Voices

2005; University of Missouri; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mis.2006.0075

ISSN

1548-9930

Autores

John J. Clayton,

Tópico(s)

Counseling, Therapy, and Family Dynamics

Resumo

Voices John Clayton [Begin Page 167] Words come to him at the edge of sleep. Hebrew. Bits of daily prayers, of daily blessings. Fragments in English, voices, many voices, no one he knows: inasmuch as . . . the forlorn ones . . . adversary song. A sign of sleep to come. But it's not his own sleep he's entering. It's somebody else's dream. He's listening in. Whose dream is this? And in the daytime: gliding down the mile-long hill on his drive to the clinic, voices in his ears, obscure gestures, pure lilt and syntax. He invents a political thriller: a receiver has been sewn [End Page 167] into a subcutaneous pouch of a spy. Then who's on the other end of the line, whispering mischief? He's had schizophrenic patients who firmly believed such things. Or maybe messenger angels—malachai—with words of prophecy? Sam Krassner has a costly investment in the dynamics of individual unconscious processes—a Ph.D. in psychology and years of clinical training. This training says, you may not know what's happening, but you can bet a soul struggle is going on. Something worked on, worked out; it's residue of battle he's hearing at a distance. But suppose the voices are nothing personal. Think of all the griefs he's privy to every day. In his private practice in Northampton, Massachusetts, he hears subtle suffering like his own: spouse, sibling, parents; guilt, grief, rage. At the clinic, the same, but compounded with the intermeshed griefs of class and race he resists taking inside. Or perhaps they are inside, the words duplicating themselves in him like a virus—sorrowing, raging words no longer tied to particular voices. [End Page 168] And they are waves, for they can't be distinguished. Look. One client at the clinic, Barbara Hammond, yes, sure she's neurotic, enacts "narcissistic injury," but mixed up with so many other troubles—she's obese and diabetic, ashamed of herself as a physical being, she can't get a decent job, doesn't believe she could be trained for anything even if she had money for training, and this assumption that she's a dead-end person humiliates her further, so that, as she expects, she is demeaned by her out-of-work husband, who debases her when he bothers coming home; and in turn she demeans her children, who enact their humiliation by doing dismally in school, continuing the pattern. A circle of pain. Circles overlap circles. And it's not just personal. Powerless, does Barbara even care that she is represented in the state legislature by a guy who consistently votes against funding the social services that might help her change her life? Sam wonders. Maybe the words he hears are of love needing to be expressed. Isn't it true he has to keep his clients' suffering at bay? You might call it a sensible professional attitude, but that's not it. After all, he can effect so little change; he resists feeling for Barbara or, say, the enraged counterman, or the mother of a boy with terminal cancer. He stays outside the poverty and chaos of these lives. What good would it do to open his heart? But maybe his heart has a different opinion. Sam's life is stuck. Is that why the voices have been busy? He makes this discovery: if on his noontime walk he sits on a bench and, closing his eyes, holds his cell to his ear and pretends to be on the phone, he can listen to voices under voices. Like in a busy restaurant. Sometimes a phrase from a news report, sometimes "Blessed Are You O Lord," or murmurs so ambiguous he doesn't know in what language. The quieter he gets, the deeper the place from which the voices seem to come. It's as if he had a surveillance microphone and could keep extending its focus further and further through crowds of talk—fifty feet, a hundred, a hundred fifty. It's after a certain therapy session with Barbara Hammond that the words seem to tell him that he should do something. What happens is this...

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