There's No Such Thing As A Free Association

As children of a psychoanalyst, my brothers and I were brought up with three basic beliefs: everything has some deeper significance, there is no such thing as an accident, and never buy retail. Of course, my father rarely told us those things directly. In fact, he hardly ever told us anything. We were just supposed to listen to what was unsaid and figure out what it meant. The only thing we weren’t supposed to analyze was our parents’ marriage.

“The reason we fight more than other couples do,” our mother would say, “is because we’re more honest and passionate than other couples are.” And it was true that when my parents were getting along, you couldn’t help but get swept up in the energy and excitement they generated. And so I believed things were ok right up until one night at the Ashkenaz, a deli on the north side of Chicago where we often ate dinner.

The truth is that my parents didn’t fight: my mother fought. My father would just stare at her as if what she was saying were mildly interesting but not really his business. If her attack grew especially fierce, he would take off his glasses and massage his eyebrows and forehead in slow circles. Or he’d close his eyes, drop his chin to his chest, and scratch the top of his shiny, bald head.

Those dinners at the deli all began with our mother questioning each of my three brothers and me about the details of our day at school: what our teachers thought about our work, whether anything new or interesting had happened with our friends, what we had for homework. During the questioning our father would study the menu or stare into space.

“So, Dan,” she would say, starting with my youngest brother, “did you get your paper back?”

“Yeah,” he’d respond.

“And? What did Mrs. Sluzarzek say? Did she like it?”

“Yeah. I guess so,” he’d reply in that flat, affectless voice my brothers and I all used whenever we were faced with our mother’s questions in our father’s presence. “She gave me an A-minus.”

“An A-minus! That’s great, Dan. Tell me exactly what she said.”

Like an investigative journalist, our mother would pounce on the smallest statement with more probing questions. Looking back, I’m sorry that we gave such sparse responses, but I think we were scared by her intensity, by just how much she cared about all of us. And perhaps we sensed that, as interested as she was in us, it was our father’s reaction — or nonreaction — that really mattered. At some point in the interrogation she’d turn to my father and ask, “Did you hear that? Are you listening? Did you hear what Lad just said? Can’t you respond? Can’t you show some interest? I know that our lives couldn’t possibly be as interesting as whatever you are sitting there dreaming about, but you could at least pretend to care.”

“I’m sorry. What were you saying again?” he’d ask me in a tone that betrayed no irritation but also no great interest.

Before I could answer, my mother would jump in: “Tell him again, Lad. Start over. He wasn’t listening. He was thinking about something more important.”

“No, that’s ok. It’s not important, really,” I would say.

“No, it is important,” my mother would say. “Tell him again.”

“No, it doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter. To me, anyway.”

But as soon as she’d cajoled me into speaking, she’d interrupt again: “Excuse me for a second, Lad,” she’d say, holding up a finger, and she would turn to my father: “Are you listening now, or have you tuned us out again?”

“No, go on,” he would say dryly, as if nothing at all odd or uncomfortable were happening.

And I would go on, reluctantly, self-consciously, and he would respond in some distant way, and I would feel angry at him for not listening and at my mother for making him listen and at myself for not being interesting to him in the first place.

It’s funny in a way: as a Freudian psychoanalyst, my father made his living listening to patients talk about their problems, exploring every detail of their dreams and childhoods, helping them understand themselves. Since he was so scrupulous about never discussing his patients with us, I had trouble imagining what he was like during a session, though I had to guess that he was different than he was at home with us. When I was thirteen, my mother had taken me to hear my father lecture on Freud and sexuality for a group of social workers. As unsettled as I was by the content of the talk (I remember being both mortified and fascinated when he described a patient who confessed to getting an erection when his four-year-old daughter sat on his lap), I was even more shocked by his style and delivery: I’d almost never heard him speak with such energy and conviction and wit. Working without notes, he moved from colorful examples of sexual obsessions and perversions, to explanations of Freudian theory, to stories about his own clinical experience. Who is this guy? I thought.

It wasn’t just that one lecture: Whenever I’d see him for a minute or two between patients — he had an office in our basement, where he worked in the mornings, and another in the city, where he worked in the afternoons — he was more alert and engaged than he was during his off hours. And when we had other families over to dinner on the weekend, he could be amazingly animated and charming. But in the evenings during the week he didn’t seem fully present. It’s not as if I never saw him show emotion. Once every year or so something would happen — one of my mother’s rants about his insensitivity would finally break him down, or he’d discover that someone had thrown away the brown banana he’d been saving to whip into his sour cream at breakfast — and he’d explode with a fury that was all out of proportion: “Goddamn fucking shit!” he’d yell, slamming a door or knocking items off a table. But in a few minutes the outburst would be over, and he’d be back — or gone again, depending on how you look at it.

My mother would sometimes tell us about my father’s past: how, as a teenager in a poor, immigrant Jewish family on the west side of Chicago, he would sneak into weddings to eat the free food and meet girls; how he had moved from one passion to the next, allowing his father to train him to become a boxer, then enrolling in the yeshiva so that he could become a rabbi. I felt as if I were hearing about someone I had never met.

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