Life Coaching-- a Case Study, Part 1

At his first session with Claude Chauncey announced that he had already completed a four year psychoanalysis. By his account the treatment had been a rousing success. 

Chauncey had chosen a young analyst at the clinic conducted by the Gramercy Institute. He paid a very low fee and worked with Stella, a young trainee who was supervised by a more senior analyst. 

A recent college graduate Chauncey felt an affinity with Stella, who was only a few years his senior. In exchange for his reduced fee Chauncey had agreed that Stella could present his treatment as a control case to fulfill the requirements for her own graduation.

When treatment ended Stella’s training committee had concurred that she had conducted a highly successful, almost textbook case. 

And yet, eighteen months after receiving what he considered a clean bill of mental health Chauncey was mired in deepening anguish, as though his world was in ruins. 

It was not for nothing that Freud never claimed that psychoanalysis was an effective therapy.

When he first consulted Claude, Chauncey insisted on presenting the story of his life. Ignoring Claude’s convivial handshake and matter-of-fact niceties, he launched into his personal history, in great detail, accompanied by a smattering of analytic insights.

Allowing Chauncey to indulge this deformity, which told him more than he needed or wanted to know, Claude registered that the young man’s positive self-image, or what was left of it, depended heavily on his belief that he had mastered the analytic process. Not only that, but Chauncey had become a true believer, a cult follower for psychoanalysis.

Product of an unhappy, though stable marriage between an anglophile lawyer-- who had insisted on giving his son an archaic British name-- and a mother who had maintained a career as a real estate agent-- she had told her son that work was the most satisfying part of her life-- Chauncey was the younger of two children.

He had a sister, Yvette, six years his senior. The family had settled in the sylvan verdure of the New York suburbs. The family’s living standards had bounded forward when his father had parlayed his limited legal skills into a thriving divorce practice. Chauncey went to public high school and then to Yale.

Yale was his father’s dream come true. The older man had contributed generously to the Sterling Library Fund and believed that this had helped gain his son admission. He wanted Chauncey to become a lawyer and to join his practice. Whenever Chauncey expressed reservations about becoming a junior clone, his father exclaimed that George Bush had not done so badly.

Claude could not fail to notice that the bedraggled young man facing him, with his long blond ponytail and unkempt beard, wearing an unpressed flannel shirt and baggy jeans, sitting sloppily in the consulting chair with a terrified gaze focused intently on him, resembled a farm boy from Iowa more than a scion of Westchester gentility. He took it as a bad sign. In some circumstances he might have mentioned the discordance, but given Chauncey’s evident fragility, he held his tongue. 

He chose to side with Chauncey against his father by saying that what worked for the Bush family was not necessarily a universal law of human nature. Chauncey was somewhat comforted. He proceeded with his story.

Working with Stella had confirmed his conviction that his father was the problem, and quite a problem it was. The family autocrat had hovered over him like a menacing angel. He had been quick to find fault and quicker to punish. He amused himself with quaint and biting witticisms: “In this house there are two ways; my way and the way out.”

Chauncey feared his father and spent much of his energy attempting to conform to his father’s will. Until he arrived at Yale things had gone according to plan-- according to his father’s plan, that is.

At Yale, Chauncey had joined a group of political activists protesting the school’s racism. Later he manifested wioth a caucus denouncing big corporations for their environmental pollution. In place of the preppy uniform that he had worn like a second skin, he adopted a freer dress code-- to the point where his father preferred that he not come home. 

Inevitably, Chauncey decided against law school. He chose to work at a store that sold wholesome food in an underprivileged neighborhood. Hearing this news his father became apoplectic and refused to help his son make ends meet. “You are not going to be a slug on my money,” were his words.

Chuncey took the news badly and fell into a depression. When he decided to do psychoanalysis, his father pronounced it to be so much brainwashing and refused to pay for treatment. Thus, Chauncey became a low-fee clinic patient.

Treatment had focused on the conflict between father and son, emphasizing the father’s need for control and the son’s need to rebel. 

But the treatment did not ignore Chauncey’s mother. In fact, she resented her husband’s treatment of her son-- not least because he behaved like a brute with her. Deadened by her marriage she had been going through the motions, constantly criticized for her son’s failings. Chauncey’s father blamed Yale for his son’s breakdown, but he also unleashed torrents of rage against his wife. For her part she took a secret satisfaction in her son’s rebelliousness.

At the same time, Chauncey’s father was slavishly devoted to his daughter. In her father’s eyes Yvette could do no wrong; he never pressured her to do anything. Being a girl she escaped family tradition and was not obliged to walk in her father’s footsteps. At present she was living in Omaha with her husband, an insurance executive and their two children.

After presenting the family portrait, Chauncey explained that Stella had thought that he was a pawn in an ongoing struggle between father and mother. By making him the kind of man her husband despised, Chauncey’s mother was exacting revenge for years of abuse.

Later, Chauncey disclosed that his mother had never really wanted to marry his father. The man had tricked her into having sex and had impregnated her. Being of a lower social class he proclaimed her to be a trophy of great value. She would not have called it rape but she knew that she had been victimized and that she would have to live with the consequences for the rest of her life. 

Claude was moved by this stirring rendition of Chauncey’s life. He saw two ancient Greek myths converging. On one side was young Oedipus, crippled and left to die by his father, surviving to murder his father and to marry a woman he would eventually learn was his mother. But Claude also heard echoes of the myth of Medea, the sorceress who aided her husband in capturing the golden fleece, only to turn into the scorned wife who destroyed herself and her children in revenge. 

However much he admired the narrative clarity of this psychoanalytically inspired rendition of his life, Claude hesitated to bless it with his unqualified approval. If this were the truth of Chauncey’s life, the unfortunate young man would have been trapped in a struggle to the death between two monstrous specimens of inhumanity. Aesthetically, it was satisfying to interpret human existence through the filter of Greek mythology, but it reduced people to caricatures  and burdened them with a fatalistic mood. Claude could see that none of it had provided Chauncey with emotional balance.

Perhaps Chauncey saw himself condemned to play a role in someone’s play. Were he to refuse the role, what alternatives did therapy have to offer? Should he become the author of his own tragedy? Eminent psychoanalysts had offered this solution. Claude found it to be vapid.

Psychoanalysts had always taken it as an article of faith that the past determines the present. Studying the past allows a patient to discover what he really, really wanted, and what other people really, really wanted from him. And yet, nothing was gained by learning who wanted what from whom. It might have provided a mask of intelligibility, but that did not change behavior.

The real challenge was to overcome bad habits. Understanding how and why you develop a bad habit has no real influence on the habit. So said Aristotle, and he was surely right. The problem is not how to understand dysfunctional behavior, but how to modify it.

Claude was digesting all of this material when Chancey launched into a multi-count indictment of his parents. He believed himself the product of parental treachery.

He began with a constellation of childhood experiences that Stella had found especially salient.  One day when Chauncey was five his father was trying to teach him how to catch a rubber ball. Each time it was thrown, Chauncey bobbled or dropped it. As his father became increasingly enraged, Chauncey lost the will to try. Finally, the father could take it no longer and slapped his son’s unmanly face. The boy screamed and ran into the house, into the comforting bosom of his mother. To console him she pronounced words that would mark him forever: “Daddy’s a mean man,”

A month later his mother was making desperate telephone calls trying to find out why her husband had not come home for dinner. The man had disappeared; no one knew where he was. As Chauncey’s sister Yvette was trying to console her brother, he blurted out: “Good. I hope he never comes home.” Everyone stayed up late awaiting the man’s arrival. He rolled in at 12:30 and never bothered to offer an explanation.

Chauncey’s parents fought often and violently.  The young man remembered his mother in tears, crumbled on the floof, his father standing over her like a conquering hero. Later he would learn of his father’s mistress and his mother’s hysterical complaints about feeling rejected.

The boy had always dreaded his father, but he often fantasized about fighting him for his mother’s sake. And then, one day when he was nine, Chauncey had come home early from school, only to find his half-undressed mother in the arms of the plumber. His mother begged him not to tell his father. She seemed to fear for her life.

Chauncey also blamed his mother for being chronically inattentive and absent-minded. She was almost never around when he came home from school. Dinners were hit-or-miss affairs; until Yvette took over the role of homemaker and provided more stable routines. Since his mother was a real estate broker she spent most of her weekends showing houses, leaving Chauncey at the mercy of his disapproving father.

Claude was thinking that the more Chauncey sided with his mother the more he had been stripped of his manhood. And yet, within the family the options for becoming a man were none too appealing. If Chauncey had done his father’s bidding and become a divorce lawyer he would have compromised his moral character. If this is what it meant to be a man, better not to be one. By remaining faithful to his mother Chauncey had punished his father, but at a very high price.

While waiting for Chauncey to arrive for his second session Claude decided that he had heard rather enough horror stories. Chauncey’s commitment to these stories was eating away at him. Left unchallenged they would surely destroy him.

Psychoanalysis had offered the young man a certain version of his past history; it was certainly not the only account. And nothing said that he had to embrace it. By selecting the most sordid episodes and the most ignoble motivations Chauncey had placed himself in a double bind. Any success he achieved would redound to his father’s benefit and would break faith with his mother. But if he fulfilled his unspoken pact with his mother, he would sacrifice his chance for happiness in his own life. The more miserable Chauncey became, the more he would feel morally triumphant.

At Chauncey’s second session Claude was ready to refocus their work, to take charge of the situation, and to lead Chauncey out of his mind-- and the attendant narratives. He understood that his new client excelled at free association and would use it to evade all relevant issues. If he fell back on questions of desire Chauncey would have an excuse to avoid the moral issues he could not face.

Claude suspected that Chauncey’s life was anything but dull and anything but normal. Perhaps his insistence on telling his past history masked a keen embarrassment with his present circumstances, coupled with a wish to have license to avoid dealing with it.

Rather than wait for Chauncey to begin the second session, Claude spoke first to express his favorable impression of the young man’s intellectual acuity. Then he shifted abruptly to more present concerns, though in a roundabout fashion: “Have you come to me because something from your past still haunts you? Do you feel that your analysis was incomplete?”

“Not at all,” Chauncey admitted, “I am quite happy with my analysis. No, the problem is that things have not been going well in my life. I think I need more guidance than analysis, and that is your reputation.”

Chauncey said he was tempted to return to Stella, but he was afraid that she would take it as a reproach. Nor could he remand himself to one of Stella’s colleagues; he was a famous patient, a great success story, and that fact that he was undergoing a nervous collapse suggested that psychoanalysis had limited therapeutic value.

So, Chauncey sketched a picture of his current predicament. Currently he was working at a health food store. “You must know it,” he said. “It’s called the Good Earth.” There he occasionally personed-- they were not allowed to say manned-- the cash register and otherwise worked on arranging the foodstuffs-- bagging peanuts and stacking boxes of organic cereal-- and even helped the owner to select new items. The work hardly challenged this Yale graduate, but to his mind it offered a spiritual fulfillment that he could never have gained in a law office or a bank.

Speaking of banks, Chauncey quickly segued into a description of his current paramour, Ursula, with whom he had been sharing a spectacular Tribeca loft for the past twenty months. Clearly, he could not afford this lifestyle on the pittance he received from The Good Earth. The loft belonged to Ursula, an Amazonian bond trader at Goldman, Sachs.

Chauncey described her as tall, blonde, and almost beautiful. Known to her colleagues as the terror of the trading floor, Ursula had recently been named a managing director of the firm. Her ambition was to become the first female CEO of the firm. She had studied economics at Johns Hopkins and was All-American in lacrosse. She then attended Wharton and moved on to Goldman Sachs. She had made a great deal of money, for the company and for herself.

Intense and driven, Ursula rarely came home before 10:00 p.m. Chauncey took pride in her success and she rewarded his solicitous support with a great deal of affection. He explained that they were wonderfully happy together. Their sex life, he added, was excellent, and Ursula occasionally liked to be tied up and whipped. He added that she likes dominant men.

Chauncey’s male pride was not compromised by their income disparity. He expected that he would eventually receive a substantial inheritance from his father. On that score, Claude opined to himself, Chauncey was undoubtedly wrong.

Then he would be able to contribute to their coffers and would have more time for his aquarelles. He had forgotten to mention that watercolors were his great passion in life. Not because he or anyone else felt that he had any talent, and not because he saw it as a new career path, but because he enjoyed it. 

Ursula loved her man for what he was, not for what he had accomplished. After suffering through a series of unsatisfactory relationships with Wall Street types, she discovered Chauncey while shopping for Nepalese granola at The Good Earth. She thought he was cute, if a bit unkempt, but she picked him up, enticed him to her lair and took full advantage of him.

Of late, a series of troubling events had upset the equilibrium of Chauncey’s life and psyche. First, at Ursula’s company outing, Chauncey became trapped within a contingent of cigar smoking futures traders who were exchanging vulgar repartee, most of it at Chauncey’s expense. Whatever he said about his work at The Good Earth provoked derision. 

After the party, cruising down the thruway in her white Mercedes convertible, Chauncey felt seriously discouraged. The incident reminded him of his father’s abuse, so he attempted to analyze what had occurred. He saw the men as grandiose narcissists, out of touch with their feminine sides, but he could not regain his self-confidence.

Ursula, however, was working herself up into a fury, for having brought him to such an event. So she kept demeaning her colleagues. Not one of them could sustain a relationship with a woman. Without their fat wallets none of them would ever get laid. 

This made Chauncey ask her whether she had ever had sex with any of them, but she refused to confirm or deny. He was not consoled by the thought that his paramour had to stand up for him.

Several days later, as Chauncey continued to mope around the store in a protracted funk, one of his colleagues, Cassandra, invited him to lunch. Chauncey could not expose his abjection to this pretty twenty-year old, but she had felt so much compassion seeing his melancholic eyes that at one point she spontaneously grasped his hand. The softness of her touch produced a twinge of excitement, but Chauncey quickly told himself that she was being nice, not seductive. 

He had jumped to the wrong conclusion. Later in the afternoon, as he was arranging boxes of power bars in the basement storeroom, he abruptly turned around to find himself facing Cassandra. Before he had a chance to recoil he felt her lips on his. Suddenly, their lips were locked in a passionate embrace. Shocked was too weak a word to describe Chauncey’s seeming willingness to betray Ursula.

To be continued, next week.

I am happy to announce that I now have some free consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested, please email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.