Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,46

she announced in her heavy Brooklyn accent. “Somebody returned a vial of the Clooney kid.”

The Clooney kid . . . my guy. The one who was “the whole package.”

“Returned?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how I felt about returned semen. I thought about how at Whole Foods, you couldn’t return any personal-hygiene items, even with a receipt. But Kathleen assured me that the vial hadn’t left its sealed nitrogen tank and that there was nothing wrong with the “product.” Somebody had simply gotten pregnant some other way and no longer needed the backup. If I wanted it, I had to buy it now.

“Clooney has a waiting list, you know—” she began, but before she finished her sentence, I had already said yes.

Late that fall, I was out to dinner with a group of people after my baby shower when my mother noticed the real George Clooney sitting at a table nearby. Everyone at our table knew about Kathleen’s “young George Clooney” description, and one by one, my friends and family pointed at my enormous belly, then turned their heads toward the movie star.

He looked much more grown up than he had as a young actor starring in ER. I, too, felt much more grown up than I’d been as a young executive working at NBC. So much had happened in both of our lives. He was about to win an Oscar. I was about to have my son.

A week later, “the Clooney kid” got a new name: Zachary Julian. ZJ. He is love and joy and wonder and magic. He is, as Kathleen might say, “the whole package.”

Flash-forward eight years: a déjà vu, of sorts. When Boyfriend says, “I can’t live with a kid under my roof for the next ten years,” I’ll be transported back to that day at Urth when Alex told me he couldn’t be my donor after all. I’ll remember how shattered I was, but also how Kathleen called soon after, resurrecting what had felt like the death of a dream.

The situations will seem similar enough—the blindsiding twist, plans dashed—that underneath my pain in the wake of Boyfriend’s announcement, I might expect to have hope that things will work themselves out again.

But something feels very different this time.

17

Without Memory or Desire

In the mid-twentieth century, the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion posited that therapists should approach their patients “without memory or desire.” In his view, therapists’ memories were prone to subjective interpretation, morphing over time, while their desires might run counter to what their patients wanted. Taken together, memories and desires can create biased notions that therapists hold about the treatment (known as formulated ideas). Bion wanted clinicians to enter each session committed to hearing the patient in the present moment (rather than being influenced by memory) and remaining open to various outcomes (rather than being influenced by desire).

Early in my internship, I trained under a Bion enthusiast, and I challenged myself to start each session with “no memory, no desire.” I loved the idea of not getting sidetracked by preconceived notions or agendas. There also seemed to be a Zen flavor to this kind of relinquishment, similar to the Buddhist notion of letting go of attachment. In practice, though, it felt more like trying to emulate the neurologist Oliver Sacks’s famous patient H.M., whose brain injury confined him to live only in the moment, with no ability to remember the immediate past or conceptualize the future. With my frontal lobes intact, I couldn’t will myself into that kind of amnesia.

I know, of course, that Bion’s concept was more nuanced and that there’s value in checking the distracting aspects of memory and desire at the door. But I bring up Bion here because when I drive to my sessions with Wendell, I think about how, from the patient’s side of the room—from my side—“no memory (of Boyfriend), no desire (for Boyfriend)” would be close to grace.

It’s Wednesday morning and I’m on Wendell’s couch, sitting halfway between positions A and B, having just arranged the pillows behind my back.

I fully intend to open with what happened at work the day before when I was in the communal kitchen and spotted a copy of Divorce magazine on top of a pile of reading material that was to be placed in the waiting room. I pictured the people who subscribed to this magazine coming home at the end of the day and finding, among all the bills and store catalogs, this magazine with the word DIVORCE in bright yellow letters on