Dr. Rosenthal, Please tell me It's Countertransference

"Self-Portrait in Minimal Motel"Austin, Texas. July 2002. Juliana Bealsey. Mark and I shared this room. I hardly knew him.

In 1997,I flipped in India and not on my own accord. My parents died in 1997 and 1998, my mother first and then my father. Everything became too colorful and bright, too loud and I couldn't turn the volume down. I guess it already was. Very loud and very messy. I wrote the following after a series of two psych hospitalizations at Gracie Square, one at Beth Isreal and finally the fourth at Christ Hospital in New Jersey. Two in 2001 and two in 2002. This was the early part of the century...and my life had become empty and listless. Everything was fractured and time stopped for too long. I holed up in my apartment for days without leaving, ordering in Guyanese jerk chicken, and eating out of aluminum trays. 5/23/01 My Beloved Dr. Rosenthal You would have thought I lost all my dignity, right? Wrong. Here I was on the Upper East Side and I wasn’t shopping at Tiffany’s. I was sitting on a plastic mattress covered in over-bleached sheets. I was at Gracie Square, on the third floor. I was in a psychiatric ward. It was my second hospitalization in two months. Three weeks earlier, my psychiatrist, Dr. Rosenthal had suggested a three-week hospitalization to ease the transition from one medication to the other. I refused and once unmedicated got sick. I was in love with Dr. Rosenthal. My friend Lia, a wisecracking ingénue stripper with a rough smoky voice said, “You’re on the ‘Loveboat’.” Except, Dr. Rosenthal never made it to the boat for departure. And I wasn’t even moored in the harbor. I was dry-docked and having my barnacles removed. Let’s take a reality check for a moment. Dr. Rosenthal was no Burt Lancaster or my personal favorite Monty Cliff. He looked more like the cartoon dog Droopy with sad puppy eyes. He was sixty plus and had a little paunch. It didn’t matter to me. He was a perfect amalgamation of reservation, academia, and a handful of irresistible eccentricities. Perhaps, it was his nervous posturing, crossing his arms and looking intently over his yellow legal pad and notes, trying to figure out the perfect pharmaceutical combination for me. Or maybe it was his steady monotone nasal voice that occasionally peaked in laughter—the tonal inflection and the softening of his eyes were so remarkable and unexpected that with every crescendo I felt like had earned an accolade of sincerity. It felt great to have the power to take him away from the clinical and make him laugh. “Dr. Rosenthal, you look like you’ve gotten a tan.” “Well, it’s not the glamorous kind,” he remarked off-handedly as he organized my file and jotted notes onto a yellow legal pad. He was dry and I was wet. Dr. Rosenthal was nothing like the man I had dated for the last year, Caleb. First off, he was committed to my cause. He had a lot of qualities that I was looking for in a man even if he sat safely behind a desk and the conversations revolved around me. He was kind, smart, dedicated to helping his patients, meticulous, wore great suits, polite (he greeted at his office door and escorted me out), he was quirky, understated, and shy (although I imagined in the presence of his colleagues, he was a refined speaker), unpretentious, however a little snobby because he couldn’t help it because he was just incredibly “cultured”. Extra plus, he remarked that he had lesbian friends, knew something about photography, and lastly was an older man. And Jewish too. I thought with all those qualifications he must be gay.

"5 Minutes Before Getting on the Path Train to the Gracie Square Psych Hospital", Jersey City, NJ, November 7, 2001. Self-Portrait, Juliana Beasley.

I was initially disappointed when the Trinidadian receptionist who admitted me to Gracie Square broke the news; “Dr. Rosenthal is such a gentleman,” she said, “and his wife is too. Did you know she is a therapist?” I was horrified and simultaneously pleased. Lying on the thin foam mattress in my hospital room, I reduced the Rosenthals to the upper middle class doctor parents I had minus all the pathos, and addiction: The Rosenthals had compartmentalized their lives perfectly. They talked about patients, lived uptown or maybe Long Island (although, later in a dream, he told me that he lived in Kew Gardens)), they were “foodies”, they had two boys, they had a dog, a lab possibly named Barnaby, a cleaning woman since they didn’t have enough time to keep their minimally and tasteful home perfectly organized and clean, they woke up really early and drank coffee and read the times together. They even found the time to get to the gym and got up an hour and a half earlier. Their friends and neighbors adored them, “Achh, (Jewish whiny voice), the Rosenthals. They’re such a lovely and bright couple; did you know that he gives electroshock?” —“Oh, really, they still do that?” They ran the lecture circuit, Dr. Rosenthal speaking about the values of electroshock treatments, Dr. Mrs. Rosenthal speaking about the treatment of anorexics. They found the time to submit papers to medical journals. And yes they could hold up under a lot of stress. But, they knew when to turn off pagers and cell phones during the weekends, had covering doctors, and drove off in their Mercedes SUV to their country home with Barnaby where they drank wine with great legs. They read all the right books, reviewed in the New York Book Review and then had long fascinating intellectual conversations in front of the fire.

I am looking for my home, my home. I found it on the side of the highway from Dallas to Texas. Mark was driving. I asked him to stop the car and pull over. I got out, walked across through the dewy high grass. Thousands of magical grasshoppers hopped up and down around me. I raised my hands above my head, looked back at Mark waiting in the car. I must be in heaven.

Even if sometimes, when they disagreed or felt irritable from a long day of work, they could talk about their feelings, “I feel…” Occasionally, they forgot about proper interpersonal behavior etiquette and were so damn angry at each other, plus being that they both worked in psychology and knew each other’s underpinnings so well, they would perform the deadliest of character assassinations. After all, they weren’t robots. They knew about time outs. Dr. Mrs. Rosenthal took a walk with Barnaby, Dr. Rosenthal went to the T.V. room and watched some meaningless sitcom but soon they resolved the matter. They also knew that anger was a natural human response and still knew that they were a perfect match for each other. Dr.s and Dr.Mrs would then go back to work. They had been bred with good boundaries. I had no boundaries. I wanted to show him how bad I really was. I imagined myself to be some iconoclastic Frances Farmer. I was ready to flirt and outsmart him, disorienting and creating holes of doubt in his Hippocratic oath. I called my therapist Natasha on the pay phone in the hall. “Natasha, I have a terrible crush on Dr. Rosenthal. Should I tell him?” “Yes,” she told me. I was bored and had nothing better to do. I had pre-visualized the scene: I would look him strongly and forthright in the eyes as I revealed my feelings about him. I would be serious, strong, and forthright. I sat lotus style on my bed, he on my roommates, “Dr. Rosenthal, I have a crush on you.” I bowed my head and gazed upon his hands. He was nervously fingering his flawlessly pressed sports coat that lay next to him. I felt pathetic. Was this purely a case of transference? Did I think he was my daddy? Was I just another cliché? Was this the predictable outcome of a therapeutic relationship? “I thought you must have been gay,” I told him to lighten the situation. He laughed. “Don’t you know that I’m only attracted to the unobtainable?” , I asked. He laughed and turned his head to the side. “I hope this won’t get in the way of your treatment,” he said. I was on a mission of self-deprecation and pure provocation. I wanted to make him more uncomfortable. “Let’s run off to Tuscany.” “I think you’ve begun to trust me,” he said. Oh, unrequited love. Written in 2002.