Seven Days in Rio Read Online Free PDF Page A

famous maxim, “We aim to please, will you aim too, please?” displayed above the toilet in his office bathroom, was another bone of contention between the two men).
    The position once occupied by Moldauer had been taken over by someone named Herbert Schmucker. Schmucker had a whole theory of Oedipal rivalry that argued it was best to be as blatant about it as possible. This explained the fact that he named his institute after himself instead of after his esteemed mentor, Sunshine, and favored a porn film entitled Three Some , in which a physically appealing couple invite their sad-sack friend to watch them having sex, while never allowing him to join in. Schmucker had argued on more than one occasion that sexual satisfaction derives from a feeling of superiority in getting something that someone else doesn’t have. The guilt from such feelings of rivalry, he believed, is what any good analysis should attempt to alleviate. There were all kinds of paradoxes in analysis. For instance, one of the most famous centers for the study of analysis in Manhattan is the Karen Horney Clinic, but what kind of inducement is a name like that? How could Karen Horney help me? Why wouldn’t I go to a place honoring someone named Karen Un-Horney, where the name at least held out a hope?
    Sunshine and Schmucker were like an argumentative married couple. Over the remainder of my stay in Rio, I would frequently find them sniping at each other in the halls, and in one case overheard a furious battle in which Sunshine actually brought up the naming of Schmucker’s institute, telling Schmucker in a petulant voice that could be heard throughout the hotel lobby, “You’re behaving like you just got off the boat. You’re behaving just like a schmuck!” Indeed, I learned from Wikipedia that Schmucker’s parents had been humble German immigrants, and that Schmucker had grown up in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. Schmucker’s parents had occupied a tenement on 86th Street above the Old Heidelberg restaurant. But the old German neighborhood was in the same district as the silk-stocking PS 6 (which I would attend years later) and Schmucker was able to get an education that allowed him to rise out of his immigrant roots, attend medical school at NYU, and eventually become a prominent psychoanalyst.
    China had been close-lipped when Sunshine had come up in our conversation, but she spoke with great reverence about Schmucker, whom she plainly regarded as one of the gods of Olympus. It was clear from her attitude that Sunshine had become a mere footnote in the arc of Schmucker’s career.
    I returned to the lobby to look for Victor the concierge. He hadn’t been much help, but it has always been my philosophy that it’s good to do the same thing again and again even if it fails to produce results. I remember my analyst telling me that there are people who in fact unconsciously want to bring about the outcomes they so often complain about. There is even a word for it in the psychoanalytic literature: parapraxis.
    I was thrown into a tailspin when I arrived at the concierge desk to find that Victor wasn’t there. In his place was a small, dark, unshaven man with the face of a rodent. I immediately dubbed him Rat Man, after Freud’s famous patient. His nametag read, “Adolphe.” When I asked when Victor was coming back, Adolphe was evasive. He pulled the language card, pretending he didn’t understand what I was saying. As far as Adolphe was concerned, he was the concierge now and Victor didn’t exist anymore. I felt very much the way I did years before when my analyst got sick and set me up with a dentist named Dr. Klein, a good friend of his who had had analytic training, but for some reason had chosen to become a dentist instead. For months I went to Klein’s office on 57th Street, using his dental chair as an analytic couch. As then, I dreaded having to tell my story all over again, especially to someone like Adolphe, who didn’t seem to