The Finder
— J. Chr. de Vries
Just over a month after the unexpected encounter with my old flame Hedy Pogélosç, we agreed to meet again for lunch in Le Bugue, at the restaurant overlooking the Vézère. I had a fond memory of that first meeting, but I was still somewhat nervous to see her again, afraid that my expectations might be too high. I hoped I wouldn’t fall in love with her again; I had left my adolescent infatuation behind—or had I? She was already seated at a table by the window when I walked into the restaurant. I still found her very attractive.
After the customary exchange of news and gossip, our conversation turned to her work. She worked as a psychotherapist at the Academic Hospital in Leiden, where she lived. Here in France, she had bought a second home in the village of Paunat, not far from Le Bugue. As she was approaching retirement age, she had negotiated to work less, allowing her more time to spend in the Dordogne. Through her work at the hospital, she regularly visited the psychiatric institution Endegeest in Oegstgeest. At one point, she began telling me about a remarkable woman who was admitted to this institution.
“This woman, let’s call her Rozeke de Vriend, which obviously isn’t her real name, had caught my interest. She lived there as an inpatient and had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which, in my opinion, is a problematic label.” She paused to refill our glasses. I took the opportunity to ask her what exactly this condition ‘borderline’ entails. I was only familiar with the term.
“In short, there are two types of mental disorders, neuroses and psychoses,” she continued, “In the former case, it involves anxiety disorders such as agoraphobia, OCD, or fear of flying. In the latter case, that of psychoses, the person in question has lost touch with reality. Borderline is, as the name suggests, the area between these two conditions; it’s a borderline condition, at least at the time when that term was coined. In the latest version of the manual on mental disorders, DSM-5, the disorder is defined more strictly. But I still have issues with it.”
“And this DSM-5, what exactly is that? I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never delved into it.”
“The term stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the ‘5’ refers to its version, it’s the most recent one. It lists various classifications of mental disorders that therapists can use to make a diagnosis and then determine a treatment for. If you don’t take that manual too literally, you can indeed find it useful, but all those labels can also be dangerous for proper treatment. You then no longer see the person behind the problem, and likewise, you don’t take enough account of factors other than psychological ones, such as sociological, economic, political, or legal factors that can equally influence someone’s behavior and well-being. As a therapist, you always have to find a good balance. Especially in the area designated as borderline, those other factors can play a significant role.”
Our conversation gradually turned into a lecture on the history of psychology, she was unstoppable. I remembered this from the time we lived together; she read everything by Foucault and anti-psychiatrists like Laing and Berke; she was a fierce advocate of radical changes in psychiatry. Times had changed significantly since then, but the traces of the sixties were still clearly palpable in her. But perhaps old memories had also been awakened in her. When she paused for a moment to take a sip of wine, I saw my chance to interrupt her monologue.
“But there are universal emotions, like fear, happiness, and love, that every human being knows regardless of the culture or time they live in, right? I assume there’s no difference of opinion about this among various psychologists or psychiatrists.”
“Of course. We have our instincts, and we experience those primary emotions wherever we are. But, the danger of the jungle is not the same as that of the city jungle. Different techniques are needed to resist a predator threatening us than the dangers in traffic. When I cycle through the city past a row of parked cars, I have to be aware that a driver might suddenly open his door right in front of me, causing me to crash into it. In other words, our instincts are biologically determined, but what we do with them is determined by what we have learned ourselves in a particular social context. This makes the profession complicated and not reducible to a cookbook.”
“I remember an interesting issue someone brought up to me: did Freud discover the subconscious, or did he invent it?”
“To keep it historically accurate, the term originated from Pierre Janet, and Freud further developed his theory. But the question is indeed interesting. Because if you say it’s an invention, then people before Janet or Freud had no subconscious. The term then becomes a tool, a part of language. That argument goes against the practice of those DSMs. On the other hand, how can we be sure? The term appears in earlier texts as well. I believe that the social context is a significant factor that shouldn’t be ignored. My mentor once said to me, ‘Psychiatrists, like economists, would rather use each other’s toothbrushes than each other’s theories.’”
“Dr. Zeele?” I asked.
“No, not Zeele, someone else,” she said hesitantly. I felt she didn’t want to mention his name. Did she perhaps have a relationship with that man, I wondered. I caught myself feeling jealous.
She looked at me with the penetrating gaze I remembered from before. “Ahh, you’re jealous!” she remarked.
I looked at her sheepishly, feeling the blood rush to my cheeks. “Yes, sorry, silly of me. And also inexplicable.”
“Emotions are often inexplicable; they don’t occur on a rational level. Any psychologist will tell you that when a child is afraid of the tiger under his bed, it’s utterly pointless to say ‘you don’t need to be afraid.’”
We silently immersed ourselves in eating for a while, each lost in our own thoughts, likely revolving around the same topic: our lost relationship. I hesitated if I wanted to talk to her about it; it seemed pointless, too much time had passed. Perhaps on another occasion, when I had a better grasp of what the point of it could be.
“So, that’s what we were talking about,” she broke the somewhat awkward silence. “We do the things we do, often without understanding them, at least not to the level we demand of them, and there are no ready-made solutions.”
At least we still understood each other well. That was both comforting to realize and painful and tragic.
“It means there was a valuable element in our relationship, at least,” I continued my thoughts aloud. She nodded in understanding.
“It wasn’t wasted time,” she finally said. “But, and here we essentially return to our previous topic, it may also be that reflecting on a certain time gives it a certain value. Not the time itself has that value, a priori, I mean, but the meaning we give to it. — Well, it’s a perspective.”
We had finished our apéritif and main course inside, but fortunately, the weather had cleared up, and the sun had come out in full force. We told the waiter we wanted dessert outside; when the sun was shining, it immediately felt warmer. Hedy put on sunglasses, which I regretted because now I couldn’t look into her eyes properly.
“I had that woman at Endegeest as a patient. I saw her once a week, at that institution,” said Hedy.
She would have said ‘client’ in the past, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud because I didn’t want to interrupt her.
“One time, she didn’t want to come to the room where I saw my patients, and a staff member came to tell me she didn’t want to leave her room. So, I went to her. She was crawling on her hands and knees through her room, apparently searching for something; she looked under her bed, under the table and the two chairs that were there, she moved items to look behind or under them; she didn’t seem to see me at all. So, I asked her what she was looking for. Only after some insistence did she answer: ‘I’ll know when I find it,’ without looking at me. There was no further exchange of words with her, so I left her alone.
“A week later, she still didn’t want to come to the treatment room, so I visited her in her room again. She was lying on her bed, but this time she didn’t ignore me. When I asked if she had found what she was looking for, she nodded. ‘What did you find?’ I asked. After some thought, she said, without looking at me: ‘I can’t say.’ — ‘Why not? Or do you perhaps not want to say?’ — When she answered me, she did look at me: ‘I can’t determine for you what you should seek or find.’ After that, she didn’t want to speak to me anymore.
“Another week later, she came to the treatment room by herself, she was in a good mood, almost cheerful even. She also looked well-groomed, not in the worn-out sweatpants she usually wore, but in a colorful knee-length skirt and a dark blue jacket. And a hat! She looked at me as she spoke, and responded directly, without hesitation, to my questions.
“‘Apparently, whatever you found has done you good,’ I said. She nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, you could say that.’ I didn’t want to ask what that ‘whatever’ entailed; she had to decide for herself if she wanted to tell me more about it.
“We talked for a while longer, mainly about practical matters, such as her medication and what she would do when she could live independently again. Just before I wanted to conclude the session with her, she came up with the answer to the question I didn’t want to ask her out loud: ‘I’ve realized that I haven’t lost anything.’”
“Beautiful!” I said. “She was searching for insight. Quite curious that she tried to find it under her bed.”
“No, I don’t find that strange at all,” replied Hedy, “after all, she didn’t know what she was looking for. It could have been anything, whether something concrete or a certain idea or insight, she didn’t know at that moment. Most theories ultimately become forms of praxis; most people forget that from time to time, especially scientists and lawyers.”
“Yes, I agree,” I said, I fear, with a lovestruck smile, “our lunch is an excellent example of that.”
— Bonnemort, 22 April 2024