First Memories
I must have been no more than five years old when I was struck by lightning for the first of many times. There was a pretty boy in the neighborhood whom I set eyes on, for only a moment. I just fell into him in some way. Not that I have a full and complete memory of that chance encounter – after all, it happened over 60 years ago and when you are only five, your mental capacity to record one’s inner fluctuations is limited. But I do recall the effect the vision of this boy had on me because I happened to see him again once or twice when I was older. On those occasions, the impact of the first encounter echoed within me.
They say, the first cut is the deepest. I am not even sure there was a first cut, not in this lifetime, at least. I feel I was born with this wound: Feeling the sudden rush of longing, desire, adoration, and deflation of my sense of self. I admired that boy! He looked so adorable, self-confident, free of inhibitions and self-doubt. He was (in my projection at least) the way I longed to be, completing me and, at the same time, draining me of self-love – all in one instant. Of course, I had no words for my experience, nor did I share it with anyone. I just felt confused and wounded.
When puberty came upon me, at a fairly early age, the lightening strikes became more frequent and more devastating, more confusing and more charged with lust and pain. There were years in which I struggled again and again to regain my equilibrium, easily upset by as little as looking at a boy I fancied from a distance.
It did not take long for me to realize that I was at least partially gay (a bit longer to accept it), but that was not even the worst of it. Actually, looking back I was not tortured as much by shame, guilt, or fear as many other young adolescents are when they are coming out to themselves. Not that it was easy; after all, it was the Sixties and the prevailing winds were quite different from the cultural currents of today. But I always had a nonconformist streak within me that helped me cut through the fog.
Thus, it wasn’t so much my sexual inclinations that bothered me but the fluctuations of my sense of self, the sudden deflation and loss of self-love that tortured me, as they were agonizingly intertwined with lust and desire.
As many an adolescent I, too, had more than a passing acquaintance with suicidal ideations. In fact, I had decided to kill myself around my 18th birthday if things did not look up by then. Well, they did not – but I reached out to a therapist instead.
I had been reading psychological books since I was 12 or 13; at the age of 14 I read my first book by Sigmund Freud. Now, I was hoping to find some answers in “real” therapy. The fact that my therapist was a classical psychoanalyst did not help, however, as she was largely silent and mostly listened to my ramblings. (I still feel sorry for bending her ear with my mental gyrations.)
My many hours on the couch taught me at least one thing: how not to conduct psychotherapy. It was a painful, time-consuming, and costly experience but ultimately helpful in finding my own style in that business.
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