The Therapist Who Mistook His Client’s Check For One Having Been Drawn on a Legitimate Bank Account

  Case Study No. 6 – The Love/Hate Response to Dreck 

        Mr. X continues to display an irrational fear of art galleries, particularly the ones that look as though no human customer has stepped foot in them for the last 19 hours, and which are inevitably staffed by a lone bespectacled young woman at the back of the room gazing into a large computer screen and appearing both bored and self-important (and who probably has an MFA in Twenty-First Century “hues” from Brandeis). Despite his fear, Mr. X has a compulsion to frequent these establishments. He posits that this may be a form of karmic retribution for some past life transgression, such as carving his initials into a service elevator at the Guggenheim museum. For this reason, he always covers his eyes while walking past the Guggenheim, and has many bruises and scars to prove it.

Mr. X is terrified that the aforementioned prototypical gallery manager, after several awkward moments of pretending to be engrossed in something other than a video game, will look up, notice him, rise from her chair, stride over, and strike up a superficial conversation loaded with code words, designed principally to ascertain whether Mr. X knows the first thing about art, and, more importantly, whether he has any disposable income that would permit him to purchase (for $27,000) a limited edition print of what any sane person would recognize as squiggles. Because the answer to the second question is always framed in the negative, and because Mr. X cannot tell the difference between art and chazerai, his coping mechanism is to affect an attitude of solicitousness, ask politely for a business card, and then to flee.

        Mr. X has amassed an impressive collection of these paper tokens of his abortive encounters with the cultured classes, which mementos he keeps stuffed into his wallet in place of functioning credit cards, a fact my receptionist confirmed recently when she attempted to have him charge the cost of last week’s session as a means of replacing the check he wrote to the practice, and which was returned unceremoniously by the bank with “NSF” stamped all over it. In the course of discussing the status of his delinquent account, he had occasion to show me a number of photographs he had snapped (furtively) in the interior of a gallery he had stumbled into recently. (He claims that he often finds himself in these places with no prior memory of how he ended up there). Based on a cursory review of his album, one could quickly discern a unifying theme: the art house in question was purveying vastly over-priced chazerai. Mr. X said he had always suspected as much, but that he was so intimidated by anything that “smacked of the hoity toity” that he could not bring himself to reveal his true opinion to the proprietor.

        However, he has remarkable clarity about one episode during which he felt emboldened enough to exclaim to the gallery owner precisely what he thought of the merchandise, but only after appropriating a pseudonym.  In this instance, he gave his name as a “Mr. X.” In today’s session, we agreed that this presented a serious conflict of interest, and that this choice of pseudonym was not healthy. We are now working on honesty in interpersonal relationships with utterly inconsequential strangers. Mr. X has shown some progress in this regard.  We are also working on a payment plan, where progress is considerably less evident.  Perhaps he would be less stingy under sedation.  

Case Study Number 18 – Attitude Problems of the Artistic Temperament

        Running late for a session, I arrived at the office and found Miss XXX poring over my notes in her file. I confronted her, but she exhibited no small degree of hostility towards a pencil by throwing it at me. She also raised her voice uncharacteristically and demanded to know why I referred to her in the notes as “Miss XXX,” as she felt this was unprofessional and inappropriate.  She also expressed dismay that there were so many crude drawings scattered throughout the record, and she questioned whether I was, in fact, paying attention to much of what she said in our sessions. She felt that, for $250/hr., at a minimum, the quality of the doodles in the file should be better.

        Miss XXX carried on like this for some time, but much of what she had to say went in one ear and exited directly out the other. Regardless, it seems obvious that Miss XXX has a bit of an attitude problem.  I have decided to adjust her medication from none whatsoever to a moderately powerful sedative, designed to diminish her capacity for rifling through my personal effects whenever I am not around, and treating writing implements as though they were projectiles.

        During our discussion about boundaries, I noticed her more than once eyeing the glass snow dome on my desk. Though no larger than a medium-sized rock, with the right velocity, trajectory, and distance, this thing could put a serious dent in the cranium. On the spot, I determined it to be in the best interest of recovery to up the dosage of the medication.

 

        We explored the genesis of her rage.  Miss XXX acknowledged that, as an art gallery owner, she had a viscerally negative reaction to shoddily-executed graphics of any stripe. Discovering the same in her folder had apparently triggered a standout traumatic experience of recent vintage wherein a strange and creepy-looking fellow had lurked around her store for some time without buying anything. Suddenly he began to insult the exhibition.  Referring to himself as “Mr. X,” he reportedly made some predictably childish remark about finger-painting and then stormed out. She wanted me to validate her feeling that “Mr. X” was a moronic name, but her hour was up.

      

Case Study Number 36 – Emasculated by Hyphenation

        Mr. and Mrs. Ex-Ex are in their fourth week of couple’s counseling.  Mr. Ex-Ex reports that, prior to his marriage, he was always happy and carefree, but that he has become increasingly morose about what he perceived to be a diminution of masculinity. Using a process of regression elimination, we are exploring the possible source of these feelings.

        Mr. Ex is a professional painter. After the date of his nuptials, he began to follow the practice of signing his work with a hyphenated name linking his last name (“Ex”) with his wife’s (“Ex”). His artist friends quickly noticed this trend, and began to tease him about not wearing any pants.  He considered this a direct threat to his manhood.  Consequently, he began to over-compensate by experimenting with ever more primitive and amateurish styles in his art.

        Some of his newest works have been displayed on consignment at a local gallery. He has heard rumors that a would-be customer had come into the store recently, and reviewed his collection in an extremely negative and demeaning light. This may well be the source of his depression, and the reason that the couple now fight so often.

        Mrs. Ex observed that “Ex” was an ominous name for a married couple – or for any kind of couple, and did not bode well. This took me aback, for when I assigned this couple the name “Ex” for reasons of clinical anonymity, it had never occurred to me that “Ex” was their real name.

Following my suggestion that I tended to agree with Mr. Ex that the hyphen in their joint name may be somewhat emasculating, Mrs. Ex suggested that a new therapist may be in order. I have considered adjusting her medication. As Mrs. Ex was exclaiming and gesturing with her arms, she accidentally knocked over a magazine that, I had forgotten, was covering up some photographs given to me by another patient. Mr. Ex saw them and said:  “Hey those are photographs of my work!  How did you get these?  You’re not supposed to take photographs of any kind in the gallery!” At this juncture, the time was up, and we concluded the session, having, in my professional opinion, made some excellent progress.