The Thanatos Syndrome

problem, Doc.
    Actually I helped her and ended up liking her and she me. Yes, she had always been “nice.” “Nice” in her case had a quite definite meaning. It meant always doing what one was supposed to do, what her mamma and papa wanted her to do, what her teacher wanted her to do, what her boss wanted her to do. Surely if you do what you’re supposed to do, things will turn out well for you, won’t they? Not necessarily. In her case they didn’t. She felt defrauded by the world, by God. So what did she do? She got fat.
    She started out being nice as pie with me. She listened intently, spoke intelligently, read books on the psychiatry of fatness, used more psychiatric words than I did. She was the perfect patient, mistress of the couch, dreamer of perfect dreams, confirmer of all theories. All the more reason why she was startled when I asked her why she was so angry. She was, of course, and of course it came out. She couldn’t stand her mother or father or herself or God—or me. For one thing, she had been sexually molested by her father, then blamed by her mother for doing the very thing her mother had told her to do: Be nice. So she couldn’t stand the double bind of it, being nice to Daddy, doing what Daddy wanted, and believing him and liking it, oh yes, did she ever (yes, that’s the worst of it, the part you don’t read about), and then being called bad by Mamma and believing her too. A no-win game, for sure. So what to do? Eat. Why eat? To cover up the bad beautiful little girl in layers of fat so Daddy wouldn’t want her? To make herself ugly for boys so nobody but Daddy would want her?
    I couldn’t say, nor could she, but I was getting somewhere with her. First, by giving her permission to give herself permission to turn loose her anger, not on them at first, but on me and here where she felt safe. She didn’t know she was angry. There is a great difference between being angry and knowing that you are angry. We made progress. One day she turned over on the couch and looked at me with an expression of pure malevolence. Her lips moved. “Eh?” I said. “I said you’re a son of a bitch too,” she said. “Is that right? Why is that?” I asked. “You look a lot like him.” “Is that so?” “That’s so. A seedy but kindly gentle wise Atticus Finch who messed with Scout. Wouldn’t Scout love that?” she asked me. “Would she?” I asked her. She told me.
    She lost her taste for french fries, lost weight, took up aerobic dancing, began to have dates. She discovered she was a romantic. At first she talked tough, in what she took to be a liberated style. “I know what you people think—it all comes down to getting laid, doesn’t it?—well, I’ve been laid like you wouldn’t dream of,” she said with, yes, a sneer. “You people?” I asked her mildly. “Who are you people?” “You shrinks,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t know what you think and probably want.” “All right,” I said. But what she really believed in was nineteenth-century romantic love—perhaps even thirteenth-century. She believed in—what?—a knight? Yes. Or rather a certain someone she would meet by chance. It was her secret hope that in the ordinary round of life there would occur a meeting of eyes across a room, a touch of hands, then a word or two from him. “Look, Donna,” he would say, “it’s very simple. I have to see you again”—the rich commerce of looks and words. It would occur inevitably, yet by chance. The very music of her heart told her so. She believed in love. Isn’t it possible, she asked me, to meet someone like that—and I would know immediately by his eyes—who loved you and whom you loved? Well yes, I said. I agreed with her and suggested only that she might not leave it all to chance. In chance the arithmetic is bad. After all, there is no law against looking for a certain someone.
    After hating me, her surrogate seedy Atticus Finch, she loved me, of course. I was the one who understood her and gave her leave. Our eyes met in love. It was a good transference. She came to understand it as such. She did well. She was working on her guilt and terror, the terror of suspecting it was her fault that Daddy had laid hands on her and that they’d had such a good time. She got a