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Sunday, December 25, 2005
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V STRONG EGO A recent post about psychotherapists reminded UD of her months working for Professor Erika Fromm, a hypnotherapist at the University of Chicago. This was so long ago that UD remembers using purply ditto paper on the correspondence she typed for her. Erika was a psychologist through and through. UD was at Erika's Hyde Park apartment one afternoon (it was dominated by a grand piano on which sat inscribed photographs of Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez - Paul Fromm, Erika's husband, was a serious patron of modern music) and happened to see the piece of paper on which she'd written her impressions of UD as she interviewed her for the job as Erika's assistant. "V STRONG EGO" she'd written of our UD. And it's a funny thing -- I mean, not just a funny sort of thing to have written, but funny in its effects. UD had in fact wavered for years on the question of whether she was a strong or weak person, but when she saw that piece of paper she thought, "Heigh-ho. If you say so." The statement was absurd, but UD decided on the spot to take it as a sort of confirmation... The ego was sorely tried, though, working for Erika. My office was a thin wall across from hers, and her droning voice as she put various patients under hypnosis (her patients were mainly grad students trying to calm themselves for big exams, and/ or trying to quit smoking) worked on me too... Not that I ever went under; but I recall being terribly bored by the correspondence I had to type up, and listening with prurient interest to the murmurings going on nearby... Sometimes I fell into a light trance... I quit that job. The little office was stifling; the little world of anxiety and compulsion it housed was depressing. Although the University of Chicago obituary of her I just read (she died two years ago, at 93) describes her hypnotherapeutic approach as much less gloomy than Freudian psychoanalysis, it was plenty gloomy by UD's standards, at least when you were sitting inches away from it. |