The Other Side of Desire Read Online Free PDF

didn’t want a law that would deter the undetected from approaching him for help. In this way, he guarded his role as confessor, his ability to redeem, his immersion in the chaos of eros.
    From that chaos he needed refuge. A huge and majestic saltwater aquarium was mounted in his office, dominating the room, the brilliant colors of the fish overwhelming the deep red of the antique furniture. A sea apple, like a purple and yellow balloon with white tentacles sprouting from the top, migrated slowly, searching for invisible particles of food. A surgeonfish, its blue scales set off by streaks of ebony, glided above pink coral. A yellow tang darted around a flaming red angel. Cow-fish, with their strange horns and broad gray bellies, hovered above a crab, a clam. “Even that clam has an existence there,” Berlin said, at once marveling at the thought of a clam’s reality and laughing at his own wonderment. “And that sea apple—he moves to the front of the tank, where he can get the best nutrition. I don’t know what in nonhumans constitutes a feeling or thought, but it would be very presumptuous of us to believe we’re the only living entities capable of having some sort of subjective existence. To watch something like that, that almost looks like a balloon, and to see that it makes purposeful movements and has a life, it makes you think, it makes you wonder, and I find it very relaxing and very fascinating.”
    He liked simply to sit and stare into the tank, and to imagine a world of subjective experience that included no torment. He was mesmerized, too, by the compatibility of the underwater beings, the coral and crabs, the lone clam and all the species of fish. “Everything in there is alive, there’s nothing artificial, and there’s a symbiotic way in which they all survive together.”
    Within each creature, and for all of them combined, he perceived a tranquility denied to humans. “These species,” he added, “rarely mate in captivity.”
     
     
    WHEN Jacob arrived, Berlin gave him the “Multiphasic Sex Inventory” and the “Million Clinical Multiaxial Inventory,” two long questionnaires designed to elicit a patient’s sexual preferences and his disorders of mind or mood. There were three hundred items on the sexual test, each requiring an answer of true or false: “Occasionally I think of things too bad to talk to others about…. I have exposed myself one hundred times…. It does not interest me to learn that a woman may not be wearing panties…. It would peak my interest to learn that a child is curious about sex…. I would like to be tied up and made to have sex.” And there were one hundred and seventy-five more on the multiaxial. With his labored reading, Jacob took several hours to get through. “I can remember one of the questions was about interest in animals,” he recalled. “And I’m thinking, What? That’s disgusting. That’s ridiculous. And then I thought, I’m a hypocrite.”
    He felt a degree of comfort in Berlin’s mansion, partly because the façade bore no name, nothing to broadcast the perversions that brought people here; partly because he was now, for the first time in his life, ensconced within a world constructed for deviants like himself; and partly because he admired and trusted Berlin, though as Jacob struggled through the questionnaires the two men had scarcely talked. Jacob had formed an opinion based on the only thing he’d ever read about foot fetishism, a short article he’d come across in Psychology Today . The writer quoted Berlin saying that without attention to the feet the fetishist “usually can’t get aroused”—from these and a few other words, Jacob felt that the psychiatrist was able to stare into his soul. Soon he would think of Berlin “like a god.” And soon he would renounce going to synagogue, because he felt so betrayed by a god who could make him so alien. Berlin became his deity, soothingly Jewish, with a torah scroll sitting atop one