washed me back on. That was all there was to it. It was over very quickly.”
“You went out to the end of a pier at the height of a hurricane?” I asked incredulously(不相信地).
“I told you. I like storms. I wanted to be close to that elemental fury.”
“I can understand that,” I said. “We both like storms. But I don’t know that I would have put myself in jeopardy(风险) like that.”
“Well, you know I have a suicidal(有自杀倾向的) streak(性格特征),” Ted replied almost impishly(恶作剧地). “And I was certainly feeling suicidal that summer. I’ve analyzed it. Frankly, I can’t remember going out on the pier with any conscious suicidal intent. But I certainly didn’t care much about life and I acknowledge the possibility that I was begin suicidal.”
“You were washed off?”
“Yes. I hardly knew what was happening. There was so much spray you really couldn’t see much of anything. I guess a particularly big wave came. I felt it slam(猛烈撞击) into me, felt myself swept away, felt myself lost in the water. There was nothing I could do to save myself. I was certain I was going to die. I felt terrified. After about a minute I felt myself tossed(抛) backward by the water-it must have been some kind of backwash wave-and a second later I was slammed down against the concrete(混凝土) of the pier. I crawled to the side of the pier, gripped(紧握) it, and hand over hand I crawled back to the land. I was a bit bruised(擦伤的). That was all.”
“How do you feel about the experience?”
“What do you mean, how do I feel about it?” Ted asked in his resisting way.
“Just what I asked. How do you feel about it?”
“You mean about being saved?” he queried.
“Yes.”
“Well, I guess I feel I was fortunate.”
“Fortunate?” I queried. “Just an unusual coincidence, that backwash wave?”
“Yes, that’s all.”
“Some might call it miraculous,” I commented.
“I guess I was lucky.”
“You guess you were lucky,” I repeated, goading him.
“Yes, goddammit, I guess I was lucky.”
“It’s interesting, Ted,” I said, “that whenever something significantly painful happens to you, you rail(抱怨) against God, you rail against what a shitty, terrible world it is. But something good happens to you, you guess you’re lucky. A minor tragedy(不幸) and it’s God’s fault. A miraculous blessing and it’s a bit lucky. What do you make of that?”
Confronted with the inconsistency(不一致) of his attitude toward good and bad fortune, Ted began to focus more and more on things that were right with the world, on the sweet as well as the sour, the dazzle(灿烂) as well as the dim(暗淡). Having worked through the pain of Hank’s death and the other deaths he had experienced, he began to examine the other side of the coin of life. He came to accept the necessity of suffering and to embrace the paradoxical nature of existence, the “dappled(斑驳的) things.” This acceptance occurred, of course, in the context of a warm, loving and increasingly pleasurable relationship between us. He began to move out. Very tentatively(验性地), he started dating again. He began to express faint(微弱的) enthusiasm. His religious nature blossomed(发展). Everywhere he looked he saw the mystery of life and death, of creation and decay and regeneration. He read theology. He listened to Jesus Christ, Superstar, to Godspell, and even bought his own copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. After two years of therapy Ted announced one morning that the time had come for him to get on with it. “I’ve been thinking about applying to a graduate school(研究院) in psychology,” he said. “I know you’re going to say that I’m just imitating you, but I’ve looked at that and I don’t think that’s it.”
“Go on,” I requested.
“Well, in thinking about this it seemed to me I ought to try to do what is most important. If I am going back to school I want to study the most important things.”
“Go on.”
“So I decided that the human mind is important. And doing therapy is important.”
“The human mind and psychotherapy, that’s the most important things?” I queried.
“Well, I suppose God is the most important thing.”
“So why don’t you study God?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“If god is the most important thing, why don’t you study God?”
“I’m sorry. I simply don’t understand you,” Ted said.
“That’s because you’re blocking yourself from understanding,” I replied.
“Really, I don’t undertand. How can one study God?”
“One studies psychology in a school. One studies God in a school,” I answered.
“You mean theology school?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, become a minister?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that.” Ted was aghast(吓呆的).
“Why not?”
Ted became shifty(躲躲闪闪的). “There isn’t necessarily any difference between a psychotherapist and minister. I mean, ministers do lots of therapy. And doing psychotherapy, well, it’s like a ministry.”
“So why couldn’t you become a minister?”
“You’are pressuring(对……施加压力) me,” Ted fumed(恼火). “A career is my personal decision. It’s up to me to go into the career I want. Therapists aren’t supposed to direct patients. It’s not your role to make choices for me. I’ll make my own choices.”
“Look,” I said, “I am not making any choice for you. I am in this instance being purely analytical. I am analyzing the alternatives open to you. You are the one who for some reason does not want to look at one of those alternatives. You are the one who wants to do the most important thing. You are the one who feels that God is the most important thing. Yet when I drag you to finally look at the alternatives of a career in God, you exclude it. You say you couldn’t do it. Fine if you can’t do it. But it is my province to be interested in why you feel you can’t do it, why you exclude it as an alternative.”
“I just couldn’t be a minister,” Ted said lamely(勉强地).
“Why not?”
“Because… because to be a minister one is publicly a man of God. I mean, I’d have to go public with my belief in God: I’d have to be publicly enthusiastic about it. I just couldn’t do that.”
“No, you’ve got to be secret, don’t you?” I said. “That’s your neurosis and you’ve got to keep it. You can’t be publicly enthusiastic. You’ve got to keep your enthusiasm in the closet, don’t you?”
“Look,” Ted wailed, “you don’t know what it’s like for me. You don’t know what it’s like to be me. Every time I opened my mouth to be enthusiastic about something my brothers would tease for it.”
“So I guess you’re still ten years old,” I remarked, “and your brothers are still around.”
Ted was actually crying now with frustration at me.
“That’s not all,” he said, weeping. “That’s how my parents punished me. Whenever I did something wrong they took what I loved away from me. ‘Let’s see, what is it that Ted’s most enthusiastic about? Oh, yes, the trip to his aunt’s next week. He’s really excited about that. So we’ll tell him that because he’s been bad he can’t go see his aunt. That’s it. Then there’s his bow and arrows. He really loves his bow and arrows. So we’ll take that away.’ Simple. Simple system. Everything I was enthusiastic about they took away. Everything I loved I lost.”
And so we arrived at the deepest core of Ted’s neurosis. Gradually, by act of will, continually having to remind himself that he was not still ten, that he was not still under the thumb of his parents of within striking(打击的) distance of his brothers, bit by bit he forced himself to communicate his enthusiasm, his love of life and his love of God. He did decide to go on to divinity(神学) school. A few weeks before he left I received a check from him for the previous month’s sessions. Something about it caught my eye. His signature seemed longer. I looked at it closely. Previously he had always signed his name “Ted.” Now it was “Theodore.” I called his attention to change.
“I was hoping you would notice it,” he said. “I guess in a way I’m still keeping secrets, aren’t I? When I was very young my aunt told me that I should be proud of the name Theodore because it means ‘lover of God.’ I was proud. So I told my brother about it. Christ, did they make fun of me. They called me a sissy(胆小鬼) in ten different ways. ‘Sissy choir(唱诗班) boy. Why don’t you go kiss the altar(祭坛)? Why don’t you go kiss the choirmaster(唱诗班指挥)?’” Ted smiled. “You know the whole routine. So I became embarrassed by the name. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I was no longer embarrassed. So I decided it was all right to use my full name now. After all, I am a lover of God, aren’t I?”