The End of the World: A Case History. Part Two

“Teach them?” I responded. “About what, fear and helplessness?” I was thinking that the first phone call terrified everyone in the school and. once the news of the call spread through the community, even more, people got exposed to the “lesson.”

“People take things for granted. They forget. Everything is gone, disappears, in an instant,” Robert continued.

“That’s true,” I said, “but culture and society are set up to provide us all with a variety of explanations and distractions to shield us from fears like these.”

“See how easy it was for me, just with one phone call, to prove how none of that really works,” Robert quickly countered.

“Ok,” I said, “but why the second phone call; you made your point with the first one and the second only guaranteed that you’d be caught and punished?”

“I wanted them to know what I was doing, that I was teaching them about fear,” Robert went on, “getting caught didn’t matter.”

“It didn’t matter because what you were trying to teach them had already happened to you? You weren’t any longer part of the school or the community, even though you attended school and sat in class every day. Maybe not going to school anymore, even getting arrested, made more sense than any alternative?” I asked.

“Whatever,” replied Robert, losing interest in our conversation. Merely my “understanding” the reasons for his actions didn’t matter much either.

In our personal lives, being understood is quite important. The opposite of this, being ignored, treated as if nothing we might say or do matters, can be devastating. Even Robert’s threatening phone calls were intended as communications, designed to grab everyone’s attention and to deliver a powerful message.

Yet the wish to be understood and recognized, even the pleasure and satisfaction associated with these experiences, all take something crucial for granted: that we are relating to others based on a mostly tacit, but organized sense of our own identity. We act as if we know who we are and our expectations follow this sense of ourselves. When others respond dramatically against our expectations, this often comes as a shock or insult to us and can lead to anger or confusion. Our socially-based identities and the social roles that we play, while not rigid, are quite well organized. The positive feelings associated with being understood, even a sense of trust, that result from this, are all predicated on this tacit, familiar sense we have of ourselves. Clearly, these elements and expectations were not in play in Robert’s circumstance. So I took the conversation in another direction.

“Who told you to teach everyone this lesson?” I asked.

“No, it was just me; I’m not hearing voices or anything like that,” he answered, knowing what I was after.

But I persisted, needing for both of us to be clear on this point. “But if it’s just something you realized, about how vulnerable we all are, why was it so important to force others to recognize this? Religions proselytize, spread the word and message that come from a greater source or higher power. Individuals are just messengers. It sounds like you were attempting something like this.”

“Not really,” said Robert. “I don’t even care about them, any of them, and how stupid they are. So this lesson stuff doesn’t make sense to me either.”

“Much like you didn’t care or feel attached to yourself and the way you were living?” I asked.

“That’s right, the old Robert is dead. Good riddance. He was a pussy anyway.”

“So you made the calls to teach him, that is, yourself a lesson, to help get rid of the old Robert, who couldn’t deal with his fears, and replace him with a new Robert?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“So you tried to create an environment, a part of the world, where your sense of helplessness in the face of fear would be shared by others, so it wouldn’t seem overpowering? Like if someone’s living in a town where his is the only house destroyed by a hurricane, that individual could begin to get a bit paranoid that some greater power is out to get him. But if everyone’s house is destroyed by the hurricane, it’s not as bad. He still has no home, no belongings and so on, but at least it’s not all on him; he’s not being singled out for punishment?”

Robert smiled a bit, more like a sneer, “I was feeling this pressure building up inside of me. The friendlier everyone around was, the more fun everyone was having, the weirder and stranger I felt, that I might lose my mind, whatever the fuck that means. But after the first call, I started to calm down a bit. Everyone freaking out calmed me down. It’s like all of them acting like idiots and cowards took the pressure off of me. The old Robert is one of them.”

If he had not been able to find an adequate response to this dilemma, he could have easily become paranoid and delusional. As it was, he was neither. I shared these last few thoughts with him.

“So I guess I had to kill myself to save myself,” Robert said thoughtfully and seriously.

Robert agreed to see me the next day. We worked together a few times a week for the next 3 years. With his keen intelligence, he developed strong interests in history and biology, being quite academically successful in the new private school we found for him. In response to his contempt of (his image of) the old Robert, he became a competitive bodybuilder, with national recognition. He went off to college and fell in love. He would see me from time to time when he was in town. He never became psychotic, or delusional and never required a course of medication (not that we would’ve hesitated to use it, should it have been necessary or helpful). While the years of therapy that followed were quite important, all of our accomplishments were made possible by our first critical meetings. In extreme situations, such as Robert’s, the end of the treatment tends to be presaged by the beginning

Dr. Friedman is a psychologist in private practice in Chicago and a faculty member at the Northwestern University Medical School. He has published in psychoanalytic journals around the world, contributed to a number of psychoanalytic anthologies and his book, The Origins of the Self and Identity, has been translated into an Italian edition as well. He has lectured to professional and lay audiences around the country for over 20 years and his seminar is approaching its 30th year.