The Thanatos Syndrome

good job at a doctor’s office—as a receptionist, did well—and got engaged.
    I didn’t share her faith in the inevitability of meeting a certain someone by chance, but I do have my beliefs about people. Otherwise I couldn’t stand the terrible trouble people get themselves into and the little I can do for them. My science I got from Dr. Freud, a genius and a champion of the psyche— Seele, he called it, yes, soul—even though he spent his life pretending there was no such thing. I am one of the few left, yes, a psyche-iatrist, an old-fashioned physician of the soul, one of the last survivors in a horde of Texas brain mechanics, M.I.T. neurone circuitrists.
    My psychiatric faith I got in the old days from Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, perhaps this country’s best psychiatrist, who, if not a genius, had a certain secret belief which he himself could not account for. Nor could it be scientifically proven. Yet he transmitted it to his residents. It seemed to him to be an article of faith, and to me it is as valuable as Freud’s genius. “Here’s the secret,” he used to tell us, his residents. “You take that last patient we saw. Offhand, what would you say about him? A loser, right? A loser by all counts. You know what you’re all thinking to yourself? You’re thinking, No wonder that guy is depressed. He’s entitled to be depressed. If I were he, I’d be depressed too. Right? Wrong. You’re thinking the most we can do for him is make him feel a little better, give him a pill or two, a little pat or two. Right? Wrong. Here’s the peculiar thing and I’ll never understand why this is so: Each patient this side of psychosis, and even some psychotics, has the means of obtaining what he needs, she needs, with a little help from you.”
    Now, I don’t know where he got this, from Ramakrishna, Dr. Jung, or Matthew 13:44. Or from his own sardonic Irish soul. But there it is. “Okay, that patient may look like a loser to you—incidentally, Doctors, how do we know you don’t look like losers to me, or I to you?” said Dr. Sullivan, a small ferret-faced man with many troubles. But there it was, to me the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in a field, that is to say, the patient’s truest unique self which lies within his, the patient’s, power to reach and which we, as little as we do, can help him reach.
    Do you know that this is true? I don’t know why or how, but it is true. People can get better, can come to themselves, without chemicals and with a little help from you. I believed him. Amazing! I’m amazed every time it happens.
    Very well, I am an optimist. I was an optimist with Donna. I was willing to explore her romanticism with her. What I believed was not necessarily that her knight might show up—who knows? he could—but rather that talking and listening ventilates the dark cellars of romanticism. She needed to face the old twofaced Janus of sex: how could it be that she, one and the same person, could slip off of an afternoon with Daddy, her seedy Atticus Finch, do bad thrilling things with him, and at the same time long for one look from pure-hearted Galahad across a crowded room? Daddy had got to be put together with Galahad, because they belonged to the same forlorn species, the same sad sex. She was putting it together in me, who was like her daddy but had no designs on her and whom she trusted. She could speak the unspeakable to me. Sometimes I think that is the best thing we shrinks do, render the unspeakable speakable.
    So here she is two years later. I watch her curiously as she comes up the porch steps. She looks splendid, a big girl yes, but no fat girl she. She’s wearing a light summery skirt of wrinkled cotton in the new style, slashed up the thigh and flared a little. Her hair is pulled up and back, giving the effect of tightening and shortening her cheek. With her short cheek, flared skirt, and thick Achilles tendon, she reminded me of one of Degas’s ballet girls, who, if you’ve noticed, are strong working girls with big muscular legs.
    I try to catch her eye, but she brushes past me, swinging her old drawstring bag, and strides into my office. She ignores the couch. Seated, we face each other across the desk.
    Her gaze is pleasant. Her lips curve in a little smile, something new. Is she being ironic again?
    â€œWell?” I say at last.
    â€œWell