Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy Read Online Free PDF

my office offering me a photograph of herself in the bloom of youth. And I was even more unnerved when this patient, Natasha, a portly Russian woman of seventy or so, stared as intently at me as I stared at the photograph of a beautiful ballerina in arabesque pose, balanced majestically on one toe and stretching both arms gracefully upward. I turned my glance back to Natasha, who, though no longer slender, had coasted to her seat with a dancer’s grace. She must have sensed I was trying to locate the young dancer in her, for she raised her chin and turned her head just a bit to offer me a clear profile. Natasha’s facial features had been coarsened, perhaps by too many Russian winters and too much alcohol. Still, she was an attractive woman, though not as beautiful as before, I thought, as I glanced once again at the photograph of the young Natasha, a marvel of elegance.
    “Was I not lovely?” she coyly asked. When I nodded, she continued. “I was a prima ballerina at La Scala.”
    “Do you always think of yourself in the past tense?”
    She drew herself back. “What a rude question, Dr. Yalom. Obviously you’ve taken the bad manners course that is required for all therapists. But,” she paused to consider the matter, “perhaps it is so. Perhaps you are right. But what is strange in the case of Natalya the ballerina is that I was finished as a dancer before I was thirty—forty years ago—and I’ve been happier, ever so much happier, since I stopped dancing.”
    “You stopped dancing forty years ago and yet here, today, you enter my office offering me this picture of you as a young dancer. Surely you must feel that I would be uninterested in the Natasha of today?”
    She blinked two or three times and then looked about for a minute, inspecting the décor of my office. “I had a dream about you last night,” she said. “If I close my eyes, I can still see it. I was coming to see you and entered a room. It wasn’t like this office. Perhaps it was your home, and there were a lot of people there, perhaps your wife and family, and I was carrying a big canvas bag full of rifles and cleaning equipment for them. I could see you surrounded by people in one corner, and I knew it was you from the picture on the cover of your Schopenhauer novel. I couldn’t make my way to you or even catch your eye. There was more, but that’s all I recall.”
    “Ah, and do you see any link between your dream and your offering me this photograph?”
    “Rifles mean penises. I know that from a long psychoanalysis. My analyst told me I used the penis as a weapon. When I had an argument with my boyfriend, Sergei, the lead dancer in the company and, later, my husband, I would go out, get drunk, find a penis, any penis—the particular owner was incidental—and have sex in order to wound Sergei and make me feel better. It always worked. But briefly. Very briefly.”
    “And the link between the dream and the photograph?”
    “The same question? You persist? Perhaps you’re insinuating that I am using this picture of my young self to interest you in me sexually? Not only is this insulting, but it makes no sense whatsoever.”
    Her grand entrance holding the photograph was loaded with meaning. Of that I had no doubt, but I let it go for the moment and got down to business in a more direct fashion. “Please, let’s now consider your reasons for contacting me. From your email I know you will be in San Francisco for only a short time and that it was extraordinarily urgent I meet with you today and tomorrow because you felt you were ‘lost outside of your life and couldn’t find your way back.’ Please tell me about that. You wrote that it was a matter of life and death.”
    “Yes, that’s what it feels like. It’s very hard to describe, but something serious is happening to me. I’ve come to visit California with my husband, Pavel, and we’ve done what we’ve always done on such visits. He met with some important clients; we’ve