September 4, 1990
Tuesday - A Man's Behind the Desk and Time's Up
i'm in a room i don't know in a chair my skin is creamed white my hair long and dark i don't know how old i am my body's naked i'm looking straight ahead my hands are tied a man sits behind a desk i ask him to call the police he says ok and dials the number gets a report says i'll repeat what i've heard and he does his voice is loud but i can't hear him because the man hadn't called the police he pressed a button under his desk to turn the phone off he didn't want to help me he's in business for himself not for me and for a moment that i forgot why did you need the police he asks to get him away from me why did you want him to get away from you he had to buy a house and car and furniture and play tennis at the country club he had a life of his own and didn't tell me he lied because he made me feel his life consisted only of me you knew that wasn't true, even in the dream the man in the dream looked over at me his face and hands were huge like yours my hands are small i said this was a dream he stands up from behind the desk he walks toward me i see the bottom frame of his body his legs keep walking toward me his fingers probe around his belt, the area above his fly his hands slip under his belt i can't move my hands are tied behind my back my legs are welded to a chair abe's massaging my shoulders sweetheart you're dreaming it was a dream wake up he rocks me back and forth i wake up and see you abe kisses me and kisses me we fall back to sleep now we're in his office at group health and i'm registering for school my advisor's with me yet he isn't i don't know if he's supposed to be with me i think he's not supposed to be because he pays for my lunch and i don't know if i should let him sometimes he scares me there are too many men here i don't know how to respond to them or where my mother is i want her but she's working or having a baby my sister and i'm still only two years old i don't know where i am if i'm at my new college or the one i transferred from once when i was seventeen i sleepwalked went to the phone said i've got to call my college mother woke up esther who are you calling in the middle of the night my college my college i have to call my college you come back from vacation it's the first day back after being away the whole month of august yet you hand me a bill as if money is our only connection from this small act of handing me the bill on your first day back from vacation i am stunned i don't know how you can do this to me to us to all we've meant to each other in this room that is our shelter our haven from everything hurtful and bad i wish i could cry take the first twenty minutes of the fifty-minute hour and cry but i can't i don't know anything about him except that he scares me and i don't believe not deep down inside i don't believe that he's honest anymore or that psychoanalysis is honest but i can't get away from either is it because of my cousin and the feeling i've always had since i was two of being raped by him right now i'm stunned this has happened before and before this is another layer of repeat my body mind are numb i sit in the chair and say nothing i do nothing but sit straight up with my hands tied behind me one thing certain i won't lie down on his couch today i know not to do that a man puts his hands inside his pants this is a father dream but it can't be my father never touched me except in good ways he scratched my back and hugged me was it my brother and older cousins who touched me the other ways they weren't supposed to was this your wish you could ask something as evil as that one of those cousins is a big shot psychoanalyst i'm on your couch and feel as if you're going to rape me too i don't understand part of you i love and part of you i hate this dream alone tells me what to do now get up off the couch and leave don't come back but i can't and don't know why the feel of father is all around how to get away maybe i don't want to or i wouldn't be in this room with this man whose eyes are all over me can eyes rape he tells me to talk of my father but i only think of his handing me the bill instead of hugging me as a part of him especially his eyes seems to want to do but he doesn't hug me in this room not today and my father is dead time's up
copyright2005Esther AltshulHelfgott
All Rights Reserved
Esther Altshul Helfgott:
"I underwent a four-and-a-half year five-day-a-week analysis with a traditional male Freudian psychoanalyst (or he tried to behave that way). The maternal aspects of the analysis were wonderfully gentle, but the paternal/fraternal aspects were horrendous. He came to hold an incredible amount of power over me and would not help me leave, terminate, be done with the process that was, from the beginning, highly sexualized and erotic... He refused to confront the "here and now" between us, always taking me back to my past; in so doing, he helped repeat/reenact a condition that brought me to analysis in the first place... In the end, I thought he would keep me there forever ... and so I left. Eventually I came back to the study of psychoanalysis which is, with all its faults, one of my intellectual homes; another is poetry."
read Esther's
Eating Pavlova
Now the Day is Over
