Facebook informed me, a couple of days ago, that it was Larry Bloom’s 85th birthday. I did some obituary hunting and found none so I guess it’s correct, that Dr. Bloom is 85. I’m glad he’s still here.
Bloom was my shrink for about 35 years. Sometime once a week or twice a week or three times a week. Sometime, additionally, in a group he assembled and monitored.
At least initially, he was old school Freudian. Whatever my problems of the moment, transference and counter-transference was the currency we traded in. All the classic complexes, most frequently oedipal, made appearances in our sessions.
He always had a literary bent and would celebrate Bloomsday with an annual lecture on Ulysses to the psychiatry residents at Mount Sinai hospital. At a certain point, maybe, 25 years in, Martin Buber showed up as a canonical influence which, unfortunately, was the nose of the camel. Spirituality, light and dark, metaphysical influencers became a large part of my therapy. My atheism was interpreted as resistance.
Was I helped by all that talking we (mostly I) did? I think so. I learned a lot which is a poor substitute for changed a lot but I’d say I changed. I was also 35 years older and would have certainly changed some with or without therapy. Nothing that happened in session, though, provided the elation that came with retirement. It shocked me, the way the anxiety and stress of my work life permeated all the rest of my life and how happy I was to jettison it.
While I was seeing Bloom, when I was, let’s say, analytical, I could see life’s complexities and, I believed, people’s subterranean motives and I miss the absence of that very much. I feel shallower, dumber. It’s as though I’m an apartment house with people scurrying about upstairs but all the mechanicals, the boiler, the elevator controller, the AC compressors are all down in the basement and I can’t get in there anymore. I don’t even remember where the door was. All I can do is scurry.
It’s possible that I stopped seeing Dr. Bloom because, after 35 years, I had simply had enough. That was not the reason I gave.
My second wife, Syd, was a drug addict and a borderline personality, something it took me a couple of years to realize, but, after less than a year’s marriage, we determined we needed couples therapy. I did a little research, asking around, and came up with a few names. I told Syd we’d go to whichever she chose.
What she wanted was for Bloom to be our couples therapist. I resisted but I talked to Bloom and he said he had been in that position before. “You must understand though,” he said, “that when I’m treating a couple, the marriage is my patient. I want the marriage to be healthy.”
So we began our sessions. It quickly became clear that the reason she wanted to see Bloom was that he would know, from our very first meeting, how fucked up I was and that our problems all stemmed from my issues. In a year of Blooming she never once acknowledged that she was at least a little at fault. In fact, as time went on, she saw me more and more as a villain acting out of evil, sadistic intent.
Early during that time though, when we were only 12 months married, we had a fight that, I thought, was beyond the limit that I could endure and I resolved to end the marriage. I informed Bloom of this during one of our private sessions. “That solves a problem, I suppose, but I believe that the best chance you each have for growth and happiness,” he said, “is with each other.”
I stayed another two years during which things got worse. Her paranoia got worse. Her agoraphobia got worse. Bloom was willing to do house calls but she came to see him as an agent of those who would harm her, as was I. Things once got physical and, two days later, she swore out a complaint against me at the local precinct and I was arrested. Then she had me arrested again for no reason.
There were other times the police came to the house, called by our neighbors mostly (one time police and firemen when she set our mattress on fire). They came to know her and to know how damaged she was. We had her admitted to a few different resident programs. Finally we divorced.
I carry a lot of anger about that time still, notwithstanding the fact that I learned a year or so ago that she was dead. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, I don’t know any of the circumstances. My anger doesn’t prevent me from seeing what a sad, helpless, hopeless woman she was. I hope there was something approaching a happy ending for her before she went.
If my anger at Syd was modulated by pity, my anger at Bloom was unchained. Whether or not the marriage was his patient, I was his patient too. I felt like Brando talking to Steiger in the backseat of the car: he should have looked out for me. He had a much clearer idea of Syd’s psychology than I did. Were it not for his encouragement (mind you, he almost never made behavioral suggestions to me – it was not that kind of work) I would have avoided two years of needless expense, pain and drama.
So our time together came to an end, another item, perhaps, broken by Syd. Or perhaps not. It’s true that our sessions at the end revolved around my anger at his failure to deal with the corporal world and the practicalities of living (such as a drug addict wife). His spiritualism shielded him from recognizing what a grave mistake he had made and the price I had to pay for it.
And today? Today I love him. I appreciate all the concern, all the emotion, all the counter-transference, he gave me. He made a mistake, definitely. Everybody does.
Happy birthday Dr. Bloom.
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