Through the Looking Glass

The third course was a different matter, entirely. We all sat down and Harold asked what we wanted to be called and a bit about what we were willing to share about ourselves on this first day. Anne, Carol, Howard, Patrick, etc. ... each in their turn dutifully responded with their first name and a brief on where they'd been for their earlier professional career. Harold handed out a -- perhaps -- 100,000 page reading list of literature with which we should become familiar over the next several years. It was 8 pages with one entry devoted to Freud's >6,000 pages of psychological writings -- fortuitously, translated into English. Harold then quietly explained that he would like to be called by his title and last name. 

Need I say, this group of post-professional were considerably less than pleased. 

Students: "You tricked us."

"Why should you be the only one addressed by his title?"

Harold: "I don't think it could be that I'm the only one wearing a tie. preferences are, what to say, preferences. ... But let's begin."

Perhaps, I consider that interchange and the bitterness that came out of it the beginning of my psychoanalytic training. Harold went on to talk about the requirements. Classes would begin on time and end on time and he and we were expected to attend all classes. He would recommend readings for each week and we would read to the best of our ability. And, then ...

"For each class, you will bring in a 5"x8" index card with your name, the date of the class and any comments you'd like to write on the card. You'll hand that in to me. If there are any missing or late cards, you will not receive a passing grade for the course."

The candidates, already upset by "the Name-Game," were getting more and more pissed. I remember thinking that both my face and the faces of my comrades (poised to bear arms against 6'2''/60'ish Harold) didn't seem to hide just how dissatisfied they were. And Harold began talking about how the theories of psychoanalysis were like the wrappings on a package ... The core of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, was the process of free association of feelings ... usually expressed on a fainting couch. Feelings led to other feelings and often-times got us in trouble and we all develop ways of hiding that trouble. Free Association allows us to get a random sample of those feelings and to understand how they follow each other ... how they are canonically sequenced. Some of us, he explained, fade into the woodwork ... become objectified like pieces of random furniture. Others get involved in complex costumery. Harold went on like this -- without notes or anything else in front of him -- for the remainder of our 2.5 hour seminar and the 9 others that followed, that semester. Students in that first class were too pissed to talk after that first bit of nominal chicanery. When time was up, Harold arose to his full height and, without breaking stride, walked through the door noting: "Please, begin reading Freud." Anne piped up: "But where shall we begin?"

Harold: "Volume 24 is an index. You can skip it if you are a'mind to."

and Harold was gone, leaving me, for one, with the problem of the Index Card, the challenge of reading some 100,000 pages, and an apparently love/hate attitude to Harold. Anne and Carol shared with each other their sense of how contemptuous and contemptible a man this was. Others left in a daze.