The Other Side of Desire Read Online Free PDF Page A

about his crimes, but there was something robotic about his compunction. “He confessed everything, but he himself described that he knew how he should feel about what he’d done, and that the emotions simply wouldn’t well up inside. Intellectually he was sorry, intellectually he felt for the families, but he knew he should be overwhelmed.”
    With the Lupron in his system, thwarted, compulsive lust was replaced by storms and floods of regret. It was as though desire, so rarely satisfied, had stymied everything else. Now, Berlin said, “He is no longer sitting in prison masturbating to fantasies about strangling someone.” The medication, in the psychiatrist’s mind, allowed the self to emerge, permitting Ross his own humanity. Sorrow drowned him. He couldn’t bear what he had done, couldn’t endure the thought of the mothers and fathers of the dead being put through more waiting, more testimony, more memory, so he had started the campaign to quicken his execution. With sex eliminated, Ross became who he truly was.
     
     
    BERLIN seemed, at times, to see Ross’s new resolve as proof that sex and the self existed in opposition. Erotic desire wasn’t the essence of the self; eros wasn’t even essential to the self; Freud was far in the past. In expunging the libido, Lupron had liberated Ross’s very being, his soul, and granted him excruciating guilt and the expiation of choosing death. It was at once a medical and religious vision, and Berlin was both a medical and religious man. The paraphilias were diseases, almost surely rooted in biology. He felt that the treatment he often prescribed—Depo Lupron or another anti-androgen, Depo Provera—was horribly imprecise. “It’s a club,” he said. The anti-androgens bludgeoned the hormonal foundation of desire rather than addressing specific aberrance. But he believed that, for now, until the brain was better understood and more delicate drugs were found, there was frequently no other choice. And once the medication spread through the system, redemption came quickly. The sexual sadist could become—purely—the good Samaritan who helped to change flat tires, and Michael Ross could become a man seeking his own sacrifice, asking to die for what he’d done.
    “I pray to a god I cannot see; I depend on a god who may not be,” Berlin said, smiling a bit sheepishly. He attributed the line to a patient from long in the past; he could not remember who. But the words had always stayed with him, and had become a credo of his own. The moment of uneasiness, as he acknowledged his measure of belief, seemed to arise from a feeling of unbelonging, an awareness that both the strictly religious and the devoutly scientific would scorn his statement of faith, the religious because he was far too tentative and the scientific because he depended on anything at all that was beyond the reach of proof and disproof. “I want there to be a higher power. I don’t see that as a threat or alternative to science. I’m not going to be able to find a god, but as a human being I yearn. I desperately would like to believe, but if I’m really honest with myself, I’m just hoping that he’s there.”
    Berlin affirmed what he could, proved what he could. The most depraved people were moral beings. With the aid of medicine, God, through a patient like Michael Ross, nearly came into view. Berlin worked with a necrophiliac who had a job at a funeral parlor; he treated a gynecologist voyeur. He welcomed uncountable pedophiles and child molesters into his office, invited them to his group therapy sessions, offered them—calmly urged upon them—medication. These, the most reviled of sex offenders, were the majority of his patients. Testifying in the state legislature, he fought against a mandatory reporting law that would require psychiatric professionals to notify the police if patients who came for treatment voluntarily, with no record of sexual offenses, confided incidents of abuse. Berlin