XV
“I can certainly offer you an opinion resembling a diagnosis if you feel this would be helpful,” said Robin when I saw him later in his consulting-room at the Healing Centre. “Now that the marriage is unquestionably over I can be more frank, but I must warn you that my opinion may not be as satisfactory as you think.”
“Why not?”
“Reality isn’t always something which can be committed to paper, analysed, tied up in pink ribbon and filed away neatly in the correct drawer of the filing cabinet.”
“All I’m looking for is a professional opinion which is reasonable and logical—”
“Reason and logic are useful tools, but human beings are so mysterious, so very much more, it always seems to me, than the reasonable, logical sum of their mental and physical parts . . . And don’t forget that as I never met Kim what I say will inevitably be speculative. Scientific accuracy? No, I’m afraid that won’t be possible. But would you be prepared to look at an impressionistic sketch?”
“Anything’s better than nothing!”
“Then let me start with those questions I raised for you to consider earlier. Some of them turned out to be more important than others, didn’t they? I was interested to hear that Kim showed signs of being more benign towards his father, more forgiving. It sounds as if his psychiatrist did some effective work on that front even if he never got to grips with some of the other problems . . . But we have to remember that Kim was only at the beginning of being treated. Several months of out-patient therapy might have made a big difference to him.
“I was certainly right to call attention to the enigma of his sexuality. His most obvious problem, it seems, was that he reached adult life with a poorly integrated sexuality, and the part he couldn’t adjust to was split off and repressed. Am I saying he was a closet homosexual? Not necessarily. Without interviewing Kim in depth it really is impossible for me to reach any kind of firm conclusion, but if you pushed me hard enough I’d say he sounds more like a maladjusted heterosexual than a homosexual. Wasn’t he bisexual, you ask? Not in my opinion. The evidence suggests that he was strongly attracted only to women and that the motivation behind the homosexual episodes was more akin to the motivation underlying rape—which is primarily about violence, not about sex. Cases like this illustrate that sexuality is a far more complicated subject than a lot of people think, and that all the conventional sexual categories are really only broad generalisations which can be seriously misleading . . .
“But for clarity’s sake, let me add this: let me theorise that Kim hated and feared the unintegrated part of his sexuality, and this hatred and fear was projected onto homosexuals whom he then abused; it would have been a way of ridding himself not only of self-loathing but of great psychological discomfort. He talked of easing a dislocation, didn’t he? Yes, I see him as someone who never came to terms with his feminine side and so despised any man who didn’t fit his definition of the macho male. Why was he like this? We don’t know. Possibly his father always insisted on him being very tough—while at the same time his mother made certain aspects of the feminine repulsive to him.
“The dislocation would have set up a fault-line in his personality and under stress this fault-line would rupture, propelling him into the incidents which formed his ‘hobby.’ No, I don’t see his personality as fragile but I do see it as fractured; that’s not quite the same thing. He was certainly tough enough to paper over the fracture most of the time, but the trouble is that the more we repress unwelcome feelings and the deeper we bury them in our unconscious minds, the more likely those feelings are to erupt eventually in very disagreeable forms.
“Kim’s remark to you that his ‘hobby’ seemed to have more to do with rage than with sex supports my theory that the homosexual episodes had nothing to do with his basic sexual orientation. I see him as an angry man, angry with his parents for not fulfilling his emotional needs, angry with Sophie for making him feel guilty, angry even with the professional success which gave him so much yet couldn’t give him the satisfaction he was still seeking when he got involved with Mrs. Mayfield’s occult society—and in the end perhaps he was angry that he ever got involved with Mrs. Mayfield in the first place. If his feelings for you were genuine he would have been angered by the trouble he was having disassociating himself from both her and her world.”
Robin paused. I supposed he felt it was time to check that his “impressionistic portrait” was not affecting me too adversely, but I was already feeling better. It helped to have the baffling pieces in the jigsaw of Kim’s personality slotted into a pattern which made sense. I felt I was beginning to have a firmer grasp of Lewis’s idea that the personality of the real Kim had been invaded and poisoned by a malign subpersonality, and by spelling out the psychological distortions which had grown upon Kim’s true self, Robin was helping me to visualise a metaphorical cancer of the mind, a spiritual cancer, which had in the end proved terminal.
“Go on,” I said. “Do you, in fact, think his feelings for me were genuine?”
“It certainly sounds as if they were—although, as you came to realise, he was projecting onto you an image which didn’t match your reality. But as I explained to you before, this is not uncommon behaviour when people are in love, and as it turned out, you were projecting an image onto him too . . . Can you see now what was going on?”
“Oh yes,” I said, and although I tried to keep my voice light and ironical I was unable to stop the bitterness creeping in. “I was projecting onto Kim the image of an idealised father, the father whom my real father had failed to become, the father I always felt was owing to me— although that projection was too painful ever to admit.”
Robin nodded, refraining from comment, allowing me my moment of grief. Finally I was able to say: “But if Kim and I were projecting false images onto each other, surely the relationship was a grand illusion?”
“Not at all. The images weren’t entirely false, were they? You did have this masculine persona and Kim was indeed a version of the man your father had the intelligence to be. Of course Kim misread your persona— and as you chose not to see his resemblance to your father you couldn’t judge how accurate the resemblance was—but these projections were mere distortions of reality, not total inventions. I suggest that the fact that you were projecting these images onto each other just means you were romantically in love, but romantic love can often precede a successful, reality-based relationship.”
“But if Kim was attracted to me because of my masculine persona, surely this means—” I broke off, too confused to put my doubts into words.
“It seems clear that Kim was primarily attracted to you for all the obvious reasons connected with your femininity,” said Robin without hesitation. “I doubt if he’d have been interested in a woman who didn’t appeal first and foremost to his heterosexual taste. But the big bonus to him—the bonus which made you unique—was that this masculine persona of yours had the power to call forth the feminine side of his personality which he had repressed. Now, this masculine persona’s like a radio which you operate instinctively, adjusting the volume for each situation; the volume can be turned right up, but most of the time when you’re not at the office it’s just a background hum. Kim detected the persona straight away, he said, when you picked him up at the airport, and my guess is it fulfilled such a need in him that he could always hear it, even when you had the volume turned down low.”
“And when I turned it up high—”
“He would have been bowled over. But even when he wasn’t bowled over I believe the background hum would have had an important effect on him; I believe that whenever he was able to discard the role of shark and play the dolphin with you, he was indulging the feminine side of his personality, and this unprecedented freedom to be more fully himself would have made him feel more integrated; he would have experienced this as some kind of healing.”
“So that was why he felt the time was right to give up Mrs. Mayfield and her various ‘cures’!”
“Exactly. But I’m sorry to say,” said Robin with a sigh, “that there were two big flaws in this potential happy ending—and this is where we face your dread that if only you’d agreed to a reconciliation you and Kim might have lived happily ever after (assuming, of course, that he escaped a murder conviction). The first big flaw—”
“This must be where we also face the fact that the masculine persona isn’t the real me.”
“I’d prefer to say this is where we face the fact that the romantic love you both shared was unlikely to develop into a long-term reality-based relationship. Your masculine persona doesn’t accurately mirror the masculine side of your personality—it’s a hyped-up distortion aimed at helping you survive in a man’s world. Could Kim ever have adjusted to this reality once it impinged, as it inevitably would have done, on his romantic illusions? Your experience when you told him you wanted children leads me to say: probably not. His attraction to you was too bound up with this mask of yours, but if your journey was leading you out of a masculine world into a feminine one the mask would have become redundant and a key feature of the relationship would have been displaced. My guess is that when that happened Kim would soon have started searching elsewhere for another woman who could keep him stitched together, and something tells me you wouldn’t have been as willing as Sophie to put up with an unfaithful husband.”
I shuddered but merely said: “And the second flaw in the potential happy ending?”
“This is even more of a marital chiller. In the end, contrary to what Kim appears to have thought, I believe he would have felt compelled to return to his ‘hobby.’ Carter, it’s a safe bet to say that even if you’d been the woman he thought you were, you alone could never have provided Kim with a long-term answer to this problem—the healing you provided wouldn’t in the end have been enough because the roots of the compulsive behaviour hadn’t been treated. Kim would have needed a great deal of therapy to bring the behaviour under control—indeed in my view he would also have needed to turn himself over to what the members of Alcoholics Anonymous call a ‘Higher Power.’ How interesting that he could identify with the part Jack Lemmon played in
Days of Wine and Roses
! He was not without self-knowledge, it seems, and certainly not without intelligence, but he needed professional help on a massive scale. Mrs. Mayfield, I need hardly add, would have been no use to him at all, quite the contrary; she would have made him worse by encouraging him to replace the ‘hobby’ with other deviations, all of which would have failed to solve the problem.”
“Could Kim ever have been cured?”
“In these cases ‘cure’ isn’t the favoured word to use, but he might have achieved a remission which would turn out to be permanent. The danger of relapse would always be there but with the right support he’d be all right.”
“Like a recovering alcoholic in AA?”
“That’s it. And as I said, the right support would be crucial. Ideally a priest would be working alongside the doctors, and there’d need to be a caring community, praying regularly—”
“But why?”
“Well, medicine doesn’t have the complete answer to this type of problem. Doctors—even a psychologist like me—can offer a great deal of help, but in the end when we start to use phrases such as ‘turning oneself over to a Higher Power’ or ‘accepting Jesus Christ as Lord’ we’re really venturing beyond the boundaries of our disciplines. We can justify these phrases by saying that they’re both referring to an integrating principle and that integration equals salvation, but nevertheless . . . no, I think it’s healthy to admit we don’t have all the answers, healthy to admit that in this kind of case the priests should always be working alongside us to reach the parts the medical textbooks fail to touch . . .”
XVI
“How guilty should I feel about all this?” I said after a prolonged pause spent surveying this portrait of Kim. I was unsure how far Robin would respond to this direct question, since he preferred to help me uncover the answers to my questions myself, but he answered willingly enough: “It’s normal to feel some degree of guilt when one’s marriage fails, and that’s not unhealthy. It’s the obsessive, morbid forms of guilt which cause trouble.”
“I wasn’t thinking of the failed marriage. I can see now it would never have worked out.” I hesitated before confessing in a rush: “I’m still feeling so guilty because my confrontation with him triggered the suicide.”
Again Robin seemed to realise he could help me best by offering a frank reply. “It’s also normal for those closest to someone who commits suicide to experience guilt,” he said at once, “but don’t forget that a suicide can have multiple causes, and in this case I think it would be more in keeping with reality if you allowed Kim some responsibility for his actions. Remember that he was seriously disturbed as the result of a way of life he had embraced long before he met you, and you were neither responsible for that chosen way of life nor for the damage he suffered in the remote past. You were also not responsible if, thanks to Mrs. Mayfield, he became neurotically drawn to see the balcony as an invitation to self-destruct.”
“That’s true.” I began to be conscious of relief.
“Don’t forget either that suicide can be an act of aggression,” added Robin, startling me. “It’s an act which lashes out not only against the world but against the nearest and dearest. If Kim had punched you in the face, would you have been tempted to assume that your broken nose was your fault?”
“Certainly not . . . But isn’t one supposed to turn the other cheek when one’s on the receiving end of aggression?”
“The subject of forgiveness does of course come up,” said Robin, becoming cagey again as he reverted to a more oblique approach, “but you need time, Carter. Profound emotional responses to a crisis or tragedy can’t be worked out swiftly by means of reason and logic. Other areas of the brain have to come into play, and they may not be immediately accessible.”
“But I want to sort everything out
now
so that I can get on with my life! Can’t you tell me how to press the right psychological button which will allow me to forgive Kim for wrecking me and forgive myself for allowing the wrecking to happen?”
“Definitely questions for the priests.”
“Robin—”
“I’m sure that with the help of Nick or Lewis or both of them, you and I can uncover the right way forward.”
“That’s not good enough!” I said exasperated. “If I can’t work out my response quickly by means of reason and logic, then you must give me the appropriate psychological principle to apply!”
“That would be no use. This is a response you have to feel, Carter, not intellectually grasp. Reason and logic are fine but you need another tool here to open up the area of the mind which deals not in words but in symbols and images. After all, forgiveness is rather more than just a three-syllable word, isn’t it? It’s a concept, a vision, an experience.”
“So what’s the tool?”
“Well, have you ever thought of going to our regular Friday healing service? Sometimes the laying-on of hands unlocks the psyche and allows the mind to make powerful connections which—”
“I’m an atheist,” I said, finally losing patience with him, and terminated the session.