The Quad

The next step in my curriculum as a psychology major was a weekly regimen of psychoanalysis, and Meghan Schulze was my assigned therapist. She was a washed-out woman in her sixties with steel-gray hair and hazel eyes faded by the depredations of time, like a long-forgotten newspaper blanched by years of sunlight. In sheer academic terms she was an adjunct professor of psychology at the college. She spent most of her time in a downtown office where she maintained a successful private practice.

Schulze smiled and nodded when I arrived for my first appointment. Then the Ph.D. handed me a slip of paper with typed instructions that read:

I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Jonathan Kranepool. Now please sit and say nothing. Our first session will be devoted to just being together. Relax and observe silence. No questions, please. No comments. The session ends when I stand and hand you a departing set of instructions.

“I’ve never heard of such a therapeutic technique,” I said.

She brought an index finger to her lips to silence me, then gestured toward a three-cushion leather sofa. I sat on the center section and listened to the air hiss from the cushion as it compressed.

Schulze sat with her legs crossed at the ankles, dressed in a heavy wool skirt and sweater. Though we weren’t talking she had a notebook and pen in hand and was writing in intermittent bursts. Every now and again she looked at me, smiled and resumed taking notes.

My eyes wandered around the room. The place was disheveled. Manila file folders stacked everywhere, slumping in places and just a bump away from avalanching onto the floor and spilling their revealing contents. Pages pertaining to one patient could get mixed up with those from another and years of psychoanalysis would be muddled, misdiagnoses proliferating. It seemed appalling and irresponsible. A good lock-picker would have access to dozens of people’s inner and outer lives, all the material needed to blackmail Schulze’s patients.

The supposedly heterosexual housewife having an affair with a woman. The father trying to resist sexual impulses for his own daughter. The macho sheriff’s deputy who secretly cross-dressed in women’s lingerie for relaxation. The teenage boy bedeviled by voices urging him to commit murderous acts.

The tab on one file folder lying on a nearby end table was readable. It said, “Dineen, Harry.” There was something about Harry in there, something potentially harrowing or mortifying.

After ten minutes of Schulze’s silence treatment, the angst was running through me like an electric current. I wanted to speak for myself, to answer all these unspoken questions. Something serpentine rose within me and broke out.

“Shouldn’t we talk?” I said.

Schulze put a finger to her lips to reinforce the code of silence. Then a fresh round of urgent note-taking ensued. What could she possibly have to write when she was barely observing me, let alone asking questions? I wanted to call the whole thing off, wrest the notebook from her hands and find out what kinds of lies and misconceptions were passing from her hand.

It was a good thing I had smoked a joint before showing up.

I closed my eyes and tried to meditate. It was no use. I opened my eyes and she was staring straight at me. I looked at my watch. Less than half the session had elapsed. The silence kept getting louder. I covered my ears with my hands and rocked. There was a scream inside of me that wanted to come out. I managed to hold it down.

In a blatant act of cruelty, Schulze let the session run overtime by six minutes. When she finally stood to signal our time was up, I was handed yet another slip of paper. Typed on it were just eighteen words.

Thank you for your forbearance, Mr. Kranepool. I will see you the same day and time next week.

The statement was so curt it might as well have been texted to my cell phone. She opened the door and put a silencing finger to her lips once more as I left the premises.

I smoked two joints before returning for my second appointment. Dr. Schulze addressed me verbally this time. It wasn’t until I heard her accented English that I realized she was a German immigrant.

“Velcome back, Mr. Kranepool. I am so pleased to see you again. This veek vee vill talk a bit. But vee vill also vatch and observe in a different manner than last veek. Vee have much vork to do, very exciting vork, the kind of vork that vill open you to aspects of your personality you do not yet know exist. Vhen vee are done vith this semester you vill be an open book. Yes, to me, but most importantly to yourself.”

There were two straight-back chairs facing one another in the center of her office sitting just two feet apart.

“Please,” she said, “have a seat. Sit up straight and relax your facial, neck and shoulder muscles.”

Schulze sat in the other chair and looked into my face from an uncomfortably close proximity.

“Now then,” she said, “vee vill gaze into one another’s eyes and vee vill do so unflinchingly.”

Already my faith in this therapist was slumping. It was going to be another bizarre interlude with this German frau, this purveyor of strange practices and harsh intonations.

“As children vee all had staring contests. The first one to break eye contact vould lose the game. Dogs are not good at this game, and cats cannot be defeated. They have amazing composure. This is not a contest, however. This is therapy. Even between adults it is very common for competitiveness to arise. Let us not fall into that temptation.”

We got started. Schulze gave me the most intense, penetrating eye contact I had ever seen. She was a master of the technique, utterly motionless. It was like sitting across from a piece of taxidermy. It took just moments for my lids to start blinking and eyes shifting.

“Vee all have some darkness vithin us,” she said. Her mouth didn’t even move. Apparently she was also a ventriloquist. “But vhat is lurking in the dark? That’s what vee vant to know. That’s vhat vee must know if vee are to become successful psychoanalysts who can untangle the knotted emotions of the unhappy and the troubled.”

The staring contest rolled on. I felt an overwhelming impulse to break the gaze. My eyes began to tear.

“Hold steady,” she said. “Breathe evenly and deeply and stay focused. It gets easier and more natural as vee go along.”

I started to see ugly images superimposed over Schulze’s face, distortions of the likes she had alluded to. Extrasensory energies at play. Were these images a projection of her dark side or mine?

When our hour mercifully expired, she stood and said, “Now that you have been familiarized vith this technique, next veek vee vill do the exact same thing, except that vee vill observe silence from start to finish. Things vill begin to happen.”

Schulze sensed hesitancy.

“Goot?” she asked.

“What happens the veek after that,” I said, falling into her pattern of mispronunciation.

“Zen, vee vill talk about our experiences.”

The first thing I did back on campus was visit my psychology program counselor to demand a new therapist. The counselor was a scrawny little man whose glasses and protruding mouth made him look like a studious rodent. He had learned long ago that the surest path to the least amount of work was to say “no” to all student requests. In fact, he said my request was “impossible” because all assignments were permanent. I restated my demands more urgently this time, hoping to intimidate the little hamster. I was escorted from the building by the counselor’s receptionist.

Sick to my stomach with apprehension, I drank a bottle of Milk of Magnesia before returning to Schulze’s psychological death chamber the following week. This time a third chair had been added to the grouping just off to the side. Sitting on it was a recording device.

“What’s the point of recording our session if we’re not going to be talking?” I said.

Schulze gave a devious smile. “Breathing patterns,” she said. “The sound of minute bodily movements. The gurgle of digestive systems in distress. This is a very sensitive device, it picks up everything.”

We took our seats. I glared at the electronic interloper.

“Now please, hush,” Schulze said as she switched the RECORD button. It started vacuuming all sounds from the room.

Schulze took up where she left off last week, giving me the evil eye, a stare so piercing it burrowed into my unconscious mind, rummaged through its filing cabinets and took a thorough inventory. Her pupils dilated as the trance deepened, as if to engulf an even greater share of my mind. Halfway through the session the room went black except for a circle around the elder woman’s face. I batted away thoughts related to the dark side of the German psyche – the stoicism, the cruelty, the spittle.

Then came some gradual and surprising changes. The brain chatter ceased. Our breathing fell into a natural synchronization. My stomach settled and stopped making weeping sounds. My resistance subsided. Calmness permeated the room. The unconscious mind, under foreign invasion earlier in the hour, seemed to be undergoing an indescribable flowering. My awareness had clarity I hadn’t known since a child. All of my emotions seemed readily accessible. Meghan...