The Thanatos Syndrome

handsome, formidable woman with heavy breasts, youngish but with hair gone prematurely iron-gray and done up in two heavy braids—and shaking like a leaf. She had been frightened for months.
    Frightened of what? Failure? Not according to her. One might have thought she had enough ordinary troubles to frighten anybody. But she had her own theory. She read books on psychology. She misread Freud. Her theory was that she had a strong sexual drive, that it was not being satisfied, and that in consequence she became anxious. So anxious she couldn’t cope.
    As the older Freud would have told you, it’s not that simple.
    I think I helped her. I only saw her a few weeks. There was not enough time or money for a proper analysis. But we made some progress.
    The young Freud might have partly agreed with her—of course, it was the other way around, she was agreeing with Freud. Suppressed or unfulfilled sexual needs translate into anxiety, etc. Now I don’t know how it was with the middle-class Viennese Hausfrauen Freud saw as patients. Maybe he was right about them. But he was not right about Ella. As a matter of fact, she satisfied her needs and drives, as she called them, had an affair with one of her bosses, a chicken farmer—and became more frightened than ever. She actually wrung her hands and cried, her face going red as a child’s between her heavy iron-gray braids.
    I began to notice something about her. The only times she was not frightened were when she carried off some little performance, a gesture which seemed to her to be “right,” that is, sufficiently graceful, clever, savvy, warranted, that it pleased her and me. I never cease to be amazed at the number of patients who are at a loss or feel crazy because they don’t know what to do from one minute to the next, don’t think they do things right—I don’t mean right in the moral sense, but right in the way that people on TV or in books or movies always do things right. Even when such actor-people do wrong, go nuts, they do it in a proper, rounded-off way, like Jane Fonda having a breakdown on TV. “I can’t even have a successful nervous breakdown!” cried Ella, wringing her hands. She thought she had to go nuts in a poetic way, like Ophelia singing sad songs and jumping in the creek with flowers in her hair. How do I know what to do, Doctor? Why can’t you tell me? What I want to tell them is, this is not the Age of Enlightenment but the Age of Not Knowing What to Do.
    One day she carried off a charming little gesture and I noticed that it pleased her very much. She showed up with copies of Feliciana Farewell, the yearbook of our high school—yes, she had discovered that we had attended the same high school here and the same university in North Carolina. She opened the two books to show me her picture and mine—yes, we had both been editor of the yearbook. She gave me the yearbooks. It pleased her. She stopped trembling.
    We talked about failure. What is failure? Failure is what people do ninety-nine percent of the time. Even in the movies: ninety-nine outtakes for one print. But in the movies they don’t show the failures. What you see are the takes that work. So it looks as if every action, even going crazy, is carried off in a proper, rounded-off way. It looks as if real failure is unspeakable. TV has screwed up millions of people with their little rounded-off stories. Because that is not the way life is. Life is fits and starts, mostly fits. Life doesn’t have to stop with failure. Not only do you not have to jump in the creek, you can even take pleasure in the general recklessness of life, as I do, a doctor without patients sailing paper P-51s at a martin house. I am a failed but not unhappy doctor.
    I took her hints of suicide—“I don’t have to play this hand,” etc.—seriously. We spoke of failure and she got better. I can’t claim a cure, but she got better. She showed some initiative, stopped wringing her hands, moved to Nags Head on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, got a job teaching school, put her children in the excellent public school system of North Carolina, and even began writing poetry. She sent me a postcard showing the beach and the dunes of Kitty Hawk. It read: “Did you ever walk on a beach in December in a gale. The winter beach is lovely.” Later she sent me a poem she wrote called “Spindrift,” about the