Erickson: I’ll tell you one more case history. One professor took a two-year course in psychoanalysis in our country, and his wife was analyzed for a year. Then they went to Europe, where Freud himself analyzed the professor for a year, five times a week, and one of Freud’s students studied his wife for a year. The next summer they returned to America and offered their services to the Worcester Hospital.
The professor told me about two years of psychoanalysis, a meeting with Freud and two years of his wife’s psychoanalysis. He and his wife wanted to have psychotherapy with me. I had just started working in the research department and was very busy with my own affairs. I said that I would have to wait until I could make time for them.
The first week I worked there was a book fair in Worcester. I liked to buy books, especially when the remnants brought by the publishers sold out. The professor joined me, he was also a book lover. We are walking along the street, and then from the store, about five meters in front of us, an extremely obese woman comes out, a meter and a half tall and the same width.
The professor turned to me and sighed, «Milton, don’t you feel like picking up something like that?» “No, I don’t want to,” I replied. «And I would take it.» We returned to the hospital, I called the professor’s wife to me and said: “Today we were walking down the street behind a very fat woman, straight head over heels — one and a half by one and a half, and your husband asks if I would like to hold on to this ass. I replied that I did not have the slightest desire, and he said that he would hold on.
The wife directly soared: “So he said that he would hold on to this immense fat ass ?!” “Exactly, and with great feeling,” I replied. “Just think,” she finally indignant, “that all these years I starved myself to maintain slender girlish thighs. End of the hunger strike! I will grow such a fat ass that there will be something for his hooks to grab onto!” (General laughter.)
She comes to me a few weeks later and says: “You know, my husband is too much of a gentleman. Prudish chistyulya. He thinks he knows everything. I want you to tell him how to love me. He thinks the only way is when he lies on top of me. And sometimes I myself want to lie on it.
I invited my husband to my place and explained to him that in love any position is good if both partners enjoy it. And if one is dissatisfied, then the position is not good. Explained everything to him down to the smallest detail. This is what my psychotherapy is all about.
(To the group). How is it that this professor, in three years of psychoanalysis, has not been able to find out that his wife’s girlish thighs are not to his taste? And why didn’t his wife, in two years of psychoanalysis, five times a week, realize that her husband likes a lush lower bust?
In general, it took me only two conversations with them to successfully complete the entire Freudian analysis and analysis of his assistant. The professor has now retired, he and his wife have grandchildren, she has become one and a half by one and a half — and both are happy.